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In August 2021 University of Oklahoma alumnus Ron K. Jones donated a letter that he had received in 1959 from Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) to OU Libraries’ Western History Collections. In October 1958 Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but, under pressure from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and the Union of Soviet Writers, declined to accept it. LALT, along with WLT, is proud to publish Pasternak’s 1959 letter here with a note by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Mr. Pasternak’s nephew.

From Peredelkino, Russia, to Norman, Oklahoma

In the spring of 1959, as the Cold War raged between the former Soviet Union (present-day Russia) and the United States, two strangers, who shared a common bond, exchanged letters. One stranger, Ron Jones, was a brokenhearted young man who would soon graduate with a business degree from the University of Oklahoma. The other, Boris Pasternak, was (by this time) an oppressed poet, writer, and translator of great literary renown. The bond they shared was the epic novel, Doctor Zhivago, which Pasternak completed in the mid-1950s, had smuggled out of the Soviet Union by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1956, and published in 1957. Upon its release, the novel was translated into numerous languages, including English.

Ron Jones was fascinated by the novel because a young woman he was dating constantly raved about the book. To impress her, he read it numerous times. Though they were scheduled to attend a spring dance at his fraternity, she was not impressed and broke off the date. As a result, Ron grabbed his typewriter, locked himself in the women’s restroom at the Phi Delt house (this after taping an “out of order” sign on the door), and wrote an impassioned letter to the author of Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak’s response to Ron’s letter specifically demonstrates the author’s contempt for those literary critics attempting to impose various meanings and symbols onto the novel.

Todd Fuller
University of Oklahoma

May 4, 1959

My dear Ronny K. Jones, may good fortune always and everywhere accompany you in your life, as you have had it with me; here is my answer you desired and dreamed of.

Your fellow students are right in many respects. Not all written letters from me and to me reach their goal, not all arrived letters am I able to read to the end, especially the handwritten and the long ones, rare and very few of them have I time and possibility to reply. So much the more will I profit by the transient opportunity of […] writing to you to say in passing some casual truths.

I read praising eulogistic English articles on “Dr. Zh,” searching after separate hidden senses behind each word of the novel, suspecting deep symbols in every small, insignificant and shallow detail; making whole allegorical constructions out of such, obtained in that way comments, ascribed to the text. It is an error, a deplorable, measureless exaggeration.

The main property or feature of the book is the flow of astonishment, of the novelty and singularity of the usual, that permeates the book. This breath is a common faculty of the volume, not a particular statement or truth to be found and cited on a certain place where it had been put.

Art in general, every art is symbolical in a whole, large sense of directed attraction or force, and not in the meaning of rebukes or charades, consisting of many partial riddles to be guessed separately and then joined together for the final solution.

Not only art, language, every language is still more symbolical, but also in the sense of indifferent meaningfulness, in the significance of spiritual energy or activity. Language is connected with reality and life, history of language is partly history of facts and countries, of developments and ages. Surnames of persons are everywhere derived from names of things. But will it hence appear that each isolated name or image or situation of my novel should mean more than it simply and modestly means; or that each item, each particularity of my narration, like little photographs on the walls, are thoughtfully and intendedly fixed upon the text by little nails of minute and stupid allegories and nicknames? Such explications are pure and incredible absurdity.

I thank you for your greetings and return them gratefully.

Yours,

B. Pasternak

Against Ham-fisted Symbolic Readings of Doctor Zhivago

Publication of the English-language edition of Doctor Zhivago was soon followed by a controversy about the possible symbolic significance of some elements of the novel. Edmund Wilson published an essay in Encounter magazine titled “Legend and Symbol in Doctor Zhivago” (1959), which promoted such a symbolic interpretation. (For example, the novel has a recurrent image of a billboard advertising agricultural machinery, and the advertiser’s name, Vetchinkin, looks like the Russian word for “ham”—was this an allusion to Hamlet?) This approach was vigorously contested by Pasternak’s sister Lydia Slater in her essay “Pasternak and Wilson,” published in the next Encounter. Boris wrote to compliment her on it, being himself clearly irritated by such allegorical distortions of his work. In the letter to Ron Jones, he restates his feelings about the true meaning of what he wrote. Everything in life, he implies, is rich in meaning on its own, not symbolic of something else.

Nicolas Pasternak Slater

Image: Leonid Pasternak, Boris beside the Baltic at Mereküla (1910), oil on canvas.

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Going back to the medieval period, the word besa is a small word with large implications throughout Albanian society, from law to literature to history. And in a world that sometimes seems to be tearing itself apart, it may be the small word that meets our current challenges.

Learning a language, therefore, is not only learning the alphabet, the letter sounds and the shapes, the meaning, the grammar rules, and the structure or arrangement of words, but it is also learning the behavior of the society and its cultural customs.

– Kadri Krasniqi

Can a word be the glue that holds a cultural community together? Can two simple syllables extend tendrils throughout a diverse state and connect at levels from empire all the way down to the everyday? And if so, would it then be possible to uproot that word and plant it into another language?

The Albanian word besa goes back to the medieval period, and its origins as a social concept may go back much further. It has played a central role in some of Albania’s most significant literature and mythic narratives. It has even been a part of world-historical events that have played out on Albanian soil. All in all, it is a concept that touches the lives of many daily.

Besa—literally “to keep the promise”—means, in the words of scholar Kadri Krasniqi, “taking care of those in need, protecting them, and being hospitable to every single human being you have given your promise.” The word is interwoven into the very meaning of Albanian community, as seen through scholar Besmir Shishko, who writes that “besa contains mores toward obligations to the family and a friend, the demand to have internal commitment, loyalty, and solidarity when conducting oneself with others.”

Sources tend to agree that besa came about in part because of the frequent incursions of invaders into Albania’s territory throughout history—when anyone could be turned into a refugee at a moment’s notice, community norms toward hospitality, protection, and solidarity would make a lot of sense. As a legal doctrine, besa goes back perhaps to the fourteenth century, when the Statutes of Scutari, a legal code for the region (which was then known as Scutari), documented the concept of an oath as a part of the social order. Since that time, besa has been passed down for generations as part of Albania’s Kanun, a set of common laws that has governed the lands since the fifteenth century. Beyond the legal sphere, some see the very idea of besa as possibly originating in the Christian Bible, while others, such as leading Albanian author Ismail Kadare, consider it as predating Christianity. With the opening of Albanian society and overall modernization throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the concept has begun to lose much of the cultural currency it once had.

A notable act of besa that reappears again and again in the literature surrounding the word occurred when the Albanian population protected thousands of Jewish individuals during the Holocaust, taking them into their very own homes and treating them like family. This act is perhaps even more remarkable when one learns that, at the time, Albania was the only nation in Europe where the majority of the population was Muslim. This diverse country considered it its besa to protect Jews by granting them false identity papers and hiding them within their homes. It is a point of cultural pride that, according to many accounts, the refusal to aid and abet the Nazis was so thorough that not a single Jewish person was turned over to Nazis by Albanians during World War II, despite intense pressure by the occupying forces to give up lists of Jewish people. 

Decades later, during the wars of separation that occurred as the former Yugoslavia splintered into individual nations after the fall of communism, Albanians again showed care and hospitality to those caught up in horrific, genocidal acts. Writer Hamza Karčić recalled his experience of besa as he fled Slobodan Milošević’s siege of Sarajevo as a ten-year-old boy:

In my case, long before I had ever heard of the concept of besa, my family and I experienced it. Other Bosniak families who came to Macedonia with us, as well as many who poured into the town in the following weeks, were similarly given besa by other Albanian families…

Albanians’ besa to Bosniaks was not a top-down decision. It was a grassroots, people-to-people, humane response to an ongoing genocide. Nor was it the only time Albanians had acted this way in the twentieth century. It is a testament to the power of an informal code of conduct and a reminder that acts of immense faith and hope do take place.

Beyond wars, the concept has also figured significantly into Albanian history via politics. In one major example, the concept was integral to Albania becoming an independent nation from the Ottoman Empire; as Bedri Muhadri explained in an article in Kosovo Online, “by forming the League of Prizren in 1878, besa was given to fight for the independence of Albania against Ottoman rule.” Muhadri also explained that besa has factored as a way for politicians to build consensus among the population for major policy proposals. “When the unity of the Albanian masses was sought to achieve their legal and political rights, they gave their word and thus, through faith, created lasting trust and cohesion.” 

One of the earliest instances of the concept of besa in Albanian literature is found in the age-old ballad “Constantin’s Besa,” which tells the story of Constantin, the youngest of twelve brothers to only-daughter Doruntine. Constantin promises his mother to bring back Doruntine after she is married far from home, and even dying in a war does not prevent Constantin from keeping his besa to his mother. Constantin does, in fact, bring her back home, and in the climactic finale, both women realize Constantin has risen from the dead on his sister’s behalf.

This ballad, which is often sung at Albanian weddings, has been the subject of much literature, notably Kadare’s novel Kush e solli Doruntinën? (literally, “Who brought Doruntine back?”, although translated into English by Jon Rothschild as The Ghost Rider). Kadare adds his own flourish to the legend by placing it in the context of a medieval police procedural and adding the character of the detective Stres, who must solve the mystery of how the dead Constantin could bring back his sister. In Kadare’s hands, the story turns into a meditation on the birth of legend, the origins of Albania’s version of Christianity, and the source of its Kanun laws.

More recently, the legend of Constantin and Doruntine was transformed into a bilingual children’s book, Doruntina’s Besa, released on International Women’s Day in 2021 by the United Nations. Notably, the book aspires to feminist goals by giving the legend’s besa to Doruntine (who is the hero of this book) instead of Constantin. In the words of the book’s press release, “This publication aims to teach children, youngsters and adults alike, that boys and girls bring the same happiness into families’ lives and that no one should have the right to decide for women’s and girls’ marriage.” It is an example of how the concept continues to have cultural currency, centuries after it was first codified into existence.

Scholars Craig T. Palmer and Amber L. have argue that literary texts have played an essential role in transmitting besa through the centuries. They believe that literature has been a significant part of ensuring that the concept has retained cultural value:

The behaviors prescribed in the Kanun were not simply transmitted from parents to offspring as simple instructions of how to behave. Instead, the tradition was made more interesting, and thus more influential, through being transmitted in stories, songs, and plays, and these accompanying behaviors often emphasized the importance of keeping one’s besa to sacrifice for others as prescribed by the Kanun. Whitaker (1968) explained how “traditional Albanian epic songs (këngë trimnijë)… reveal the Canon of Lekë Dukagnini in operation,” and Mustafa, Young, Galaty and Lee (2013) observed that the pledge of besa to follow the social behavior required by the Kanun is “informed by cultural narratives so immense and unique to the people of the valley that entire books have been written about them.”

