1 I am grateful to Valentina Izmirlieva, Mark D. Steinberg, and the anonymous referees for Slavic Review for suggestions that gready improved diis article. I am referring to the original Albanian publication of the novel. Kadare, Ismail, Pallati i Ëndrrave (Tiranë, 1999), 16.Google Scholar All translations from the Albanian are my own. An English translation of the novel is available: The Palace of Dreams, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1998). This translation is based on the French translation of the Albanian original: Le Palais des revês, trans. JusufVrioni (Paris, 1990).

2 Kadare, Pallati i Ëndrrave, 18.

3 Mikhail Bakhtin considers the problem of “authorial surplus” and deems it to be “a zone that is fundamentally inaccessible to the consciousnesses of the characters.” Authorial surplus is a “surplus of meaning accessible to the author” that helps provides a work of art with a certain meaning that is not apparent to the characters. Bakhtin, , Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis, 1984), 72, 73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Kadare, Pallati i Ëndrrave, 17.

5 The novel's Islamic setting is a fitting scenario for a dream-project. But though the idea of an enterprise for the interpretation of dreams has its roots in the Islamic practices of dream interpretation, the project conceived in The Palace of Dreams is far removed from that tradition. Dream interpretation was a very popular practice in the Ottoman empire, and the various types of dream interpretation involved assorted tripartite models. In the novel, the only tripartite model for dreams is the one that relates to the three types of dreams that need to be discarded. In general, Kadare more or less discards authentic Ottoman practices of dream interpretation. Indeed, we even get a clear sense of this rejection in the novel. Once Mark-Alem starts working in the Tabir he immediately rejects family rituals of dream interpretation and even insults his mother when she asks him to interpret her dreams. The moment with Mark-Alem's mother is significant because it is the only realistic representation of Ottoman dream interpretation practices. Dream interpretation in Islam was both fundamentally private and for the benefit of the individual and was almost always carried out by solitary seers who predicted a single individual's future for the benefit of that individual. Alternatively, the members of a household merely shared dreams with one another in the morning. In the United Ottoman States, dreams are no longer interpreted by inspired individuals in order to provide guidance for other individuals but are collected in mass and used for the sole benefit of the state.

6 Kadare, Pallati i Ëndrrave, 192.

7 Ibid., 53.

8 Ibid., 57–58.

9 Lubonja, Fatos, “Privacy in the Totalitarian Regime” Endeavour (Perpjëkja), vol. 20 (2005): 108.Google Scholar

10 Fischer, Bernd, “Enver Hoxha and the Stalinist Dictatorship in Albania,” in Fischer, Bernd, ed., Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers in South Eastern Europe (London, 2007), 240.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 241.

12 Quote from Bashkim Kuçuku, “The Hidden Masterpiece,” in Kadare, Pallati i Ëndrrave, 205.

13 Morgan, Peter, “Ancient Names … Marked by Fate: Ethnicity and the ‘Man without Qualities’ in Ismail Kadare's Palace of Dreams” European Legacy 7, no. 1 (February 2002): 46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Quote from Bashkim Kuçuku, in Pallati i Ëndrrave, 210.

15 Kadare, Ismail, Dialog me Alain Bosquet (Tiranë, 2002), 156–58.Google Scholar

16 Kadare, Pallati iËndrrave, 18.

17 I use this term in its Weberian sense. In Methodology of the Social Sciences, Max Weber discusses the “ideal type” as a construct that “brings together certain relationships and events of historical life into an inherently coherent conceptual cosmos.” He argvies that the “ideal type” is a Utopian construct insofar as it accentuates “one or several perspectives, and through the synthesis of a variety of diffuse, discrete, individual phenomena,” presents a skewed version of a messier and much more complicated reality. Discussions of “totalitarianism” as a system of government that existed in eastern Europe or in Nazi Germany presume that it is possible to wield, in reality, the sort of perfect control and perfect centralization that defines totalitarianism. Weber, , The Essential Weber: A Reader (New York, 2004), 387, 388.Google Scholar

18 Arendt, Hannah, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government” Review of Politics 15, no. 3 (July 1953): 303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Boris Groys, who pays particular attention to the artistic nature of the socialist project in the Soviet Union, argues that “the communist party leadership was transformed into a kind of artist whose material was the entire world.” Groys, , The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, trans. Rougle, Charles (Princeton, 1992), 3.Google Scholar

20 Foucault, Michel, “Dream, Imagination, Existence: An Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's Dream and Existence” in Foucault, Michel, Binswanger, Ludwig, and Hoeller, Keith, Dream and Existence (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1993), 51.Google Scholar

21 Kadare, Pallati i Ëndrrave, 111.

22 Ibid., 112.

23 Ibid., 115.

24 Breton, André, Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor, 1969), 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 10

28 Ibid., 26.

29 Short, Robert, “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–36,” in Spiteri, Raymond and LaCoss, Donald, eds., Surrealism, Politics and Culture (Burlington, Vt., 2003), 18.Google Scholar

30 Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss, “Introduction: Revolution by Night: Surrealism, Politics and Culture,” in Spiteri and LaCoss, eds., Surrealism, Politics and Culture, 6.

31 Ibid., 10.

32 Breton would even coauthor an artistic manifesto with Trotskii in 1938 titled “Manifesto: Toward a Free Revolutionary Art.” The manifesto can be found in Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Goldman, Jane, and Taxidou, Olga, eds., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Chicago, 1998), 307-11.Google Scholar

33 Kadare, Pallati iËndrrave, 23.

34 Ibid., 75.

35 Brodsky, Joseph, “Preface to the Foundation Pit”, in Platonov, Andrei, Collected Works(Ann Arbor, 1978), xi.Google Scholar

36 Freud, Sigmund, “The Interpretation of Dreams,“ in The Basic Writings ofSigmund Freud, trans. Brill, A. A. (New York, 1995), 452.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original.

