“Comrade Stalin wants to talk to you,” Boris Pasternak heard when he picked up the phone one day in June 1934, in Moscow.
The poet was stunned. Next, the leader’s voice was actually heard, unmistakable due to his Georgian accent, asking Pasternak about his friend, the poet Osip Mandelstam, who had been arrested a few months earlier by the secret police. Faced with the Soviet dictator’s question, Pasternak trembled at the thought that, depending on how Stalin received his answer, he too could be arrested. So he answered evasively, saying that he and the imprisoned poet were not as good friends as they seemed. In his response, Stalin crushed Pasternak: he told him that if it were him, he would know how to defend a friend better. And he hung up.
Pasternak, desperate, tried to call him back to explain himself better, but it was too late. Stalin’s line remained silent.
For the rest of the year, all of Moscow and Leningrad were talking about Stalin’s call. Some were more interested in Mandelstam, others in Pasternak. When the poet Anna Akhmatova, a close friend of both, received the literati in her room located in the Sheremetyevo palace on the Fontanka canal in Leningrad, she asked each guest: “Mandelstam or Pasternak? Coffee or tea?”.
A whole maze of versions was built from the story of the call. The Albanian novelist living in Paris Ismaíl Kadaré, one of the eternal Nobel candidates, analyzes some of them in his brilliant essay Three minutes. About the mystery of Stalin’s call to Pasternak. How come there are at least 13 versions of a single short call? Each narrator modified the story according to his temperament and people’s gossip did the rest. While most of the authors of the different versions insist that Pasternak himself told them with dismay the story of his betrayal of Mandelstam, his wife, Zinaída Pasternak, presents a different story: in it, her husband kept his cool in everything. moment.
While telling the different stories of the call, Kadaré gives the reader endless anecdotes. Thus we learn that Zinaída Pasternak “always maintained the tendency towards good understanding with the regime”, while Olga Ivínskaya, Pasternak’s lover, was sentenced to the Gulag twice, the second time with her daughter Irina.
One of the qualities of the book are Kadaré’s reflections on the relationship between power and literature, while parading before the reader many of the great Russian writers of the first half of the last century. Always in a playful, ironic and sometimes even mischievous tone. However, the Spanish version does not help the pleasure of reading. Although Alianza Editorial must be praised for publishing this literary gem and practically all of Kadaré’s work in Spanish, it cannot be overlooked that the edition is not as rigorous as it should be. Sometimes the errors can even be comical, as when Kadaré talks about the poet Khlébnikov (in the Alianza book he appears as “Khelbnikov”) and his transmental language (in Russian zaúmnyi) which in the Spanish translation appears as transmetal.
Maybe Stalin sensed this and that’s why he made the call and tried to ridicule someone whose work would surpass him over time.
Kadaré, who before going into exile had his censor in the Albanian dictator Hoxha – just as Pasternak had Stalin -, according to what he says in the first part of the book, does not offer any indication as to which of the 13 versions of the telephone conversation between the ruling and the poet is what really happened. And as I finish the book, I have the clear feeling that there is no way to reach the truth about that call that took place 90 years ago. Because? Because it has never been demonstrated more clearly that the truth is manipulable, elusive. Just as political power is also elusive and destined to be forgotten compared to a work of literature of the stature of Dr. Zhivago. Maybe Stalin sensed this and that’s why he made the call and tried to ridicule someone whose work would surpass him over time.
Ismaíl Kadaré
Translation by María Roces González
Alliance, 2024
152 pages. 18.50 euros
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