If Palmer and Palmer’s argument is true, then the translation of literature that centers besa in foreign languages may play a substantial role in spreading this concept worldwide. But translation of besa is quite challenging, not least because it is so fluid and shifting a notion. In the words of writer and translator Tom Phillips, “It is a quality, an obligation, a gift, but it can also mean truce, haven, protection, peace. It is none of these alone, and all of them at once, existing where they overlap or, like mortar in a wall, in the gaps between them. . . . Nor is besa a necessarily fixed concept: its definition is open to negotiation on, as it were, a case-by-case basis.”

In a world that is often critiqued for being overly transactional, based more on economic relationships than relationships based in human mores of community and connection, and also a world that at times seems to be tearing itself apart, besa would seem to have much to offer. Perhaps the very things that lead Phillips to say that besa eludes translation—that is, its flexibility and multiple nature—are those that make it so pertinent for the challenges that we face today.

Oakland, California

Photo: ink drop / Stock.adobe.com.

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Can contemporary reading methods catch up with the proliferation of and innovation in multilingual Arab literatures in ways that help combat ossified and misleading labels like “the Middle East” and “the Arab world”? The definition of “reader” should be widened to include anyone invested in reading Arab and Arabic texts.

Arab literatures have diversified to an extent that demands a concomitant evolution, if not revolution, of reading practices. A more nuanced and inclusive approach to studying, translating, anthologizing, publishing, and teaching is needed to help counteract orientalizing tendencies that persist in the marketing of literatures from and about the Arab region as well as in mainstream news media. A collective effort toward an objective, fair, and comparative “representation” of Arab literatures would reveal complex realities not only between but also within so-called Arab versus Western entities.

Reading and Writing Arab Literatures

As Waïl Hassan points out in his introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions (2017), writing by Arab authors is now a global phenomenon on all six continents: outside of the twenty-two Arab League member nations, the Arabic-language novel is also produced in Chad, Eritrea, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal as well as in Western countries (e.g., Lebanese authors Hanan al-Shaykh in London and Hoda Barakat in Paris). Not only are some Arabic-language novelists translated into numerous languages, a problematic topic to which I will return, but many Arab novelists also write in at least eleven languages: Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Some of these authors write in foreign languages while based in Arab countries (e.g., anglophone Lebanese Australian novelist Nada Awar Jarrar, based in Beirut). This expansive multilingual literary field makes Arab novelistic traditions, as Hassan argues, an “inherently and internally comparative field of study.” He concludes that “Arab literary production has outgrown the pedagogical and institutional structures organizing literary studies (single-language departments such as Arabic, English, French, and so on; language families like Semitic, Romance, Germanic; and area studies such as Middle or Near Eastern languages), and it can help us imagine new patterns of comparison and configurations of knowledge.” In short, examinations of Arab literatures should move beyond narrow and at times artificial linguistic, geographical, and disciplinary borders in order to keep pace with these literatures.

In a similar vein, Reuven Snir notes that “whether the Arab Spring is considered to have failed or not, it continues to produce various literary experimental manifestations which will certainly change the face of Arabic literature” (Modern Arabic Literature, 2017). Two possibilities, he opines, would further diversify this corpus. First, if Islam loses its dominant cultural, if not political, role, the development of independent Arabic literatures may accelerate. Second, should local dialects become normalized in literary writings at the expense of modern standard Arabic, the variety would skyrocket. Furthermore, he clarifies that the “internet has become a virtual library for billions of Arabic literary texts housed on millions of websites.” Snir encourages scholars to carry out research on the literatures now available online and in social media, concluding that “Arabic literature is now in another place, but its scholarship needs time to adapt to the dramatic change it has undergone.” Examining online publishing and self-publishing—an underexplored realm—would shed light on fresh voices and styles, thus complementing and enriching our understanding of literatures in print. Claire Gallien also advises that we need “to rethink Anglo-Arab literatures outside the box” in order to combat lingering perceptions of such texts as purveyors of more or less ethnographic information about the Muslim/Arab Other in the wake of 9/11 or as exotic elements to satisfy an unabated desire for exaggerated cultural differences.¹

Depth notwithstanding, many academic readings have remained shortsighted. According to Hassan, both disciplinary and institutional barriers have created a split between Arabic-language and foreign-tongue Arab writings, for example, between arabo- and francophone novels from Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania. For many, Arabic-language works are still considered part of Arabic studies, while French-language texts continue to be perceived as part of francophone studies. This skewed perception results in works in the two languages “rarely, if ever, studied together.” Worse still, this linguistic split “replicates the binary division of colonial space between colonizer and colonized.” Similarly, he states that studies of early Arab mahjar (immigrant) literature have focused only on those who write in Arabic, disregarding the output of Arab writers in other languages. Arab novelists writing in other languages tend to fall between the “disciplinary cracks.” Fortunately, recent studies have begun to counteract these trends, whether by stressing the Arabness of foreign-language texts geographically, linguistically, thematically, and generationally or by comparing multilingual texts tied to a particular Arab country or to original versus host countries in a diasporic context.² Critical of disciplinary blind spots, Jumana Bayeh argues that Middle East scholars have often remained, almost myopically, trained “upon a single spot on the map,” thus marginalizing the histories of Middle East migrations, whether into or out of the region.3 Fueling this fixation, I would add, is insufficient interdisciplinary and/or interlingual collaboration between Euro-American and Arab or Middle Eastern scholars.

Translating Arab Literatures in the West

Additionally, three practices in the Western publishing industry still contribute, at least on occasion, to a biased perception of Muslims and Arabs in the West. First, translation of Arabic texts occupies a very small share, with sociopolitical agendas and market forces choosing which Arabic texts get translated. In turn, it has been shown how translators may further subject such texts to a “process of selective appropriation” that manipulates, or “whitewashes,” the content in order to make it palatable to and/or simpler for Anglo-American readers.⁴ Regrettably, Arabic texts deemed too complex or experimental remain largely unknown. For example, The Yacoubian Building, translated in the wake of 9/11, “was promoted as providing an interpretation of terrorism: corruption, oppression, injustice and Islamic sensibilities, combined, are finally made to produce a terrorist. . . . Western readers are invited by the translator, reviewers, publishers and by their very preconceptions to receive the book as an ethnographic report on Arab Others.”⁵

Second, commercial reviews, understandably motivated by concerns for profit, contribute to the exoticization of cultural differences. For example, Lebanese American Rabih Alameddine, translated into over forty languages, writes: “Whenever I read reviews of my work, I notice that I am still the tour guide,” adding that, in a New York Times review, one of his novels was called a “bridge to the Arab soul.”6 In a world with over 450 million Arabs who belong to multiple religions, sects, ethnicities, and languages, such a characterization is not only “discomfiting,” to use Alameddine’s own description, but also vacuous. As he sees it, ethnic authors who make it in the West are perceived to be the “purveyors of comforting myths for a small segment of the dominant culture that would like to see itself as open-minded.” Put another way, “there is more other, scarier other, translated other, untranslatable other, the utterly strange other, the other who can’t stand you. Those of us allowed to speak are the tip of the iceberg. We are the cute other.” When translations become more inclusive and marketing more nuanced, a more complete picture of the Arab world will emerge.

Finally, anthologizing translated Arabic texts and thus admitting them to world literature, albeit a very welcome act, is still fraught with problems. Until now, much of the granularity in Arabic literatures is lost “once it is examined through the vantage point of world literature: major figures are unnoticed, significant specificities unaccounted for, and essential trajectories unheard of.”⁷ Thus, ironically, instead of making visible a whole tradition or at least coherent segments thereof, oftentimes world literature anthologies help uphold stereotypes. A wider-ranging and historically minded approach would remedy this problem in the long run.

Future Directions

In the last few years, changes in direction, scope, and rationale in studies of Arab literature have emerged, but more needs to be done. As Hassan explains in his introduction, by emphasizing the development of the Arabic novel within the framework of the nation-state, five levels of tradition become apparent: the subnational (minorities and subregions), the national, the supranational region (countries of the Maghreb, the Levant, and the Gulf), the pan-Arab (a broader supranational grouping), and the transnational (Arabic literature as part of larger categories, for example North African, West Asian, Middle Eastern, postcolonial, or world literature). The nation-state, as he points out, might be taken as a starting point but not as a horizon. By focusing on the subnational, so far the least studied, a more complex and therefore more accurate body of knowledge would be produced. In a similar vein, Bayeh proposes a diasporic reading method in order to cast doubt over the Middle East or the Arab world as a “demarcated region,” thus enabling the discovery of crisscross lines that connect various communities. Understanding this region as what she calls a “diasporic cartography” would expose it as a “set of networks holding together people and things, places and practices.”

As Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider have argued, the twenty-first century has witnessed a global transformation of modernity that calls for a reconceptualization of the humanities and social sciences.⁸ Arab studies, too, should join the movement away from binary analytical methods, such as East-West, national-transnational, and especially colonial-postcolonial. Although Arab literatures have made a long-overdue entry into the twenty-first-century literary canon, the relatively simplistic East-West dichotomy inherited from Orientalism remains at the heart of the postcolonial paradigm.⁹

Collaboration between arabophone and a diverse range of scholars would help create a much more dynamic view of the Arab world. In addition to joint academic projects, translators from Arabic need to assert the translatability of Arabic (i.e., to show that it is not a controversial language, as many still claim it is),¹⁰ by striving toward a more comprehensive and therefore a more representative coverage of Arabic literature. Writers, too, should write for excellence and not as cultural translators or mediators, as many still do in the so-called Third World, according to Anjali Pandey. Alameddine stresses the need for authors’ intellectual independence thus: “I write because I have something to say to me.” He adds, “When I am put on a panel to represent the Arab world, it frightens me.”¹¹

Beyond Geopolitical Labels

Both intellectual open-mindedness and an ethical engagement with Arab literary traditions can go a long way in combating mainstream news media and the popular sphere where Arabness is more often than not reduced to the lexicon of sectarianism, religiously inspired violence, and female subjugation.¹² Western interest in the Arab world since 9/11, intensified in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, requires an appropriate and measured response from those “in the field.” Contemporary Arab literatures continue to redefine their sense of contemporary realities. In Arab studies, scholars, translators, editors, publishers, teachers, and students need to catch up with these new developments by adopting, as some have begun to do, a pluralistic historiography governed by a search for a poetics and politics of movement in order to multiply the axes of comparison. If all these groups were to read and therefore re-present multilingual Arab literatures comparatively and conscientiously, then slowly but surely the body of knowledge produced would reach the general Western reader, who will, in turn, begin to perceive, and correctly so, the Middle East, MENA (the Middle East and North Africa), or the Arab world as no more than geopolitical labels that mask, if not occlude, much more intricate histories, experiences, and sensibilities. Only then would personal and collective Arab identities appear as they truly are: not bordered but open, intersectional, contingent—and therefore in flux and in a state of continual self-fashioning.

