Twilight of the Eastern Gods

Twilight of the Eastern Gods (Albanian: Muzgu i perëndive të stepës, French: Le Crépuscule des dieux de la steppe) is a novel by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare.

[2] The narrator is a young Albanian studying at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in the late 1950s, working on a novel about "a dead army commanded by a living general".

The book focuses on the drabness of life in the student residence, and the suspicions and disaffection of the writers being trained to produce Socialist realist literature.

The action of the novel takes place during the Soviet propaganda campaign that forced Boris Pasternak to decline the Nobel prize for literature for Dr Zhivago.

[4] Parallels with the life of Kadare, who also studied at the Gorky Institute in the late 1950s, and wrote an early novel entitled The General of the Dead Army (1963), suggest that the narrator should be regarded as an alter ego of the author.