LIFE IN STALIN’S Russia was extremely precarious for writers. One small mistake could lead to imprisonment and/or assassination. This was also the case in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, as the country’s famous author Ismail Kadare (1936-2024) knew only too well.

In 1934, the author Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) is widely believed to have received an unexpected telephone call from no lesser person than Russia’s dictator Joseph Stalin. What Stalin said to Pasternak and how Pasternak replied is the subject of a novel, “A Dictator Calls”, published in 2022 and written by Ismail Kadare. The author convincingly demonstrates that nobody can recall what was said during this brief but significant telephone conversation that occurred in 1934. Kadare provides 13 versions of what might have happened during this three-minute telephone call. At one point, he questions whether the call ever happened, but I felt after reading the book that it was likely to have happened.

A common theme amongst the 13 recollections of this telephone call is that Stalin was calling to find out Pasternak’s views on the poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938).  At the time of the call, Mandelstam, who had recently written a poem critical of Stalin, was in prison. It seems from what Kadare has written in his novel, which is based on facts (such as they are), that Stalin might have been hoping the Pasternak would say something that might help save his fellow author, the poet Mandelstam. In this fascinating novel, I felt that Kadare was questioning whether omnipotent dictators like Stalin and Hoxha feared, possibly secretly, the power of critics such as the poet Mandelstam, or in the case of Albania, Kadare. As with so many of Kadare’s novels, this relatively new one gives the reader some insight into the nature of secrecy, the contortion of truth, and uncertainty, which prevailed in regimes such as Stalin’s Russia and Hoxha’s Albania. Although difficult to understand in places, “A Dictator Calls” is a fascinating novel, which kept me intrigued all the way through it.

Kadare’s novel has been translated from Albanian into English by John Hodgson. I feel that a good translation should read in such a way that one cannot realise that it is a translation. It should read as if it were originally written in the language into which it was translated. Hodgson has achieved this very successfully.