Beirut, Lebanon

1 Claire Gallien, “Anglo-Arab Literature: Enmeshing Form, Subverting Assignation, Minorizing Language,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 39, no. 2 (2017): 5.

2 In this order, see Jumana Bayeh, The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora (2015); Michelle Hartman, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk (2014); Syrine Hout, Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction (2012); Felix Lang, The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel (2016); Ghenwa Hayek, Beirut, Imagining the City (2015); and Waïl Hassan, Immigrant Narratives (2011).

3 Jumana Bayeh, “Anglophone Arab or Diasporic? The Arab Novel in Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States of America,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 39, no. 2 (2017): 18.

4 Ghenwa Hayek, “Whitewashing Arabic for Global Consumption: Translating Race in The Story of Zahra,” Middle Eastern Literatures 20, no. 1 (2017): 94.

5 Sherif Ismail, “Arabic Literature into English: The (Im)possibility of Understanding,” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 17, no. 6 (2015): 922.

6 Rabih Alameddine, “Comforting Myths: Notes from a Purveyor,” Harper’s Magazine, May 14, 2018.

7 Omar Khalifah, “Anthologizing Arabic Literature: The Longman Anthology and the Problems of World Literature,” Journal of World Literature 2, no. 4 (2017): 521.

8 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda,” British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 1 (2006).

9 See Muhsin al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel (2003); Lindsey Moore, Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations (2018); and Anna Ball and Karim Mattar, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (2018).

10 Robyn Creswell, “Is Arabic Untranslatable?” Public Culture 28, no. 3 (2016): 452.

11 Somak Ghoshal, “My Wounds Will Not Be Healed in My Lifetime: Rabih Alameddine,” Livemint, April 6, 2018; Supriya Sharma, “Jaipur Literature Festival 2018: Arab Literature and the Internalising of Racism,” Hindustan Times, June 22, 2018.

12 Creswell, “Is Arabic Untranslatable?”: 449.

Photo: Spiegel by Jaume Plensa at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom, by puffin11k, Flickr.

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As part of the ceremony honoring Kadare as the 2020 laureate—with participants logging in from dozens of countries around the world—Kadare’s nominating juror, Kapka Kassabova, offered a video tribute from her home in Scotland.

It is a pleasure to be broadcasting this tribute to the work of Ismail Kadare from the Scottish Highlands. Though it would have been a greater pleasure yet to be with you all in autumnal Oklahoma.

Ismail Kadare has spoken of literature as an antidote to evil: “Faith in literature and in the creative process brings protection. It generates antibodies that allow you to struggle against state terror.” So I want to start with an antidote of a word that is crucial in this era of mean politics and greedy exploitation of the earth’s resources, when we are all experiencing loss. Generosity. It is the generosity of the Neustadt family that makes it possible for our borderless community of writers, readers, students, and lovers of literature to celebrate great art and the people who make it. Generosity is at the heart of all creative work. To make a true work of art, you have to go for broke, give all you have, and expect nothing in return.

I have been reading Ismail Kadare for twenty years, since I was a university student. And I continue to read and reread him today, when our books are in a sort of background conversation, even if we are not, because that’s the nature of literature—once begun, the conversation doesn’t need the author.

Great literature goes beyond language, of course. Like music, it works by a kind of psychic osmosis. It crosses all boundaries—between the waking and the dreaming mind, between writer and reader, between continents and moments in time. This is why, when I opened my first Kadare book, in the 1990s in New Zealand, it spoke to me instantly, even if it was written around the time of my birth, in a country I knew nothing about. That was Broken April. And within a few pages, I knew that this book was talking to me from the highlands of northern Albania, but about myself, about the nature of family and clan loyalty, about freedom and why some reject it, about why humanity is periodically gripped by a ritual death-wish, and about how draculean regimes can sacrifice their young, to keep themselves in power. “Blood-feudology.” Kronos devours his children: this is a theme close to my own writer’s heart, and one of the themes in Kadare’s fiction. And in our world today. In some way, that which many are facing today politically, in their countries, is where Kadare is coming from. The pitting of the individual against an infernal, faceless machine of power, the struggle to reclaim a voice in a cacophony of lies—this is his home turf.

One of the things I love and admire the most in his work is how he turns a landscape into a state of mind, and a state of mind into a place. The novel that has haunted me the most is The General of the Dead Army. It gave me lucid dreams. In the mountainous Albanian North, Italian soldiers from World War II are being exhumed from the frozen earth, and it’s raining. That mindscape with its furrows of collective memory is ingrained in me. Kadare’s gothic Balkan landscapes are microcosms where a Jungian principle comes into play: “The psyche is the world.”

Another great pleasure in Kadare’s fiction is his subversive humor. In his joyful early novel Chronicle in Stone, when the foreign tanks roll into town and the air-raid siren begins to wail, an old woman says: “Now we have a mourner who will wail for us all.” In Broken April, the young protagonist Gjorg imagines how, once he is shot in a sacrificial vendetta, his wailers will scratch their faces and how “from now on the lives of all the generations to come in the two families would be an endless funeral feast, each side playing host in turn. And each side, before leaving for the feast, would don that blood-stained mask.”

Kadare is not a mourner. Although his narratives are set in conditions of an all-pervasive, self-cannibalizing tyranny, the guiding narrative consciousness at work is one that illuminates, subverts, and satirizes the very nature of tyranny. Thus in The Traitor’s Niche, the erasure of identity is carried out through the Central Archive, “according to the old secret doctrine of Caw-caw and passed through five principal stages: first, the physical crushing of rebellion; second, the extirpation of any idea of rebellion; third, the destruction of culture, art and tradition; fourth, the eradication or impoverishment of the language; and fifth, the extinction or enfeeblement of national memory.” The Traitor’s Niche was written in 1978 in totalitarian Albania and allegorically set in the last, dysfunctional century of Ottoman colonization. It is one of his most haunting satires of absolute tyranny. At the same time, it is a great Balkan road trip of a novel.

“Many things were murky,” Kadare has said of life under totalitarianism, “because two realities were closely intertwined—concrete reality, and the other kind, virtual reality. It was a kind of geographical or spiritual negative landscape. That’s roughly how Mandelstam imagined Dante’s inferno, as an indeterminate place, like the fringes of an epidemic.”

Kadare’s work illuminates such negative landscapes. If you want a glimpse into the mind of a paranoid politician and his entourage, and those enslaved by him, read The Pyramid, where generations are harnessed by a pharaoh to build regime-aggrandizing structures. If you want to understand how a surveillance state works at the deepest psychological level, read The Palace of Dreams, in which citizens’ dreams are recorded by the state and searched for either oracular or traitorous content. Having the wrong dream can kill you. Or read The Successor and its companion, Agamemnon’s Daughter, to understand how mediocrity and evil are linked, how a tyranny ritually devours itself, but not before it feasts on the innocent. Both The Successor and Agamemnon’s Daughter are masterworks of existential horror in the form of political thrillers.

If you want to understand the Balkans and Europe in the twentieth century, read Chronicle in Stone, where a boy not unlike the young Kadare witnesses the fall of his city, Gjirokastër, to successive invaders. If you want to understand why East and West are forever fused in the Balkans, why Islam and Christianity are two faces of the same coin, read Three Elegies for Kosovo.

Kadare has said: “When the truth is hidden or over-ridden, its place is soon taken by a kind of deceptive fog which, day by day, month by month, paralyses everything. As the Greek tragedians said, every hidden crime gives birth to a new crime that resembles its predecessors.” His novels are so cunningly inventive in form, and so well-traveled in this foggy realm of human experience, that they remain perennially fresh. The master narrative of Kadare’s work is Homeric in nature. It continues to uplift, transport, and cast the light of understanding. Kadare has traveled a long road—Dante-like, both protagonist and chronicler of the Underworld.

We are living in a time when the Underworld is no longer just a mythical place. The Underworld is rising to meet us. How shall we live in the Underworld? Kadare’s work is a survival manual of the very highest order.

There is really only one more thing to say, and I say it to Ismail Kadare on behalf of his readers around the world, present and future. Faleminderit. Thank you.

Inverness-shire, Scotland

Photo: Adam Jones, from Kelowna / Wikimedia Commons.

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Reading Kadare, David Bellos finds the whole world in literary form: a masterful blend of myth and folklore with portraits of modern minds and local realities—plus a cunning, wry kind of humor.

The main and overriding reason why we should read Ismail Kadare is that he is a great storyteller. He tells wonderful stories—and he tells many.

In some ways, he’s like Balzac. But Balzac limited himself to one place, called Paris, and one time, the 1820s (with just a few excursions to the French provinces and the Renaissance), whereas Kadare takes us everywhere: to ancient Egypt, to modern China, to a tourist resort on the Baltic, to Moscow and Austria and to the Ottoman Empire. He has an almost Jules Verne–like capacity for traveling the world.

If you read Ismail Kadare, you also cover all the ages since the invention of script: from Cheops building the Great Pyramid to arguments over the succession of Enver Hoxha in 1980s Albania, and on to events and situations that take place in western Europe after the fall of communism.

The largest number of Kadare’s stories are set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Broken April takes place in the 1930s, Chronicle in Stone in the 1940s, The General of the Dead Army in the 1950s, Agamemnon’s Daughter in the 1970s. These tales allow you to read the history of Albania—and of the world—through the prism of fiction. That’s one good reason why you should read Kadare, and why I love to do so. He has created, so to speak, a parallel universe, with a deep relationship to the one we live in. It is the whole world in literary form.

