Ismail Kadare - Twilight of the Eastern Gods

That is the main reason why this comical send-up of Soviet literary culture is structured around the legend of Kostandin and Doruntine, a traditional Albanian story of fidelity to the given word. It is the main subject of Kadare’s later novella, The Ghost Rider , where its deep connection to the idea of ‘Albanianness’ is made clearer. Like so many of Kadare’s fictions, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is full of similar ‘stubs’ that serve as the central motifs of other stories and novels: readers will notice here what look like allusions to The General of the Dead Army, The Niche of Shame , and The Three Arched Bridge , but which are also in some part preliminary sketches of themes that constitute the main props and beams of Kadare’s monumental, self-entwined and internally consistent oeuvre.

Twilight of the Eastern Gods is deeply rooted in Kadare’s personal experience and in historical events, but it is neither an autobiography nor a work of history. The narrator is a young man very much like Ismail Kadare — he is even the author of a few lines of Kadare’s verse — but he is nonetheless someone else. It is true that the real young writer had a good time with a number of Soviet girls: but none of them was called or even resembled Lida Snegina, as Elena Kadare has been able to establish in her remarkable investigation of her husband’s early correspondence. Conversely, most of the teachers and students at the Gorky Institute portrayed in this novel bear the names of real teachers and students. They can all be seen in the class photograph of the 1958–1960 cohort, which is reproduced in the end papers of this edition. As libel laws didn’t exist in the Soviet Union or in Albania, Kadare felt no need to change names — but his caricatures of these variously slimy, self-serving, inauthentic, alcoholic, ignorant and otherwise comical ‘students of literature’ aren’t intended to be individually accurate or fair, only to re-create in a work of literature the social and cultural environment in which Kadare felt so ill at ease.

He was unable to maintain contact with his classmates for many years owing to the break between Albania and the rest of the socialist world. In the 1980s Kadare tried to find out what had happened to them all, but learned only that Hieronymus Stulpanc had taken his own life. In 1988, he found Antaeus alive, well, and living in Athens.

Readers interested in these and other non-fictional characters mentioned in the novel can find basic details in the Index of Names on pp. 187–192.

Because the Gorky Institute was an international institution, its corridors buzzed with many different tongues, and Kadare pays considerable (and not always respectful) attention to the role that languages played in his education as a writer. The only common language among the students was Russian, but few of the characters in this novel speak it natively or even very well. Perhaps for that reason, the peculiarities of Russian grammar and pronunciation are frequently highlighted, and several passages in the novel seem to be essays on the meaning of particular Russian words. The whole of Chapter 1, for example, could be thought of as a riff on skuchno , the Russian word for ‘boring’ — boring to a heart-rending degree, a boredom bordering on spleen; whereas Chapter 2 focuses on a different variety of sourness that in Russian is called khandra .

In translating this novel from Jusuf Vrioni’s French translation I have sought to hear the Russian in the conversations that Kadare reproduced in Albanian, and to give this voyage into a now vanished culture rather more of the original sounds and signs than Vrioni thought appropriate in 1981, when there were still several million French Communists, many of whom knew Russian quite well. I’ve tried as best I can to make the speech of the cultivated but also irreverent young people in Moscow literary circles as lively as it undoubtedly was, but without using expressions and phrases that weren’t in circulation in 1959. However poor my deferred rendition of an Albanian original to which I have no direct access, I think Kadare’s main qualities survive: his humour and his anger, his self-critical wit, and his conviction, all the stronger for having been put to the test by his Moscow years, that real literature is, in the end, more important than anything else.

David Bellos

Princeton, February 2014 * The Soviet Union’s involvement in the Second World War, that began only with the German invasion of 1941, has always been known in Russia as ‘The Great Patriotic War’.

Albanian is written in Latin characters but some letters and combinations are pronounced in a special way. The only one occurring in this novel is:

Xh makes the sound dj as in bridge

THE CYRILLIC ALPHABET

A few words and phrases are given in their original Russian forms. The thirty-two letters of the Cyrillic alphabet are pronounced roughly as follows: A a Б b B v Γ g Д d E ye Ë yo Ж zh as in pleasure З z И i as in beet Й y κ k Л l M m H n O o П p P r C s T t Y u as in l oo se Φ f X kh as in (Scottish) lo ch Ц ts Ч ch as in ch urch Ш sh Щ sh-ch as in fi sh ch owder Э e Ы uh Ь [soft sign] Я ya Ю yu

We played table-tennis outdoors, not far from the beach, until after midnight because even though the white nights had passed it still didn’t get very dark. Those with the best eyes played last; the rest of us lounged against the wooden railing, watching the game and correcting the score. After midnight, when everyone had gone to bed, leaving their bats on the table to get drenched by a shower before dawn, I didn’t know what to do with myself — I didn’t feel like sleeping. I would wander for a while around the gardens of the Writers’ Retreat (it used to be the estate of a Latvian baron), go as far as the fountain, which spurted from a group of stone dolphins, then track back to the ‘Swedish House’ and on down to the Baltic shore. The nights were very cold and quickly chilled you to the bone.

I did much the same thing almost every evening. On fine days, the mornings and afternoons went by quickly, with swimming and sunbathing, but evenings were dreary, and most of the residents were quite old. Almost all of them were VIPs, with titles galore, but that didn’t stop evenings being dull, especially as I happened to be the only foreigner staying there.

As dusk drew in we would take our cameras down to the beach and set them so they were ready to snap at the moment the sun sank into the sea. The Baltic turned a slightly different colour each night, and we used to try to fix each successive sunset on film. Sometimes a couple of distant strollers along the waterline wandered into the shot. When we developed the film, they appeared as meaningless smudges in the endless vista. After dinner we got together again around the ping-pong table, and as I watched the small white ball going back and forth, I could feel my whole being adjusting to its pace. I would try, but usually fail, to pull myself back from the ball’s metronome effect. Only every so often, in short, rebellious bursts, would I manage to break free from my enslavement to the little white sphere, whose jagged leaps, small diameter, and sharp, metallic noise when it hit the table almost succeeded in sending me into a trance. But at those instants when I recovered my lucidity I would jerk my head towards the shore, and every time I turned, like a sleepwalker, towards the water’s edge I hoped to spy in the far distance, at long last, something different from what I had seen the day before. But the seashore at dusk was merciless. It had nothing to offer but a view it had probably been rehearsing since the dawn of time: silhouettes of couples walking slowly by. They probably came from the other residences in the vicinity, and after passing our house, they scattered in directions that seemed to me quite mysterious, towards resorts whose beaches bore the names of the little stations on the electric railway line, strange-sounding names like Dzintari, Majori and Dubulti. They were names I had previously read on perfume bottles and tubes of face cream in shop windows in other places, without imagining they might be the names of stations or holiday resorts.