Twilight of the Eastern Gods. Ismail Kadare

      INTRODUCTION

      Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in the fortress-city of Gjirokastër, in the southernmost part of Albania. He began writing poetry in his teens and acquired a national reputation while still a university student in Tirana. At the end of his course he was selected to pursue literary studies at the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow. Twilight of the Eastern Gods re-creates Kadare’s experience of this strange ‘factory of the intellect’, set up to produce new generations of socialist poets, novelists and playwrights.

      In many respects Kadare had a wonderful time in Moscow. For a young man newly arrived from a provincial backwater, that vast city – the cultural as well as the political hub of half the world’s people – was an unending treat. Unlike tiny Tirana, it had a Metro, electric trolleybuses, neon lights, department stores, and a veritable army of pretty girls far more open to romantic encounters than puritanical Albania could offer. As a foreign student, Kadare enjoyed many privileges, including free holidays at ‘residences’ in the more scenic areas of the Soviet Union which were put at the disposal of its members by the Writers’ Union.

      But Twilight of the Eastern Gods does not offer a warm or admiring reflection on the Big City where Kadare spent his two years of study abroad. It is a novel of profound disenchantment, in the tradition of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, but with much about it that is quite particular to the privileged yet servile position of writers under Communism.

      Outwardly, Kadare’s Moscow years were very successful. A collection of his poetry was translated into Russian and published with a preface by the poet David Samoilov – the first of Kadare’s many books to be translated into a foreign language. (Kadare gives an account of this publication in ‘Truth, Secrets and Lies’, a long interview published in English as an appendix to Chronicle in Stone.) The young Kadare also wrote his first major work in prose, a short novel titled The City Without Signs, the story of a literary-historical scam perpetrated by a brace of cynical and disaffected students. It was so disrespectful of political and cultural orthodoxies that Kadare did not even try to publish it until after the fall of Communism.

      The inner reality was different. The professors at the Gorky Institute, the nature of the students selected for this prestigious institution, and, above all, the kind of writing that that was taught there brought Kadare to the brink of abandoning literature for good. Kadare didn’t want to write about positive heroes with blond hair and jutting chins, maidens in dirndls setting out to upturn virgin soil, heroes of the Great Patriotic War or dreamy birch groves shading an idyllic collective farm^*. In Moscow, Kadare learned to scorn virtually every aspect of the doctrines of Socialist Realism. The best he ever had to say about the course he followed there was that it taught him how not to write. The consistently rainy, foggy, cold and gloomy climate of Kadare’s later fictions can be read as a formal rejection of the obligatory optimism laid down by the doctrines of Socialist Realism.

      Post-war Albania, initially closely allied with neighbouring Yugoslavia, had been a virtual dependency of the USSR since 1949, and it housed the only Soviet submarine base in the Mediterranean. By the later 1950s, however, Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator, had grown increasingly alarmed by Khrushchev’s attempts to liberalise Soviet society, which he saw as a betrayal of Stalin’s legacy. The strained relations culminated in a meeting of the world’s Communist Party leaders in Moscow in October 1960, which expelled Albania from the socialist bloc. (This meeting is the subject of Kadare’s grand and dramatic Winter of Our Discontent.) Ironically, it was this political divorce that made it possible for Kadare to write and eventually publish Twilight of the Eastern Gods.

      Like many of Kadare’s major works, Twilight was written in pieces and rewritten in different ways over a long period of time. Its themes first appeared in a poem, Lora, written in 1961; the following year he wrote a short story, ‘A Summer in Dubulti’, which is the basis for Chapter 1 of this novel; other chapters followed in fragments over a period of fifteen years, and it was not until 1978 that The Twilight of the Eastern Gods was ready to be released – and almost hidden – in a collective volume that also included The Three Arched Bridge and The Niche of Shame. Even so, it was not really complete. It was translated into French by Jusuf Vrioni in 1981,