Kadare is of course many things besides a writer of stories. He is a dramatist and an essayist, and for a time he was a journalist and editor too. At the start of his long career, he rose to precocious fame as a poet—as the great new poet of modern Albania. But readers of English can only really know him as a fiction writer. That’s not so bad, because by far the largest part of his activity has been in the form of the novel.

But Kadare does not write only one kind of novel. Some of his stories are tiny, just five pages long, like The Dream Courier; others are great sagas that run to five hundred pages and more. In between, there are long short stories, like Agamemnon’s Daughter, and then there are novellas that Kadare likes to call “micronovels,” such as The Flight of the Stork. Then there are standard-length novels like Broken April, and then the romans-fleuves, including The Concert and The Great Winter. So in terms of formal construction, you have a tremendous variety to explore within a work that itself explores the whole world.

It’s common to read Kadare as a writer who only really talks about his own life in Albania under the Hoxha regime. There is certainly some truth in the notion that all the different places and times of Kadare’s universe are displaced images of one particular place and time. But you do not have to know that, nor do you need to take any notice of it in order to read Kadare. You can read Kadare’s stories simply as stories. He can get you interested in ghosts, in brides who travel hundreds of miles overnight on a flying horse, in corpses that rise from the grave . . . and in all kinds of things that are not immediately appealing to a rational modern reader like myself. But his blending of myth and folklore with portraits of modern minds and local realities is so masterful that I find myself drawn in, and you will too. Kadare’s universe has many levels, including the irrational, the transcendent, and the strange. 

One of the most striking and constant features of Kadare’s world is the looming presence of certain myths from ancient Greece: not the whole of Greek mythology, but those myths that dramatize family hatreds and the intoxicating, corrupting, and fearsome effect of proximity to power.

The second thing that is always present in Kadare are Balkan folk tales. I call then “Balkan” rather than simply Albanian because these folk tales exist in many other languages of the region as well. Indeed, Kadare dramatizes precisely this question of the ethnic origins of Balkan cultures in The File on H, one of the most entrancing of his tales, based on the historical exploits of American folklorists in the Albanian borderlands in the 1930s.

The third dominant feature I want to mention is that Kadare explores in almost every one of his stories the relationship between the personal and the political. Not politics in the sense of topical or party-political issues, but politics in the broadest sense, that is to say, how groups and individuals manipulate others and exercise power over them. 

Another characteristic of the world of Ismail Kadare—let’s call it Kadaria—is the weather, which, as others have said, functions almost like a character in its own right. The weather in Kadaria is always ghastly, and it makes the climate of Scotland seem by comparison as balmy as the Italian Riviera. As a reader, you quickly catch on to the almost comical dimension of Kadare’s climatic notations (fog, drizzle, rain, snow, cold, cloudy), since Albania’s climate is in fact more like the Italian Riviera than the banks of Loch Lomond. They are not plausible settings of any actual scene, but key signatures to the mood, which tells you that this is not going to be a happy story. But they do much more than that: they tell you that there are not going to be any blonde maidens sitting astride gleaming tractors bringing in the sun-ripened harvest of grain, and that the work will have no truck with the norms imposed on Albanian literature by Soviet doctrines of socialist realism. It is really a very sly way of carving out a uniquely critical position within a society where criticism was, shall we say, seriously underappreciated. 

Many of Kadare’s human characters are often not sure whether they are awake or asleep. Typical introductions to the inner lives of protagonists begin: “it seemed to him that . . . ,” “he wasn’t quite sure whether . . . ,” and so on. The borderline between being able to see clearly and not being able to see clearly is never clear-cut. So that when you have finished reading a novel, whether it is the retelling of a legend like The Ghost Rider or a quasihistorical reconstruction like The General of the Dead Army, you are not quite sure whether you’ve had a dream or not. Kadare constantly nudges us toward doubting the difference between waking and dreaming, and makes us reflect on the ways in which life is like a dream, and in what way nightmares are just like life.

So it is no surprise that Palace of Dreams (originally entitled The Employee of the Palace of Dreams) is the central pillar of Kadare’s ramified fictional world: it’s a novel that places at the center of a sinister and unpredictably autocratic society an institution devoted to the manipulation of dreams, and at the center of that institution a sensitive and confused young man who truly does not know what he is doing, or why he ends up running the whole show.

Finally, in case all this scares you away, since you may not be instantly attracted to foggy minds wandering in and out of dreamscapes where it rains and snows, I must add, and indeed insist, that Kadare is really quite funny. You have to let yourself plunge deep into this parallel universe, but once you do, you discover a cunning, wry kind of humor that is both situational and verbal. Perhaps surprisingly, Kadare’s sly digs come through even in multiple translation. 

Kadare has said on more than one occasion that his readers and critics should not pay too much attention to context. In support of this way of reading him, I would point out that Kadare’s manner of telling stories, and the nature of the stories that he tells, has not changed one iota over the past sixty years, even though the author’s social, geographical, and political context have changed beyond recognition. It is as if Kadare’s entire imaginary world arose fully formed at the start, and that the forty or fifty stories and novels that he has produced since then are but the fragments of a larger, coherent, unchanging whole. 

What underscores the coherence of Kadare’s œuvre is his systematic reuse of locations, objects, stories, and references. In The Great Wall, for example, there’s a symbol that harks back directly to The Three-Arched Bridge; in The File on H, there’s an inn that is visited in several other stories; in The Blinding Order, there’s a young man who will later become the protagonist of Palace of Dreams, and in that novel, there’s a performance of an oral epic that takes us right back to The File on H… Now, that is quite like Balzac’s device of the “reappearing characters” in The Human Comedy, but it is in my view much more subtle, since it links not so much the narrative plots of the novels as their entire fabric of allusion and reference. It is a striking achievement, and it also means that each story you read is not just that story—it is a contribution to your memory and understanding of other stories you have read, and it adds to the overall feeling that you are indeed in a different world that is weirdly like a dream.

Of course, the more you read, the more you grasp of the thousands of threads that tie Kadare’s works together. In English, alas, only about one third of it is available at the present time. That is a pretty good reason for learning French, if you balk at the effort needed to learn Albanian well enough to read this great master of modern European literature. Let’s hope it is also a good enough reason for British and American publishers to commission a heap of new translations, with the encouragement given to them by the awarding of the Neustadt Prize. 

Princeton, New Jersey

Photo: Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, by Aldo Bonata.

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During the Neustadt Prize ceremony on October 21, 2020, David Bellos read the English-language version of Kadare’s prize lecture to a worldwide Zoom audience.

I am happy and honored that the ceremony organized in honor of my being awarded the Neustadt Prize coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the prize.

There is no shortage of questions about literature. We hear questions such as, Does the world need literature? This question would call to mind clichéd TV-show questions, trying to stir up debate, had it not been already raised thousands of years ago. There have obviously been two parties lobbying over this question, for and against literature. 

Literature was born along with a denial, a barrier. Even if at first this seems strange, if we think about the questions, we will reach the conclusion that this negation is somehow befitting of literature, and it is even quite natural. Literature and negation are one and the same. Rather than being born of angels, literature is the handiwork of demons. 

Let’s look at things more simply. Literature, in the form of early oral poetry, has often had as its subject matter the return from long travels: telling of what happened there, at the far border of a country, the desert, or death itself. The first travelers coming from afar were practically the first writers. Walking back to their countries, in the solitude of the road, their minds reconstructed events in such a way that they would be most interesting to listeners. Thus, along the way, dialogues emerged, events became more exciting, colors grew brighter, and something was emphasized while something else erased.

Although the travelers brought with them stories, their heroes stayed mostly far away. They were absent, always from beyond, either on the other side of state lines or on the other side of life—meaning they were dead. In this way, since its beginnings, death and absence assumed a special place in literature. But literature entered death’s domain not to curry favor, but as an equal. In the majestic Epic of Gilgamesh, literature, fully knowing the power of death, still assumes the right to censor it. Gilgamesh is defeated by death, but for the sake of literature, part of him still escapes the grip of death. In other words, using contemporary verbiage, we might call this a contract. Only great art could engage in such contracts with the impossible. Literature continued to feed off of death and its subsidiaries: nighttime, sleep, dreams, guilt. 

From its very beginnings, literature was bound up with sacrifice. Troy was the first victim on its altar. Subsequently, there were hundreds of events, subjects, characters, and scenes drenched in blood and grief that fed the literary repertoire. When the Albanian poet Fan Noli translated Victor Hugo’s Waterloo, he noted at the end that after all the tragedy between the pages, he had a single consolation, that he himself was alive, and the poem had been reborn through him.

Literature was used to commanding this kind of sacrifice. Over the years, we have paid this tribute in one way or another.

Death, sleep, and guilt remind us of nighttime. Night has always been connected with negation in human thought. But we say such things in a lighthearted fashion, without considering what terror there would be in this world if we were irrevocably separated from the night, if our calendars merely reflected an endless day. Until now, no one has bothered to carry out a research study on the role that the night plays in softening humanity. Without her intervention, without that restraint and interruption, human evil, anxiety, and anger would march forward at a catastrophic pace. 

During its nascent stages, literature only knew about those dangers that threatened human life: erasure and oblivion. The rhapsodists sang, people heard them, and new rhapsodists emerged to sing new songs that died away with their singers or shortly thereafter. In this sense, literature confronted some of the same natural dangers as human life. Later on, literature was also confronted with dangers that came from another sphere, from society and the state. It was the theater, likely due to its ability to gather people in the center of cities, that first helped conjure the practice of censorship. Official censorship was thus born, over two thousand five hundred years ago, and it was so powerful that it created many problems for the literary giants of the time, the great tragedians. 

Censorship is bound up with writing. Before the Akkadian-Sumerians invented writing, efforts to control oral poetry were inexact and not very persistent. At the most, a nonconformist rhapsodist would not be invited to sing at the gathering of a prince, and that was the end of the matter. 

When writing appeared on the cultural horizon, it was like an unimaginable earthquake. Writing carried out a dual project. On the one side, it opened a new horizon for literature, while on the other hand, it suffocated, killed, and mummified it. 

Prior to a new phase in its development, literature, in accordance with its stringent legal codes, always sought a heavy tribute from writers. They had to give up part of their spontaneity, to pass their thought through the wheels and banners of the heavy machinery of syntax. They could not criticize literature on any given day if they were in the mood to do so. Writing was thus a dual form of control. The control that derived from a kind of consciousness, prescient for its time, but also an official form of control. The history of writing is, above all, the history of the dangers confronting writers. 

