A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare, Translation Book Club

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare translated by John Hodgson discussed at the BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards, Piccadilly

Ismail Kadare, the renowned Albanian novelist and poet, navigated the oppressive environment of communist Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha. This unusual book is based around Stalin’s alleged three-minute telephone call to Boris Pasternak. The discussion examined the relationship between dictators and writers, the power of fear and the game of divide and rule and everyone playing off each other, Osip Mandelstam and the gulag, Stalin’s purges of the intelligentsia, whether Stalin favoured Pasternak the way Lenin favoured Gorky, Putin’s regime today, Anna Politkovskaya and censorship, methods of eliminating those who speak out against a dictator, and more.

The discussion includes insights from publisher Christopher MacLehose.