Throughout his 50-year literary career, Ismail Kadare has invoked legends to underscore his critiques of communism, both in his native Albania, which was under communist rule from 1945 to 1991, and elsewhere. In “Twilight of the Eastern Gods,” he used the Albanian legend of Doruntinë and Constantin, about a daughter who marries a foreign prince and a son who rises from the grave after his wartime death to fulfill their mother’s wish to bring the daughter home, to comment on the political upheaval in Russia in the late 1950s.