Some contemporary expressions that are connected to this, such as “this literary work can burn you” or “let’s hope this work doesn’t land on your head like a misfortune,” become surprisingly clear when we think about the clay tablets on which Sumerians recorded their thoughts. When the baked tablets were taken out of the oven carelessly, the writer could burn his hands. Or a literary work, let’s say a long narrative, could have been placed in the writer’s studio so as to cover an entire wall, and one day, either because it had been placed poorly, or because it had not been baked properly, or due to an earthquake, the tablet would fall on the writer and trap him underneath. 

Like every new initiative, literature brought along many such dangers. These early possibilities were simple compared to the horrors that would follow, which have become well known. 

The departure of Aeschylus from Athens was the first of many such departures. Aeschylus and Homer were humanity’s greatest writers until the fifth century BCE. At least one of these two great writers was obliged to abandon their home. (I say at least one, because we cannot exclude the possibility that Homer, as a traveling rhapsodist, could have been traveling so much that for him the notion of departure would have lost all meaning altogether.) 

The departure or the banishment of writers was thus tied to literature, becoming part of its genetic code from early on. But the departure also changed over the centuries. Even as the weather in the world grew milder, its position vis-à-vis literature only grew harsher.

The departure of Ovid from Rome seems like the most painful, because unlike the departure of Aeschylus, where it was the anger of writers that assumed a deciding role, Ovid was sent away by the state. The repression of writers that continues to our time began with him. 

In the case of Ovid, we have all the makings of future totalitarianism: condemnation with no known cause. The kind of suppression of the totalitarian state, where you yourself don’t even know why you’re being condemned. This unexplained terror, a blind strike, would remain one of the key devices of terror until the twentieth century, when communism, after having perfected its own devices, just like Kafka’s machine, would crumble along with it. 

With their departure, great writers like Aeschylus and Dante Alighieri seemed to have been looking for a way to return to that zone, that climate, and that chaos in which literature was born. In other words, they sought to experience the status of a semideath, if not the depths of death itself. It was, perhaps, an internal order of art, of the same great ritual that suggested to Dante that before he started describing his journey into the inferno, he had to somehow separate himself from life.

At the same time, it must be said that up until Dante, writers, even in cases of misfortune, were generally treated as a seigneurial group. It was later dictatorships that understood that in order to attack writers better, they had to have their status lowered. So they made a habit of what had previously not been a habit: the imprisonment of writers, their placement in communal cells, their internment, their dishonoring, their movement by train from one camp to another, their insult, their reeducation through physical labor, and so on and so forth

In no other dictatorial regime has there been such a telepathic exchange between the tyrant and the people as under communism. Suffocating, irritating, terrifying, sleep-inducing, and intoxicating, the psychic echoes encompassed all this, and it was dominant. 

The communist regime was one that more than any other regime took its battle against literature seriously. Communism and literature simply had no means of joint coexistence. The negative stance toward literature was not a later manifestation; it was inherent to communism. The shallow paragraphs by Marx about ancient literature or about Shakespeare were a mere alibi to cover up later crimes. There is no room for literature in the Marxist vision of the future world. Lenin’s seminal article, “Party Organization and Party Literature,” was as brutal in its effects as some of the fury of Genghis Khan. There is a red thread among communists that connects their treatment of literature, from Lenin’s articles, to Stalin’s executions, to Mao’s pathological hatred for writers, to the massacres of both writers and their readers by Cambodia’s Pol Pot.

Totalitarianism likewise surmised early on that it could not merely destroy literature through terror alone. It understood that a massacre alone would not do, that a suicide of sorts would also be needed to completely solve the problem of literature. Self-censorship, this long-standing, century-old disease, which literature confronted but overcame, communism attempted to turn into a real plague. 

And it managed, in one way or another, to do so. Thousands of writers, most of them mediocre ones, surrounded literature’s temple from all sides. Their number grew daily, just as the number of true writers, who sought to keep alive the holy fire, decreased by the same measure. 

Never has the literature of half the globe been confronted with such a danger. In totalitarian regimes, literature and the arts were tested cruelly, in a manner unknown in world history until then. We know about the punishment of writers even before: the censors, the prisons, and the camps were well known. But Stalinism went further. It did not satisfy itself with simply repressing well-known works, the ones sometimes called artistic cathedrals. It attempted to forever bury the possibility of their creation too. In other words, that system sought to destroy the raw materials whereby such cathedrals are built. It attempted to create a new race of writers, who would eagerly take upon themselves the destruction of literature. Stalinism achieved this in a way. Those of us who remained faithful to the temple were in the minority in that endless and hopeless desert known as socialist realism. 

Writers were thus broken into two groups: those who betrayed the temple and those that stayed faithful to it. The divine question that could be posed to writers of the East—“What did you do, Adam?”—would have two possible answers. The first answer was: I degraded myself and literature according to communist law. And the second was: I continued to write normally, as though communism didn’t exist. When I hear questions like the ones frequently posed to writers of the former communist empire (namely, How did you continue to write normally, during a time and place when this seemed impossible?), my answer has been precisely this: we had faith in literature. It rewarded our faith and devotion with this blessing and protection. 

To believe in literature means to believe in a higher reality. To believe in literature means that your country’s dark regime seems pale compared to the majestic literary funerary rites. To believe in this art means you always know that the government which dominates you, the police that surveil you, that the parliament, the bosses, the administration, tyranny itself, are a passing nightmare, dead matter, compared to the great order of which you have become initiated as a member. 

So as not to drag on, let me repeat something that I have said elsewhere in connection with an episode of Dante’s Divine Comedy. While traveling through hell, Dante Alighieri is frightened for one moment by an approaching storm, and his master, Virgil, says: “Do not be afraid, it is a dead storm.”

Within these words we can find the explanation of what I mention above. To view the storms of the regime as dead storms is an unusual skill. And only writing can afford a writer this skill. It has never been easy for the writer to feel alive amidst all the surrounding death. 

It has been said multiple times that to think normally in the mad communist world is an incredible stance. To speak normally is outright heroic. 

Communism fell without fully realizing its perverse dream. We arrived at the end of this millennium without it. Our literature has lived in the world for three thousand years. Its first millennium was wealthy and bright. The second one was unfortunately less rich; it seemed as though humanity wanted to rest a bit during that time. And then the third millennium arrived, the one we are living in, which gave new life to literature. Let us hope that the new millennium, the fourth one, will not repeat the second, as though in a fatal symmetry. 

During these difficult days, when the whole planet is experiencing the distress of a global pandemic, I want to express my regret that I cannot be present among you for a beautiful celebration that coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of this prestigious prize. Due to the impossibility of reaching you from my native Albania on the Adriatic, I wish to express my appreciation to the jury. I am honored that you have chosen me from among the most well-known authors in the world.

Thanks to the fabulous poet, Kapka Kassabova, who nominated me for this prize.

Thanks to Robert Con Davis-Undiano, executive director of World Literature Today, for his high consideration of my work. Thanks to the university, its students, and faculty.

Thanks to the talented translators of my work, David Bellos and John Hodgson.

And a special thanks and gratitude to the respected Neustadt family for their engagement and generosity in the promotion of world literature.

Tirana, August 2020

Translated from the Albanian by Ani Kokobobo

Main image: J.M.W. Turner, Ancient Italy—Ovid Banished from Rome, oil on canvas, 1838.
Frick Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In this issue, we are pleased to begin a new collaboration with the Residency in Literary Translation, directed by professor Daniela Bentancur, of the “Juan Ramón Fernández” Institute of Higher Education in Living Languages of Buenos Aires, Argentina. This text was translated from English to Spanish by Daniela Pupato, who took part in the residency.

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Maria Stepanova is a prizewinning poet and the author of In Memory of Memory, a volume of creative nonfiction that has been recognized with many Russian and European awards and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (see WLT, Spring 2021, 95). As founder and editor in chief of Colta.ru, one of the most influential culture portals in Russia, she has voiced consistent and outspoken opposition to the Putin regime for years. Stepanova was among the first Russian authors to protest the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine with her essay “The War of Putin’s Imagination” in the Financial Times. When we spoke with her by Zoom in October 2022, Stepanova was in residency as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. This issue of WLT also includes poems from Stepanova’s still-unpublished book of recent poetry.

Kevin M. F. Platt: Let’s begin at the beginning—actually, long before the beginning. I think we could draw a contrast between the current situation of Russian writers, such as yourself, who have found themselves outside of Russia and that of emigration in the 1920s. Perhaps at the start of the revolutionary upheavals of a century ago, people hoped that everything could suddenly be resolved and it would be possible to return home. Yet what we are witnessing today is an unsettled temporality of a more significant sort, leading to a kind of fermentation. So how does this peculiar situation affect authors? Does one write differently?

María Stepánova: That’s exactly right: this has nothing or little in common with that emigration. The first-wave emigrants had a sense that they were victims of a catastrophe. A huge explosion that, regardless of how one related to it, had thrown people to all sides in the blast wave. You hope it’s not the end of the story. You try to find your way in the new circumstances. You build new institutions. Or learn to drive a taxi. Somehow, you attempt to place yourself in relation to the catastrophe.

Now, the situation is fundamentally different, because, to be blunt, it’s not us who are the refugees. It’s not clear who we are—unless we begin to address the things we really ought to be thinking about, in my opinion. I am talking about the degrees of responsibility we all bear for what happened on February 24 and for the war that began in 2014. Responsibility, guilt, participation, complicity, involvement—you can call it by various names. Yet one way or another, at present, we Russians are not those who are fleeing as refugees, but those from whom others are fleeing. Only after that, secondarily, can we be counted among those who have fled, right?

Today, to be a Russian writer—to be a Russian, even—is a kind of stigma. It’s an externally imposed stigma, rather than one that comes from within. And it’s not clear how it is defined, according to what characteristics or parameters. What identifies me, with my 75 percent Jewish ancestry, as a Russian writer? Is it my Russian passport or the language I write in? Is it the forty-odd years I’ve lived in Russia? If we are talking about others, not just me, maybe it’s just Russian heritage. A person might not even have been born in Russia but can still feel complicit. And what about a completely American or French person, yet one who has been a part of things Russian—does a certain measure of… involvement… extend to such a person as well?

We don’t have the right word for this: imbrication, presence, partiality? Yet one thing I’m certain of is that the least apt response to this condition is to say: This has nothing to do with me. Overall, I was a good person. I never voted for Putin. I wrote articles, tried to analyze what was happening around me… That doesn’t work. The truth is: you didn’t write enough, or maybe you should have done everything differently, to prevent it all from happening in the first place.

