Twilight of the Eastern Gods
By: Translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by David Bellos; Introduction by David Bellos
Edition: 1st American Edition
Publisher: Grove Press; Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated
Published: 4 November 2014
Place of publication: New York
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780802123114
Copyright date: 2014
Description: In 1958, Kadare was selected to pursue his writing and literary studies as a graduate student in Moscow at the prestigious Gorky Institute for World Literature. Twilight of the Eastern Gods is Kadare’s fictionalized re-creation of his time spent at this “factory of the intellect,” a place created to produce a new generation of poets, novelists, and playwrights, all adhering to the state-sanctioned “socialist realist” aesthetic. During his time at the Gorky Institute, a kind of miniature Soviet Union where writers from deepest Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus all came to study, Kadare was caught up in the furor over Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize win, when the Soviet Union demanded that Pasternak refuse the foreign, bourgeois award or be sentenced to exile. Kadare’s time at the Institute, the drunken nights, corrupt professors, and enforced aesthetics are fictionalized in a novel that entwines Russian and Albanian myth with Soviet history. Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a portrait of a city and a story of youth, disenchantment, and the incredible importance of the written word.