1958. In a dorm room in Moscow, a young writer is woken by the sound of angry voices on the radio. Through the fog of a hangover he hears the news that a novel called Doctor Zhivago has earned its author the Nobel Prize. There is uproar. The author, Boris Pasternak, faces exile, the press hound him and demand that he refuse the award. A few days earlier the young writer found a copy of this book – could those simple pages really be so dangerous?
Based on Ismail Kadare’s own experience, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a fictionalised recreation of his time as a student at the prestigious Gorky Institute for World Literature – a strange ‘factory of the intellect’ set up to produce a new generation of Socialist writers. With its drunken nights, uninspiring professors, specially selected students and enforced Socialist Realism his time at the Gorky Institute brought Kadare to the brink of abandoning writing altogether.
In English for the first time, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a portrait of a city and a time, it is a story of youth, of disenchantment and of the incredible importance of the written word.
A propos de l’auteur
David Bellos, Director of the Program in Translation at Princeton University, is also the translator of Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual and a winner of the Goncourt Prize for biography. He has translated seven of Ismail Kadare’s novels, and in 2005 was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for his translations of Kadare’s work.
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