Stan Culture and Stalinism

On Ismail Kadare's A Girl in Exile

If you thought I was finished with Kadare, then you thought wrong. As long as our good friend Ismail keeps writing novels and someone keeps translating them into English, then I will continue to read and review them.¹ One important difference between this novel, published in English in 2017, and Kadare’s previous work I’ve reviewed, is that the translation was made directly from Albanian to English, with no need to pass through French first. As such, the streamlined Albanian → English translation makes for a much smoother reading experience that is likely truer to the original both in style and in content.

A Girl in Exile centers on playwright Rudian Stefa and his relationship with both the hardline Stalinist regime² under which he labors as an artist and two young women, art student and Tirana transplant Migena and her best friend from back home, the enigmatic Linda B., who features in the book’s subtitle, Requiem for Linda B. Rudian and Migena meet at one of Rudian’s book signings, and while Migena is a fan, Linda is an even bigger one. Sadly, Linda can’t make it to Tirana to meet Rudian personally, so Migena goes in her place. Migena gives Rudian a book to sign for Linda (“For Linda B., a souvenir from the author,” Rudian scribbles on the first page), one of those seemingly insignificant acts that ends up inedibly impacting the lives of all involved.

But what, exactly, prevents Linda from meeting her idol in person? The reason is revealed after Rudian is summoned to appear before a Party committee to answer questions concerning Linda’s sudden suicide. There, he learns that Linda was interned in a village a few hours away from the capital, along with her entire family, due to their status as class enemies (relatives of royalists with links to the deposed monarchy).³ While Linda is allowed to attend school (where she befriends Migena) and live as normally as she can within the confines of her internment, both she and her family are forbidden to leave their open-air prison and must personally report each night to the local police.

What follows is a twisty tale of actors and understudies on the stage of life and a ghostly (in more ways than one) threesome between Rudian, Migena, and Linda. Migena and Rudian soon become lovers, and as the Party and the Secret Police⁴ interrogates Rudian, Rudian, likewise, interrogates Migena. Why are you with me? he continually asks her. Have you been informing on me? And perhaps most importantly, What’s the deal with your friend Linda? Migena remains cagey and cryptic, and on more than one occasion, Rudian considers ending the relationship, but something always draws him back to her—perhaps he loves her, or rather, the idea of her, a young, beautiful girl to accompany him as he approaches middle age.⁵ Finally, Migena tells Rudian the truth about her and Linda, and what follows is a revelation partially reminiscent of the scene in The Lovely Bones (both the novel and the film adaptation) in which the ghost of Susie Salmon inhabits the body of an old acquaintance (Ruth)⁶ in order to have sex with the adult version of her adolescent crush (Ray), only at least Migena is actually attracted to Rudian, an attraction that complicates her friendship with Linda, on whose behalf she’s sleeping with him.

We also learn about the lead-up to Linda’s death from Migena as she tearfully relates it to Rudian. It’s the night of their high school graduation party, and as potentially illegal decadent saxophone playing continues in the auditorium where their fellow students dance, Migena and Linda retreat to an empty classroom. There, Linda asks Migena not only to share everything about her physical relationship with Rudian, but also to reenact it with her; Migena lies and tells Linda that Rudian has only ever kissed her and touched her breasts. “These lips have been kissed. By his lips,” Linda says. “Do it like him.” Though the scene is ripe with the potential to be pornified, Kadare’s depiction of Linda’s hunger for love and affection and Migena’s acquiescence to her friend’s desperate demands is touching, sensitive, and an overall realistic rendering of the volatile emotional states of these two teenage girls.⁷ Unfortunately, they’re spotted by a group of their classmates, and the taunting the girls are subjected to proves to be the final straw for Linda. Two days later, she swallows vials of poison she’s snatched from the school’s science lab.