37 Kadare, Pallati iËndrrave, 78–79.

38 Ibid., 92.

39 Ibid., 91.

40 Ibid., 65.

41 For the differences between Albanian and Bosnian epic poetry, see Morgan's, Peter “Between Albanian Identity and Imperial Politics: Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams”, Modern Language Review 97, no. 2 (April 2002): 365–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Morgan argues that Bosnian epic poetry was more distinctly Islamic in character than Albanian epic poetry. He connects the difference to Albanian Islam, which was less deeply rooted than Bosnian Islam. It is for this reason, perhaps, that a family like the Qyprilli—a family that helped the Ottoman empire conquer Balkan regions such as Crete—does not appear in Albanian epic poetry but is glorified in the righteously Muslim Bosnian epic cycles. Kadare, Pallati iËndrrave, 14.

42 Kadare, Pallati i Ëndrrave, 88.

43 Ibid., 89.

44 See Vickers, Miranda, The Albanians: A Modern History (London, 1999), 24.Google Scholar For the background of this attack, see 11–31. Vickers connects the attack on the Albanians at Monastir with the growing distrust against Albanians in the Ottoman empire as a result of the independence shown by Albanian leaders of the period, like Ali Pasha.

45 Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 8.Google Scholar

46 Studies like Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Social Experiment in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989),Google Scholar or Buck-Morss, Susan, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia East and West (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)Google Scholar are among many that reveal that dreams of an earthly Utopia permeated the general conception of the Russian revolution.

47 In many ways, Hoxha followed in the steps of King Zog who had begun a similar process of modernization in Albania. Fischer, “Enver Hoxha and the Stalinist Dictatorship in Albania,” 251.

48 This treatment of the Ottoman past goes back to the Albanian Renaissance of the nineteenth century. For a more in-depth discussion of Albanian orientalism, see Sulstarova, Enis, “Orientalizmi shqiptar”, Përpjekja, vol. 20 (2005): 42–60.Google Scholar As Sulstarova shows, Kadare himself also often subscribes to this orientalist discourse.

49 As Fischer notes, however, in Albania this Stalinist spirit was tempered by pro-found nationalism and the need for national unity. Though the regime presented itself as Stalinist, in reality it was more nationalist than Stalinist, and it borrowed the nationalist paradigm from King Zog. Fischer, “Enver Hoxha and the Stalinist Dictatorship in Alba-nia,” 251. Interestingly, Kadare does not criticize the nationalistic facet of Albanian socialism but instead often echoes it in his works through frequent artistic representations of Albanians as an ancient European people.

50 Enver Hoxha, Kur u hodhën themekt e Shqipërise së re, 187, available within www.enverhoxha.info/frame.htm (last accessed 1 june 2011).

51 For a discussion of orientalism in Kadare's Elegy for Kosovo, see my article “The ‘Curse’ of Eastern Blood in Kadare's, Ismail Elegy for Kosovo,” Ulbandus: The Slavic Revieiu of Columbia University, vol. 13 (2010): 79–93.Google Scholar

52 Dobrenko, Evgeny, Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven, 2007), 4.Google Scholar

53 Epstein, Mikhail, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Post-Modernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst, 1995), 204.Google Scholar

54 Ibid., 194.

55 Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Glaser, Sheila Faria (Ann Arbor, 2006), 2.Google Scholar

56 Groys argues that part of what made Russia particularly fertile soil for a revolution was the aesthetic preparation in the country for the total inversion of the world that such an event would bring. Unlike the west, Russia was far more willing “to organize all life in new, as yet unseen forms, and to that end it allowed itself to be subjected to an artistic experiment of unprecedented scale.” As Groys shows, the avant-garde aesthetic experiments in the country were akin to, and in some ways perhaps even foreshadowed, the radical transformation brought by the revolution. Unlike more traditional artists who set themselves limited goals, the avant-garde saw their artistic projects as total and bound-less, almost on par with the revolution in their scope. As Groys argues, this very kinship, which first unified the avant-garde and the revolution, eventually disintegrated into a power struggle that precipitated an end to the avant-garde. Groys, , The Total Art of Stalinism, 5, 21.Google Scholar

57 Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, 5.

58 When he begins working in the Tabir, Mark-Alem is told to watch out for dreams made up by citizens desperate to fulfill their own career ambitions. Kadare, Pallati i Ëndrrave, 24.

59 Paradoxically enough, Kadare's most famous socialist realist work was a lyrical poem called “Industrial Dream” (1960).

60 Kadare, Dialog me Alain Bosquet, 156.

61 Marcuse, Herbert, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York, 1969), 25.Google Scholar

62 Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 128, 269.

63 Ibid., 260.

64 Kadare, Pallati i Ëndrrave, 31.

65 Ibid., 84.

66 Ibid., 88, 113.

67 Ibid., 101.

68 Ibid., 131.

69 This description of the surrealist object is provided by Salvador Dali, quoted in Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 274.

70 Ibid.

71 I am referring respectively to three paintings by Magritte: The Red Coal (where feet and shoes merge), Ship and Sirens (where a ship is made up of the sea), and The Grand Family (where a bird is made up of sky colors).

72 Quoted in Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Theimer, Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime (New Haven, 1995), 245–46.Google Scholar

73 See Alexander Genis's chapters: “Archaic Postmodernism: The Aesthetics of Andrei Sinyavsky” and “Postmodernism and Sots-Realism: From Andrei Sinyavsky to Vladimir Sorokin,” in Epstein, Mikhail, Genis, Alexander, and Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka eds., Russian Postmodernism: Neiv Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (New York, 1999), 185–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

74 Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 67.