The Ghost Rider

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“Have you ever read Bürger’s Lenore?” asks the narrator of Ismail Kadare’s Twilight of the Gods of the Steppes, as he wanders along a beach with a girl, at a writers’ retreat in Soviet Latvia. “Or Zhukovski’s Ludmilla? It’s the same story, you know. He translated it from Bürger.”

“So who did Bürger steal it from?” the young woman asks.

“I opened my mouth to say ‘From us!’ but managed to stop in time so as not to put myself in the position of those representatives of small nations ever eager to say ‘we, our people, in our land …’ with a kind of pride or bombast that I found depressing because it always struck me that they didn’t believe what they were saying either.”

The story in question is “The Ballad of Constantine and Doruntine”, an ancient tale that is known wherever Albanian is spoken — within the current borders of the state, among the Arberësh of southern Italy, in Kosova, Montenegro and Macedonia. Versions of it exist in every Balkan language and in several other European folk traditions. It was put into verse (and liberally altered) by the German Romantic poet Gottfried August Bürger (1748–1794) in the famous ballad “Lenore”, which is where Edgar Allan Poe probably found the name that he used in his own dirge, “Lenore”. Known in folklore studies as the “Lenore motif”, the legend tells of a brother (Constantine, or Kostandin in Albanian) who rises from his grave to fulfil his promise of bringing his married sister Doruntine back from a far-off land to see their dying mother. The Ghost Rider tells the same story from an unconventional perspective — that of the detective whose task it is to unravel what really happened.

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