by Gian Paolo Serino – June 8, 2025

What is a dictatorship? Today, it is televised imagery—nightmares in drone form, seemingly training us to anticipate military and human rubble, but never moral or ethical ruin. Even children, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or the other 47 countries currently ravaged by massacres: they too are presented as victims seen only through a lens.

In Le favole del comunismo (The Fairy Tales of Communism), Anita Likmeta (published by Marsilio Editori) does not simply recount the brokenness of hearts, the tears transfigured into ink, or a style of writing that beats with the muted, pulsing rhythm of a “milk drum”—a voice at once shy and blinding, reminiscent of Ágota Kristóf (whom I discovered in the late 1990s, published by Donzelli Editore), or of Magda Szabó, whom I helped reintroduce to Italian readers after she had been forgotten (a rediscovery I owe to the brave work of Mónika Szilágyi and Edizioni Anfora).

This is not mere name-dropping, but a way to say that Likmeta offers us pages torn from the wind—stories of children who, in post-communist Albania, feel no shame for the poverty stitched into their rags. On the contrary, they are proud: proud that those rags were neither white flags of surrender nor straitjackets for what they endured, but rather flags raised among crumbling walls, amid toys that, when looked at closely enough, might well be capable of killing.

This is a great novel—a rare one, like the few I ever mention. Poetry among nettles and bursts of gunfire from a past that, on one side, strokes the oldest survivors like a maternal womb—as if to say, it can’t get any worse—but on the other, offers paths that are not escapes but dreamscapes. Dreams of life, life, life, strong enough to erase every “mask that hides” the savagery so often still disguised as ideology. There is no ideology here. Only outstretched hands—without pity. And it is up to us to fulfill the fairy tale.