Upon learning the details surrounding Linda’s suicide, Rudian’s already fragile psyche is shattered completely. He loses touch with reality as he creates a fantasy of the two of them together, sans Migena, in the Tirana of her dreams, even going so far as to ask himself and others if it is possible to marry a dead woman. For Linda, Tirana is a shining, cosmopolitain paradise against the hell of her isolated, rural internment, but more than anything, Tirana is freedom, a freedom that Linda is only able to vicariously experience through her friend Migena. And Rudian is the embodiment of Tirana, of the freedom and, perhaps more importantly, the romantic love Linda will never know for herself. Is the village where Linda and her family are interned a microcosm for all of Albania? Is freedom a set of matryoshka dolls, each character’s degree of freedom nested within each other’s, with Linda’s degree the smallest and the most limited of them all?

A Girl in Exile touches on all the familiar Kadareian themes of art, love, and totalitarianism, all interwoven with some requisite nods to Greek mythology,⁸ but what makes it unique, in my view, is its examination of fan culture, or rather, “stan” culture. While this was likely⁹ not Kadare’s intention, stan was the first word that popped into my mind as I considered the interactions between Rudian, Migena, and Linda.

But first, a brief definition and explanation of the term stan for the uninitiated among us (if there are any).

Stan traces its origins to the Eminem song of the same name (“Stan”). The song serves as a cautionary, tragic warning of fandom gone wrong, an epistolary tale told in a series of letters from super fan Stan to Slim Shady/Eminem, in which Stan professes his undying love for and eternal devotion to the rapper. Shady doesn’t respond, but Stan persists in sending him letters, each one more unhinged than the last. Finally, Stan records his final message to Shady, one that also documents the murder-suicide he commits (Stan drives himself and his pregnant girlfriend off a bridge while intoxicated). After Stan’s death, Shady finally writes him back, asking about his girlfriend and wishing him well, and the song ends with Shady realizing that the story of a murder-suicide he heard about on the news is the same one involving Stan (“And in the car they found a tape, but they didn't say who it was to / Come to think about it, his name was—it was you”).

Today, stan is commonly thought of as a portmanteau of stalker and fan¹⁰ and describes someone who obsessively follows a certain artist, usually a pop star or a music group (see Stan Twitter). As pop stars and music groups of this magnitude weren’t really a thing in communist Albania,¹¹ a well-known playwright like Rudian Stefa serves as a perfectly acceptable substitute for young Linda to worship. Celebrity idols, then and now, are secular gods, and in a country like Hoxha's Albania that sought to abolish religion, that status of an alternative¹² god-for-the-godless was nothing if not significant, as well as subversive.

A stan’s relationship with the artist-object of their obsession is inherently parasocial. Though the stan has never met or even meaningfully interacted with the artist-object, they project all of their hopes, desires, fears, and insecurities onto this larger-than-life figure, an idealized version of the real-life person that exists in each stan’s imagination. The relationship is rooted entirely in fantasy; the artist is a ghost, a friendly, if not loving, phantom that, unlike actual human beings, will never disappoint, betray, or hurt the stan. In this case, the artist-object (Rudian) is made aware of the individual stan (Linda) and her longing for him, and each become ghosts to the other. By the novel’s conclusion, their roles are reversed; the stan transforms into the object, and the object the stan, as Rudian idealizes Linda, fully surrendering to his fantasy of what could’ve been between the two of them.

A Girl in Exile also ends in the death by suicide of the stan in question. Like the fan in “Stan,” Linda’s suicide is rooted, at least partially, in the realization that she will never have the chance to meet and love the real Rudian Stefa,¹³ that she will never know him beyond his signature and his handwritten message. Likewise, Rudian’s guilt mirrors the guilt Shady/Eminem feels once he realizes that Stan's death is linked more or less to him. While suicide is the fault of no one, including the victim, certain people in the victim's life, including those with only a tangential association, will inevitably feel a sense of responsibility and regret for not having done or been able to do more. Ultimately, the fantasy of Linda that drives Rudian to madness is not borne of any love or lust he feels towards her, but of the most devastating sort of survivor's guilt.