From this moment on, and for the foreseeable future, we have all lost the utopia of private existence Brodsky described in his Nobel Prize lecture, which was so valued by the older generation of Russian writers. For us, there can be no more private existence. This has very clear biographical implications. Those who write in Russian can no longer represent themselves and their work (whether within Russia or abroad) solely in terms of a private life and selfhood. They will instead be received as the product of a certain collective identity, in which the microlevel of being always corresponds to the macrolevel. One is always in the presence of the “we.” I will always be a Russian writer, whether or not I’m in exile.

It’s a quandary. When you publish a book, for instance, things have to be defined this way or that. In an interview, they always ask, “How should we present you?” You think: am I a Russian writer or a Jewish Russian writer? I usually just say, “Whatever! Introduce me however you want.” In fact, since childhood, the Jewish side has always been more definitive for me than the Russian—because it’s what could get you into trouble. It was a matter of pain. But when people ask me now, I say I’m a Russian writer. I can’t say I’m happy with this self-definition. For my entire life I’ve wanted to be just a writer. But that won’t work anymore.

Mark Lipovetsky: Masha, I agree completely about the end of the utopia of private existence. On the other hand, you, more than anyone else, never held back in your critical perspective, long before 2014 and continuing afterward. You’ve never compromised your political views. I feel bound to disagree when a writer like you ties themselves to a collective “we” that also includes Putin and his cronies and all those who support the war. What about the possibility of a divorce from the big Russian “we”? Can you envision some kind of alternative collectivity—“over the barriers,” in Pasternak’s terms?

M.S.: Yes, creation of such an alternative “we” is possible and necessary. In some sense, we are already doing so. Look, there are three of us here talking to each other, and that leads to shared meaning—to some kind of commonality. And, of course, we also need to create all kinds of new institutions because, as Bulgakov put it, “no matter what you reach for, it’s not there.”

For example, there are no Russian publishing houses or even Russian-language publishing programs abroad. With the new Russian law criminalizing all mention of LGBT lives and the steady intensification of censorship, there will simply be nowhere to print many texts written in Russian. And this censorship affects not only those inside Russia but also those who are abroad, who fear placing readers within the country at risk. It’s a hostage situation that involves everyone. There are, of course, a number of initiatives in this regard already, but I’m interested most of all in experimental writing, complex prose, and poetry. This, of course, doesn’t sell so easily. Yet perhaps we will try to do something in this arena as well?

We also need educational institutions, because we need to understand ourselves and others. This is more important than ever, because when you witness a disaster, you need to find out how and why it happened. For the duration of the Putin decades, people have been saying that we need to create a serious Russian university abroad. Yet these projects continuously stall. Maybe now they will come to fruition. In sum, this is a story about a desert island where nothing as yet exists, but one can hope that a couple of kegs of gunpowder and alcohol will be thrown on the beach by the waves, and it will be possible to begin building something.

Yet we should also remember how during the twentieth century interactions between Russians in emigration and in the USSR were shaped by relations of mutual interest, fear, attraction—but ultimately by the abyss that lay between the two. In general, what little contact there was took place in a strained and garbled manner. It seems to me that we now face the danger of falling into the same old rut—a rut from which we might never get out again. Instead, we need to create institutions that address everyone who speaks Russian, regardless of place of residence, passport, and so on. In the course of such a project, a new “we” will undoubtedly take shape.

Finally, let’s take a sober view of things. On one hand, the members of our “we” will feel others out with fine-tuned antennae, recognizing our own, our kin, sharing an embrace and common undertakings. But there are also observers, the external authority, a wider world that is trying to understand us. When a work produced by someone from Russia—a film, a poem, a book, an article—winds up in the hands of that broader public, it will be received not as an excellent novel about childhood–adolescence–youth, written by some excellent writer or other. Instead, it will be seen as a novel written by a person from Russia and will be read primarily in relation to what has happened in Russia and why. You may want to write about butterflies, but ultimately you will have to explain the war.

M.L.: That is, any text written by a Russian writer becomes an allegory of war?

M.S.: And it works retroactively, too. You can’t read texts written ten or twenty years ago now, except as premonition or prediction of war, or as blindness to its approach. Everything points forward in one way or another to the current moment. And so, when I talk about this “we,” it includes all of us—all the way from Putin himself to a baby now being born in Vyatka. Sadly, you are in this “we.” You can build any number of internal spaces in order to fight against Putin from within. But for the outside world, everything is now determined by what has happened and the need to understand it. I just don’t see any way out for anyone. It seems to me that we need to recognize this with open eyes and try to live with it.

K.M.F.P.: There have been many empires in the history of the world, and there are many imperial languages. The speakers of imperial languages are not only the agents of empire but also the victims of empire and their descendants. This means that among the varieties of imperial language and literature, there are imperial works, but there are also anti-imperial texts and movements. There are whole countries and postcolonial territories where people write, work, and speak in these languages and transform them into something new. In russophone space we could consider the example of the Fergana school of russophone poetry in Central Asia, or the Orbita group in Riga. Berlin, where you are now located, is also home to a number of russophone writers. My question is, What about anti-imperial Russian culture? Where can we find it in the past and present?

M.S.: Kevin, what you’ve just said is the equivalent of an article. And I don’t mean a scholarly essay, but rather the article in the Russian legal code that criminalizes all “appeals for the dismemberment of Russia.” This is a topic for a long and interesting discussion. But to be brief, the most challenging aspect of this problem relates to the one zone where it seems practically irresolvable. It helps to have some kind of separate topos—a territorial or linguistic zone that you can unlink, split off, separate from the imperial monolith. And then you can stand on this separate entity, like it’s an island. See, this is my language—my own special universe that has broken away from the empire. Yes: Fergana, Riga, Berlin.

But is that possible when you are in the midst of this empire, its territory and language? Do you have the ability to change something in that language? I don’t want to suggest that the logic of the separate territory comes easily, but it has, how should I put it, more drive. Namely, with some caution, I would propose that in Ukraine and Belarus (where, unfortunately, they could not match the achievements of Ukraine), the simple desire not to be like us served as fuel for a powerful revolutionary movement. They took us as a negative model, and their indignation, disgust, and unwillingness to have anything to do with that model provided them with impetus, helping them to lift away and never return. But it’s not so clear how to achieve something similar inside your own head—or in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

How can we manage the situation when literally every second expression or metaphor, if we trace it to its roots, is littered with allusions to war and violence? Language itself turns into a minefield in which you can’t put your foot down anywhere without risk of an explosion.

Let’s take the main text of ancient Rus’ian literature, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. What kind of epic poem is this, apart from its brilliance? It’s the story of a crazy military scheme, reminiscent of Russia’s current war in Ukraine. A provincial prince from a small city gathers a retinue of warriors and embarks on a small, victorious war. He is utterly crushed. All his men are killed, and he barely manages to escape and return home. In general, it’s a completely unambiguous story of failure, defeat, and shame. But in the last section of the epic, he rides along the Borichev incline to the Church of the Mother of God, and all the bells are ringing. It’s a victory parade, with a triumphal arch, imperial eagles, and assembled troops, and everything is wonderful. Somehow, unambiguous shame and defeat is recoded into triumph and victory. If we analyze The Tale of Igor’s Campaign carefully, we can see how double-think operates—a hybrid or patchwork thought—that makes it possible to recognize defeat as defeat, and at the same time to pretend that it doesn’t mean a thing, because we won all the same. This is what our culture has been doing for many, many years. It’s what Russian propaganda is trying to do now.

I don’t know how to struggle against this. I think about Celan and wonder how it was for him, writing in a language that, on one hand, was his mother tongue, while on the other hand, this same language arrived in his multilingual home and killed his actual mother and father, sparing him only by a miracle. He continued to write in this language, yet he also took each word, its etymological armature, and destroyed it from within, remaking it, turning it inside out. The result was a completely new language: a unique, individualized German—a non-German.

Yet I want to add two footnotes here. Footnote 1: When Celan first came to Germany to read his poems—at a gathering of Group 47, I think—he produced a negative impression, deeply disturbing his audience. The problem was that he read with too much pathos, in the view of these German writers who had been working to rebuild German literature on new foundations, just as we would like to rebuild Russian literature now. For them, pathos in poetry had been compromised by Nazism. It’s a striking story about the clash of two different modes of opposition. Footnote 2: It is also important to recognize that Celan, and what he does with language, illustrates a form of resistance originating with the victim. We do not have the same.

M.L.: The same license?

M.S.: Not license, but opportunity. We ourselves have no idea who we are. When they tell me we are also victims, of course that’s in some sense true, but it irritates me terribly. Of course, things are hard for us, but just compare our situation with that of the Ukrainians. So who are we, then? Neither victim nor aggressor. Then who? This is a major problem for writing. We all remember “Go I know not where and bring I know not what” from the Russian fairy tale. But now we also have: “Be I know not whom.” It’s not clear where to begin. Yet still I would say that one might have to begin with movement. You may not know who you are or what you are after, but at least you have to get moving and start doing something.

Translated from Russian to English by Kevin M. F. Platt

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Photo: Russian writer Maria Stepanova, by Andrey Natotsinsky.

In this issue, we are pleased to begin a new collaboration with the Residency in Literary Translation, directed by professor Daniela Bentancur, of the “Juan Ramón Fernández” Institute of Higher Education in Living Languages of Buenos Aires, Argentina. This text was translated from English to Spanish by María Victoria D’Ercole, who took part in the residency.

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Beneath the warmth of the February summer sun, I walked slowly along the streets, basking in the joy of a long-awaited homecoming of sorts to the south—the south of Chile, specifically Valdivia, a beautiful, fluvial city nestled at the confluence of three rivers. I was out in the city center following the directions I’d received a few days earlier from a bookseller in Librería Alemania; during my conversation with him, I shared that I’m a literary translator, and he immediately recommended I visit  Gato Caulle, a newer bookstore with a section featuring publishing houses and authors from the south.

So there I was, walking along the sidewalk on Yungay, listening to the sounds floating up from the river market on Río Calle-Calle, scanning for the bookstore until reaching a graffitied, arched entranceway over which hung the words “Casa de Artes y Oficios” (House of Arts and Crafts). Enchanted, I walked through the arched entrance and then up a stairway adorned with colorful crocheted designs that led to a wooden double door opening onto a lush outdoor patio, across which I saw the welcoming bright blue doors of Gato Caulle. Just arriving at the place was magical.

