In June 1934, the story goes, the Russian poet Boris Pasternak received a call from Joseph Stalin. Osip Mandelstam – Pasternak’s contemporary, but a more forthright critic of the Soviet regime – had just been arrested. What, the tyrant wanted to know, did Pasternak make of it? At this point, histories diverge. Some accounts suggest that Pasternak tried to intercede for Mandelstam. In others, he squirmed and vacillated, leaving the boot to stamp on the artist’s face. In several, Stalin is even said to have upbraided Pasternak for failing to defend his comrade. The 87-year-old Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare – perennially in the running for the Nobel Prize, though little-read in the Anglosphere – knows all about these run-ins, having spent the half his life working in Enver Hoxha’s ghoulish regime. A Dictator Calls, narrated by a writer with teasing similarities to the author, takes its cue from the Pasternak-Stalin exchange, mixing reportage, speculation and fantasy.…