While I always prefer to take the work at face value,¹⁴ in the case of Kadare’s oeveure that confronts Hoxha’s regime head-on, I always find myself wondering which parts of it might mirror his (gag) lived experience. Did Kadare have stans, such as they were and such as they could be, while he was working as a writer and artist in communist Albania? No doubt he had, and still has, fans,¹⁵ but for a fan to evolve into a stan takes more than just a set of exceptional¹⁶ external circumstances. Even if no such stan culture surrounding Kadare or anyone else existed during that time, the guilt that accompanies Rudian's confrontation with the memory/ghost of Linda, and with his own role within the system and society more broadly, is one Kadare could have felt, and likely did feel, with or without an army of stans.

Perhaps, then, A Girl in Exile is Kadare's way of responding to a particularly insidious allegation that is occasionally levied against him, one that claims he was a "false" dissident, a regime collaborator who changed his tune only when it became convenient and profitable to do so. Personally, I find very little merit to this accusation, not just because I’m a K fan myself, but because, unlike the USSR or East Germany or any other normal communist country, the opportunity for a “pure” and “uncompromised” dissident culture¹⁷ to arise simply did not exist in Hoxha’s Albania, so tightly controlled and restricted was the society.¹⁸ Any "collaboration" on Kadare's part was essentially done under duress, held hostage as he and his fellow creatives were by the whims of the State. No artist should have to nail themselves to the cross in order to prove their ideological purity and dissident bonafides, much less to an international audience largely unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of life (to say the least) under Uncle Enver; most Albanians, for their part, seem to understand the pressure Kadare was under, and he remains a largely beloved artistic and cultural figure.

Side note: For some reason, the winding road of a narrative that characterizes A Girl in Exile also reminded me a lot of another rap song, “Mona Lisa” by Lil Wayne feat. Kendrick Lamar; lyrics here.

1. Kadare’s latest, A Dictator Calls, is set to be released in English this September, and I plan to review it either here or in an actual publication (if one accepts my offer to review it for them).

2. Read: Hoxha’s.

3. Refer to my previous posts on Kadare and Hoxha’s Albania. Family history was very important, and having stains as dark as these in your biography would, in many cases, spell lifelong internment or worse.

4. Read: Sigurimi.

5. “Midway on life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood,” as Dante (paraphrased) would say.

6. Who happens to be a lesbian.

7. Many would be pleased to note that the “male gaze” is largely absent from this novel, which makes me wonder if it was present to the degree that it is in the original versions of earlier works, or whether the previous translation process (via French) perhaps exaggerated it to some effect.

8. In this case, the myth in question was that of Orpheus and Eurydice, which reminded me a lot of Daniel Loedel’s Hades, Argentina, which I reviewed here.

9. More like definitely; I can’t see K either knowing what a stan is or ever having listened to the song that coined the term.

10. Was this Eminem’s intention when he wrote his song, or did it arise later?

11. Even the Soviet Union had a more robust rock scene, not to mention the East German punk scene and other countercultural movements in the “revisionist” East.

12. To Uncle Enver and the Party, of course.

13. Continuing in the Eminem vein, “Will the real Rudian Stefa please stand up?”

14. As opposed to purposefully searching for bits of the author within the characters, plot, themes, etc., such is my exasperation with anything and everything “autofictional,” though unlike 90% of autofiction writers, K has lived a fascinating and eventful life.

15. There’s almost a bit of a cult of Kadare nowadays in Albania, as he’s required reading in most, if not all, high schools, and his painted face, along with titles of his most famous books, feature in a mural in downtown Tirana.

16. More like exceptionally deranged.

17. And we can definitely argue about how “pure” and “uncompromised” the dissident cultures in USSR, GDR, Czechoslovakia, etc. were as well

18. Try to imagine a “dissident culture” in North Korea, for example.