Twilight of the Eastern Gods

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Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in the fortress-city of Gjirokastër, in the southernmost part of Albania. He began writing poetry in his teens and acquired a national reputation while still a university student in Tirana. At the end of his course he was selected to pursue literary studies at the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow. Twilight of the Eastern Gods re-creates Kadare’s experience of this strange ‘factory of the intellect’, set up to produce new generations of socialist poets, novelists and playwrights.

In many respects Kadare had a wonderful time in Moscow. For a young man newly arrived from a provincial backwater, that vast city — the cultural as well as the political hub of half the world’s people — was an unending treat. Unlike tiny Tirana, it had a Metro, electric trolleybuses, neon lights, department stores, and a veritable army of pretty girls far more open to romantic encounters than puritanical Albania could offer. As a foreign student, Kadare enjoyed many privileges, including free holidays at ‘residences’ in the more scenic areas of the Soviet Union which were put at the disposal of its members by the Writers’ Union.

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