A lively, colorful space full of natural light, Gato Caulle seems to welcome readers in to stay a while, which I certainly did. While perusing, I struck up a conversation with the bookseller, who turned out to be one of the co-owners, Diego Corvera. As we chatted about books, we began to talk about the place; when Diego and his business partner, Boris Farías, opened the bookstore back in May 2017, they wanted to offer something different: a focus on small presses, a gathering place, a literary community in the heart of Valdivia. And they seem be creating just that—from book clubs, live music, podcasts, book launches, and workshops to their magazine, and more. I was drawn to the place for its regional section, but what impacted me most was the ongoing engagement with the local community and with young people in particular. Reaching beyond the entire wall lined with children’s books in the bookstore, they have partnered with local teachers and students to hold workshops, created a magazine edition featuring stories written by local students, and invited children to write reflecting on their human rights during the second round of the 2021 Chilean presidential elections, reflections they subsequently published in a chapbook. Embodying the vision of its founders, Gato Caulle has grown to be much more than a bookstore.

On my way out that day, laden down with books recommended by Diego, I stopped for a juice at a coffee bar off the patio, one of several other little shops that make up the Casa de Artes y Oficios. As I walked down those magical steps and through the archway opening to Yungay, I daydreamed of living in Valdivia again and spending my days translating on the patio outside Gato Caulle, juice in hand.

Photo courtesy of Librería Gato Caulle.

In this issue, we are pleased to begin a new collaboration with the Residency in Literary Translation, directed by professor Daniela Bentancur, of the “Juan Ramón Fernández” Institute of Higher Education in Living Languages of Buenos Aires, Argentina. This text was translated from English to Spanish by María Victoria D’Ercole, who took part in the residency.

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Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefinition of gender, the internet’s mediation of identity, and brushes with the existential—in common ways, embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims.

Over the past decade or so, a new cadre of female Latin American writers has emerged in English translation. Although each is distinctive in her own right, these writers share enough overlapping themes, approaches, and styles that we might refer to it as a “school,” if not a “movement.” On their common ground are the misogynistic violence that pervades the lives of Latin American women; bodily autonomy, especially around access to abortion; the ongoing definition and redefinition of gender; internet culture and how it mediates identity and personhood; and brushes with the existential. These writers have responded to such themes in common ways; most notably, by embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims. Their literature speaks particularly to a younger, female audience, and these authors seem to have a collective finger on the pulse of their readers’ lives.

Although I cannot pretend to have an exhaustive list of the writers in this group, I can name off the ones that currently stand out to me in English translation. In no particular order, they include Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, Fernanda Melchor, Liliana Colanzi, Cristina Rivera Garza, Valeria Luiselli, Nona Fernández, and Lina Meruane. Certainly there are more currently at work in Spanish as well as others emerging in English translation.

A good example of the prototypical novel of this group of writers is Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda’s 2018 novel Mandíbula, published in 2022 as Jawbone in Sarah Booker’s translation. It tells the story of a schoolteacher for an elite preparatory school for upper-class girls who goes mad, kidnapping one of her students and subjecting her to experiences of body horror. On one level, the book captures many of the central concerns of Latin American writers like Ojeda—body autonomy, the socialization of girls within Latin American society, mental and physical horrors perpetrated against women of the continent—yet it also communicates on levels that are detached from a Latin American context, as it speaks in languages comprehensible to young women throughout the developed world. Specifically, Ojeda speaks in the language of true crime podcasts, streaming serials, creepypastas, and the world of therapy. Regarding some of her literary influences, Ojeda told me: “I have a thing for true crime documentaries. I don’t like to like them because they really hurt me, but I keep going to them. And creepypastas, of course. Not all of them, but some are so very powerful.”

One of the striking things about Jawbone is how it comes across as something along the lines of a true crime podcast or a creepypasta—did you ever hear the one about the teacher who went mad and tortured her own student? It converses with the media resonating with young women across the globe, giving it a currency that transcends its Ecuadoran context. Yet even as Jawbone feels very of the moment, it also connects up with deep-rooted aspects of the Latin American tradition. For instance, the book includes chapters that read as though they are transcripts from one of the main character’s therapy sessions, the speakers only denoted by a Q or an A, and the questions asked by Q not included in the transcript. This tracks back to the powerful psychoanalytical writing that was a core aspect of twentieth-century Latin American literature, reminiscent of Manuel Puig, in particular. In addition, the suggestion that the controversial Catholic organization Opus Dei is involved in the school weaves in a political aspect, staying true to the propensity for Latin American authors to let politics infuse their narratives in subtle and unexpected ways. It also brings to mind canonical Latin American writers like Roberto Bolaño, who referenced the sexual abuse scandals, misogyny, and supposed ties to right-wing dictatorships held by Opus Dei.

The Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel covers areas overlapping with Ojeda—girlhood, psychoanalysis, the quandary of being embodied—doing it with her own twinge of horror and the gothic. For instance, her 2011 novel El cuerpo en que nací, translated into English in 2015 by J. T. Lichtenstein as The Body Where I Was Born, takes the form of a woman recounting her traumatizing childhood to a therapist (see WLT, Jan. 2016, 65). “We perpetrate unto the newest generation the neuroses of our forebears, wounds we keep inflicting on ourselves like a second layer of genetic inscription.” The narrator recounts a life lived with a scar on her cornea—how this mark of difference has impacted her throughout her lifetime, and how she has come to terms with that congenital wound.

As with Ojeda and other writers of her school, the narrator’s childhood is inflected by the political realities of the period. Nettel’s narrative implicates the political turmoil that gripped Latin America throughout the 1960s and ’70s, including Mexico’s own infamous massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968 and the disastrous Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Nettel also brings in the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, a watershed moment for the nation and a pivotal turning point on its long, slow journey out of single-party dictatorship and into pluralistic democracy.

Like Ojeda’s book, Nettel’s is about how women are taught to be the subjected gender during childhood and adolescence and the narrator’s own struggle to free herself and to inhabit her body as an autonomous being. The book’s title comes from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Song,” in which he writes: “I always wanted / to return / to the body / where I was born.” For Nettel’s narrator, claiming ownership over the body she was born in—despite it being disfigured by a debilitating scar over one cornea—is tantamount to learning to live as an independent woman in a world that has taught her at every turn to be dependent and unfree. It is a struggle familiar to the women—whether adults or adolescents—in Ojeda’s Jawbone, and it is a theme running through Nettel’s work. For instance, her short-story collection Natural Histories, translated in 2014 by Lichtenstein, similarly documents women struggling to define freedom on their own terms despite heterosexual relationships that subject them to a variety of misogynistic forces. As in her novel, in these stories Nettel pares back the narrative frame to the basics, letting her focus more closely on the emotions, demoralization, and confusion that her women experience as they seek to gain an understanding of their situation, and ultimately a degree of agency over it.

If Ojeda draws us closely into the existential situation of Latin American women, and Nettel closer still, then perhaps no other female Latin American writer throws a reader as boldly and completely into this state of existential confusion and peril of women as does the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin. What is most striking about Schweblin’s narratives is that they tend to sit somewhere between realism and allegory, providing enough detail to take them down from the realm of myth or fable but not providing anywhere near enough detail to give a full sense of the reality her characters inhabit, as you would get from typical realist fiction. The result is that when reading Schweblin I always feel very closely—and very intensely—attached to the protagonist’s world of emotions and sensations, as this is usually the bulk of what Schweblin gives a reader to grab onto. Unsurprisingly, it is a world characterized by extremely heightened states, crisis moments, and extremes of mental and physical functioning. I would not be surprised if reading Schweblin significantly raises my cortisol levels.

The results of Schweblin’s particular way of storytelling are narratives that feel like very strange, distinctive, and original takes on concerns familiar to her feminist peers. For instance, her story “Olingiris” is framed around a complaint common to women everywhere: the rituals and practices necessitated by the societal imperative that women have skin free of hair. But Schweblin makes it peculiarly her own: the story’s frame tale is one of women being paid for some never-explained reason to harvest their body hair in excruciating fashion by a team of women wielding tweezers. “Headlights” centers on a woman calming the emotional pain of being scorned by her husband while having a bizarre encounter with an older woman amid a backdrop of the wails of similarly scorned women. Schweblin’s 2014 novel Distancia de rescate, translated by Megan McDowell as Fever Dream (2017), is at heart the tale of two mothers coming to terms with the ever-present potential that their young children might die, but told via the titular fever-dream narration of a woman slowly succumbing to death.

Although the political realities that sit so squarely in the work of Ojeda and Nettel might seem a more difficult fit in the strange worlds of Schweblin, events from the political life of Latin America do make themselves felt in the tales she tells. Schweblin herself has said that Fever Dream was informed by the widespread use of toxic pesticides throughout her native Argentina, which have been linked to disease and death for the townspeople within their range, these pesticides being necessitated by Argentina’s place as a major producer of soybeans in the global economy. Her 2015 collection Siete casas vacías, translated by McDowell as Seven Empty Houses (2022), references the widespread misogyny that has led to epidemics of femicide throughout Latin American nations. One of the book’s epigraphs comes from Juan Luis Martínez’s “The Disappearance of a Family,” widely understood as implicating the politicized violence that Latin American governments visited on ordinary citizens during the twentieth century.

These three writers—and many of their peers, whose work I cannot discuss in detail for reasons of space—are independently arriving at overlapping territory in ways that feel meaningfully similar, despite the originality each brings to her work. They are invoking a universalized idea of womanhood ensconced in the middle and upper classes that is broadly familiar for the way it is reproduced throughout film, TV, music, Instagram, advertising, and so many other forms of media. While they are doing this in a way that is deeply true to their particular cultures and identities as Latin Americans, their stories also feel relevant to any woman who has managed a certain level of stability and material comfort in her life. For instance, the way that Ojeda brings internet horror folklore into her Jawbone, or how Schweblin brings in widespread unease about the ways we connect over social media to her Little Eyes, gives these books a broadness and a relevance as contemporary world literature.

