A Dictator Calls — what did Stalin really say on the phone?

On Saturday 23 June 1934, the Russian poet Boris Pasternak was at home with his family when he received an unexpected telephone call. It was Joseph Stalin, phoning to discuss the recent arrest of Pasternak’s friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam. The conversation lasted three or four minutes and ended when Stalin abruptly hung up. When Pasternak tried to call back, he was told the number no longer existed.

At least 13 versions of this exchange have come to light, and since the 1970s — when historian Lazar Fleishman first drew attention to its significance — it has generated great scholarly interest and given rise to a dizzying array of interpretations, glossed variously to condemn or condone Pasternak’s equivocating reply about Mandelstam: “We are different, Comrade Stalin.”

The proletarisation of Russian culture was gathering pace at this time and would rapidly escalate into the “great terror” of 1937-38 in which so many Soviet artists and intellectuals lost their lives. Arrested a second time, Mandelstam was sent into exile, where he died of typhus in December 1938. Pasternak eventually fell from favour in 1959, after winning the 1958 Nobel Prize. Denounced by other writers, stripped of his honours in Russia and expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, he died not long after.

With his new book A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare, Albania’s greatest living writer, enters the fray with an elliptical investigation of “those fatal 200 seconds”: “when the laws of tragedy had brought the poet and the tyrant together”. Now 87, Kadare has first-hand experience of the perils of authorship in the context of tyrannical regimes. Under Albanian communism after 1945, his own work was censored and banned, and in 1990 he sought political asylum in France.

Like Pasternak, Kadare has been nominated for the Nobel Prize (15 times, all so far unsuccessful) and he, too, once received a phone call from a dictator, Albania’s Enver Hoxha. To his consternation, he found himself flailing in the moment. The experience is recounted in A Dictator Calls, prompting self-lacerating retrospective questions and fuelling his obsession with the Stalin/Pasternak phone call.

The book begins in a semi-fictional mode, narrated by a quasi-autobiographical Albanian author. Prickly conversations with his editor about his latest manuscript are interspersed with “nocturnal Muscovite wanderings” in which he dreams about his student days at the Gorky Institute.

The author is tormented by the question of why Pasternak responded as he allegedly did. What did he know? What did he actually say or not say? Was he responsible for Mandelstam’s downfall? “The sad story of Pasternak was only one of many indicators that Moscow and Tirana were ready for a showdown.”

Kadare uses the Stalin/Pasternak conversation to explore the interplay between political power and artistic power

The second half of the book, set in 2015, abandons fiction and assumes the form of an essay in which Kadare scrutinises each of the 13 known versions of the fabled phone call. Drawn from KGB archives, memoirs and interviews, the versions are supplied by friends, wives, lovers, rivals, secret agents and historians. Kadare picks each one apart, chasing down their hidden meanings with the determination of a bloodhound on the scent of a fox.

One of the 13 versions comes from Anna Akhmatova’s diary, a close friend of Mandelstam’s wife Nadezhda and rumoured to have been Pasternak’s lover. Pasternak’s old friend and rival Nikolai Vilmont asserts, “These were his words as [he] himself told them to me.” But the more Kadare digs, the more the truth eludes him.

Was the catalyst for the conversation a poem, penned by Mandelstam, that appeared to describe Stalin as the “Kremlin mountaineer”? Was Pasternak flustered by receiving the call, or cool-headed? As Kadare exclaims in mock vexation: “Anybody who thinks at first that thirteen versions are too many, may by the end of the case think that these are insufficient!”

Kadare’s deep dive into the “enigmas of communism” draws in not just the giants of Russian culture but a host of others, including Freud, Seneca and even Helen of Troy. The attention he gives to the Stalin-Pasternak-Mandelstam triangle is threaded with captivating digressions, from Seneca’s suicide to Lenin’s syphilis.

What gradually becomes clear is that Kadare is using the Stalin/Pasternak conversation as an extended metaphor to explore the nature of power and the interplay between political power and artistic power. One surprising omission is Nikolai Bukharin, whose letter to Stalin in 1934 arguably did more damage to Mandelstam than Pasternak’s response. Nor does Kadare mention that by 1934 Stalin had drawn up a list of condemned writers that didn’t include Mandelstam, suggesting that Stalin may not have authorised the arrest.

Small quibbles aside, A Dictator Calls is a thought-provoking consideration of the relationship between writers and tyranny, with John Hodgson’s translation gracefully rendering Kadare’s imagination. Tyranny’s fear of art and artists is the truth worth seeking, as Kadare says: “We who know something about this matter are obliged to bear witness to it, even those aspects that are impossible to confirm . . . art, unlike a tyrant, receives no mercy, but only gives it.”

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson Harvill Secker £14.99/Counterpoint $16.95, 240 pages

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