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Twilight of the eastern gods

by Kadare, Ismail,

Format: Print Book 2014
Availability: Available at 2 Libraries 2 of 2 copies

Available (2)
Location Collection Call #
CLP - Main Library First Floor - Fiction Stacks FICTION Kadare
Location  CLP - Main Library
 
Collection  First Floor - Fiction Stacks
 
Call Number  FICTION Kadare
 
 
Monroeville Public Library Fiction KADARE Ismail
Location  Monroeville Public Library
 
Collection  Fiction
 
Call Number  KADARE Ismail
 
 

Summary
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 recreation 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 furore 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 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.
Published Reviews
Publisher's Weekly Review: "Back in the days of the USSR, the regime maintained a literary institute in Moscow for young writers from the vast region it dominated. On the evidence of Kadare's (The Fall of the Stone City) early autobiographical novel, the writers, including a very young Ismail Kadare, spent their time drinking, attending stupendously boring lectures, hitting on women, and dealing with their ambivalence. It's 1958: the big news is the scandal of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize, but below the surface lurks the gradually cooling relations between Albania and the Soviet Union. Kadare, now an elder statesman of Albanian literature, casts a cool eye on his fellow writers, depicting discussions of plots they will never write (about "limping party secretaries who stole piglets from the collective farm," for instance) and their guilt at renouncing their languages to "take up with that hag of a step mother, Russian," but he seems no less miserable and conflicted. Translated into English for the first time (with an informative note by the translator about the book's complicated publishing history), its appearance as Putin's Russia tries to reclaim former possessions is timely, and the view of a world that seems so tremendously far away has its interest. Unfortunately, however, Kadare's fidelity to the dull, compromised, and often soddenly drunk lives he and his fellow writers led makes for dull reading. Agent: Andrew Wylie and Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved."
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Additional Information
Subjects Institut mirovoĭ literatury imeni A.M. Gorʹkogo -- Fiction.
Authors, Albanian -- Fiction.
Albanians -- Soviet Union -- Fiction.
College students -- Soviet Union -- Fiction.
Socialist realism -- Fiction.
Censorship -- Fiction.
Soviet Union -- Fiction.
Autobiographical fiction.
Publisher New York :2014
Other Titles Muzgu i perëndive të stepës.
Contributors Bellos, David, translator, writer of introduction.
Vrioni, Jusuf, translator.
Language English
Notes Translated from: Le crépuscule des dieux de la steppe. Paris : Fayard, ©1981.
Originally published in Albanian under the title: Muzgu i perëndive të stepës.
Description xiii, 192 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN 9780802123114
0802123112
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