For the mostly female protagonists and antagonists in these narratives, the world is a place not their own—they strive to stay afloat, and they learn the rules to their worlds via trials-by-fire. These worlds generally involve a level of danger that the protagonists are continually trying to determine, even as they seek the signifiers of normality that women are pushed to aspire toward, such as beautifying themselves, finding lasting and secure love, raising children, and leading lives full of self-care and stability. If Ojeda, Nettel, and Schweblin find resonance and meaning in the realms of horror, the political, and bodies, and if these realities in turn resonate beyond their Latin American context, it is perhaps because they are in touch with something basic about being a woman in the early twenty-first century.

As Ojeda told me, by writing through the lens of horror she is able to drill down to the basics, which is how writers have always created art that speaks most broadly. “I think we all know fear just as much as we know love. We fear because we love, we fear because we are fragile, we fear because we are all going to die. Love is so beautiful and strong and nevertheless is vulnerable like a flower. What can a flower do against all the dangers in the world? So we tremble, so we try to protect the flower because it is so delicate, so precious. Writing horror makes you think about this kind of stuff and takes you back to myth and symbols, which I love.”

Photo: Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel, by Mely Avila.

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“Largely confined to their apartments, doctors’ offices, or hospital beds, Ugrešić’s mothers often seem unable to cope with the changing world outside and their own physical and mental decline”

My training as a scholar of Russian literature and culture colors my readings of Dubravka Ugrešić’s work. No matter how hard I try to stop myself from reaching for parallels in classic Russian and Soviet novels, works of literary criticism, and even history, I find that this familiar lens inserts itself whenever I begin to think or speak about Ugrešić’s fiction. I cannot discuss Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life without talking about Russian formalism or consider The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain without thinking about the literature of Russian emigration and exile, including specifically the work of Nabokov and Brodsky. Fortunately, in the case of Ugrešić’s work, such associations are less artificial than they would be for many other East European authors. Ugrešić is a specialist in Russian literature by training and regularly references both nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literary works in her novels and short fiction. Her short story “Hot Dog in a Warm Bun” reworks elements of Nikolai Gogol’s classic short story “The Nose” by exploring and disrupting the critical frameworks that have often been used to analyze this work. Her “The Kreutzer Sonata” responds to the work of Tolstoy. The plot of Ugrešić’s “The Kharms Case” centers on the desperate efforts of a translator to get a volume by the Russian modernist author published in translation. Ugrešić’s novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg adapts motifs from East Slavic and Russian folktales and popular myth, and it borrows its title from a quote by Aleksei Remizov. These are just a few of the most obvious examples of Russian literary references in Ugrešić’s works; her novels, short stories, and essays also include many less obvious allusions to the Russian literary tradition.

With this in mind, I would like to talk about one motif that appears in many of Ugrešić’s works: the problem of mother/daughter and, more generally, parent/daughter relationships. Ugrešić’s full-length novels, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, The Ministry of Pain, and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, all feature central female characters (and first-person narrators) who have aging mothers and spend lengthy sections of the text remembering their mothers’ homes and possessions, visiting their mothers, and attempting, with greater or lesser degrees of success, to manage their mothers’ physical and emotional needs.

In all these instances, mother/daughter and parent/daughter relationships read, in part, as comments on time and social change, on memory and forgetting. Parents are associated with the past. They live in Zagreb as opposed to the new spaces of emigration in western Europe that Ugrešić’s heroines so often inhabit. They order and rearrange family photos and other memorabilia, pruning out, hiding, or perhaps altering pieces that seem at odds with changing political winds. They hold on to visual symbols of dead things—pictures of Tito, photos of children with former romantic partners, tea biscuits with expiration dates that precede the collapse of Yugoslavia itself—as if by such acts they can somehow counteract change and stave off death. They remember and they forget. The mother in the opening chapters of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg suffers from aphasia, as a result of age, and metastasized breast cancer. Her mind, like a postsocialist city where everything has suddenly been renamed, seems devoid of landmarks, and she is unable to accurately connect her thoughts to words. Yet she feels enough of a nostalgic connection with her personal past that her daughter travels to Bulgaria to see and photograph the places she grew up, acting as her bedel, or paid surrogate. 

Largely confined to their apartments, doctors’ offices, or hospital beds, Ugrešić’s mothers often seem unable to cope with the changing world outside and their own physical and mental decline. They retreat into Spanish-language soap operas or personal memory, hiding from the disarray that surrounds them and their own unmet emotional needs. They don wigs, like armor, when they must go out and worry that the rain might catch them while they are in the open. From the moment their children arrive for a visit, they dread their inevitable departure and try, to the extent they are able, to protect themselves by immersing themselves in building gossip and the lives of neighbors. They suffer from an emotional hunger that no amount of attention from their adult children or anyone else can really assuage.

“UGREŠIĆ’S NOVELS BEAUTIFULLY CAPTURE THE DISLOCATION AND ANXIETY THAT PARENTS AND CHILDREN THROUGHOUT EASTERN EUROPE AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION EXPERIENCED IN THE WAKE OF THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM”

For a Russianist, the notion that a novelist might use strained relations and unsatisfactory communicative exchanges between a child and a parent as a means of commenting on social change calls to mind immediate associations, the most important of which is, of course, Turgenev’s great novel Fathers and Children, which is known in English under the mistranslated title Fathers and Sons. Indeed, in sequences in her novels that focus on mother/daughter relations, Ugrešić relies on the same trope of generational reversal that stands out in Turgenev’s descriptions. The narrator of The Ministry of Pain, Tania Lucic, arrives home in Zagreb and finds her mother “shorter and more frail” than she remembered and notes that her mother immediately “flung herself into my arms like a child” (96). She then watches as her mother crumbles bread “the way that children do” (110). When Tania goes to visit the parents of her former romantic partner, she finds his father dependent on a catheter, babbling out streams of words, and donning tentative half-smiles that make him look “like an abandoned child doing his best to overcome the slight” (109). Parents, in The Ministry of Pain, look on their children with longing and need, as a source of potential emotional and/or physical support. “Tanjica’s come and taken over, thank God. Thanks anyway, but Tanjica will take care of it,” the narrator of The Ministry of Pain imagines her mother saying (101). 

Yet Ugrešić’s narrators differ from Turgenev’s young people in a very key respect. Although her narrators may look on their aging parents from an almost maternal distance and both see and treat them as childlike, they have little of the self-assurance and arrogance of Bazarov and Arkady at the beginning of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. They are not the enthusiastic proselytizers of new scientific and cultural norms. On the contrary, they too often seem lost in the new world that surrounds them. They are confused when they step out onto the streets of familiar postsocialist cities. The street names and landmarks have changed; they have no way to orient themselves in this fundamentally new landscape. For them, returning to these old stomping grounds seems like “attending their own funeral” (The Ministry of Pain, 113). In both The Ministry of Pain and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Ugrešić’s narrators note that their mothers’ apartments contain few signs of them. They stay in guest rooms denuded of personal possessions. Their mothers, for all they may miss them in their absences, have created spaces and lives for themselves that allow little room for an adult child—just as the professional circles and friendship groups they used to inhabit have largely moved on without them. On the airplane, as she leaves Zagreb after her visit, the narrator of The Ministry of Pain feels both traumatized and relieved. “The refugee trauma, the equivalent of the sudden disappearance of the mother from a child’s field of vision,” she notes, “had surfaced where I’d least expected it: ‘at home.’ The fact that I’d managed to get lost in an area I knew like the back of my hand filled me with horror” (117).

In this brief quote, Tania again becomes a child, assuming the role of the abandoned orphan in which she earlier imagined her former romantic partner’s father. The mother here, of course, is the nation that she remembers from her childhood, which has disintegrated and thereby abandoned her. The refugee’s grief, like that of an orphaned child, morphs into confusion and resentment. Trapped in a cycle of loss, the narrator of The Ministry of Pain is unable to perceive that the Yugoslav wars—which represent the great dividing line in her own personal history, splitting time into before and after—are receding into the past and that, in her former homeland, life is moving on.

In western Europe, too, Ugrešić’s narrators often move through space restlessly and awkwardly, struggling to make a place for themselves. In a key sequence in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, the narrator finds herself moving in the wrong direction after a chance encounter with an elderly gypsy who, like her, is a refugee from the East. To avoid revealing her disorientation, she gets into a line at a phone booth and makes up an excuse to make a personal call (7). Her new environment leaves her tired and alienated: the only phrase she knows in German at the beginning of the book translates to “I am tired” (3). Ugrešić’s narrators in both The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain move restlessly between their native tongue and the foreign languages they are slowly acquiring. They struggle to find a means of “looking forward.” Even at the end of The Ministry of Pain, when Ugrešić’s narrator seems to have carved out a modest—if decidedly downwardly—mobile place for herself in Amsterdam, with a job as a nanny and a former student as a live-in boyfriend, she regularly retreats to the seaside when “angst gains the upper hand” to scream curses in her native language at the sea (254–57). The “pure extract of nothing to remember and nothing to forget” that she finds in moments of peace disperses all too easily (254).

In Ugrešić’s The Ministry of Pain, it is not the narrator who seems connected to the world of medicine and experimentation that was so closely associated with Turgenev’s young nihilist Bazarov, but rather the narrator’s mother. The mother tirelessly tests her blood sugar, charting the level in a “diary” with superstitious enthusiasm, and, as her daughter prepares to depart, tests her blood pressure, an ineffectual, needless gesture that we are told replaces the standard “farewell hug and kiss.” Here, science is not a new way of looking at the world that promises progress but rather just a mechanism of self-comfort and a prop, a means of staying artificially busy and keeping unpleasant emotions at bay. “The blood pressure monitor,” Ugrešić writes, “was a visible substitute for something invisible, a bloody umbilical cord, all fresh and shiny like a metal string” (114). This image ties our narrator to the world of the past and to her mother, for all that she seems alienated and separated from them, on a primal, terrifying level. How fresh is the cord, really, if it runs between an adult woman and her mother? Does it nourish or trap? What does it say about the difficulties of both escaping the past and moving forward or, for that matter, of the seductive pleasures of nostalgia?

Ugrešić’s novels beautifully capture the dislocation and anxiety that parents and children throughout eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union experienced in the wake of the collapse of communism. Her novels may hint at the eventual rise in eastern Europe of “a new, completely different tribe” that is fully assimilated to postsocialist reality and of young people who “really are ‘looking ahead’ and will no longer ‘understand the past’ or at least not in the same way,” but what they chronicle more immediately is loss and displacement, the kinds of suffering that fuel nostalgia and make a clean break from the past so challenging (The Ministry of Pain, 234). 

Photo: Dubravka Ugrešić, by Shevaun Williams.