A Philosopher After All

Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages. 2025.     

Albania’s isolation, long the source of its fascination to outsiders, came to an end in 2021. That year, the political theorist Lea Ypi, a professor at the London School of Economics, published Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History. Covering Ypi’s childhood in 1980s and 1990s Albania, the bestselling memoir made its author into a global celebrity and has likely done more to bring the Balkan nation into the international spotlight than the proliferating WizzAir lines into Tirana. Now a cultural export on par with the voluminous works of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, Ypi’s yarn hasn’t just been a hit with the hordes flowing into the up-and-coming tourist destination—Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has been known to hand out copies to visiting dignitaries.

Now we have the prequel. Indignity: A Life Reimagined follows Leman Ypi, Lea’s grandmother and the most beloved character in Free. Born in 1918 in newly post-Ottoman Salonica (now Thessaloniki) to a family of French-speaking Ottoman dignitaries, Leman made her way to Albania in the 1930s, where she married Asllan Ypi, the Sorbonne-educated son of the quisling fascist leader of Albania following Italy’s 1939 invasion. Caught up in Stalinist repression after the war, Asllan spent nearly fifteen years in the gulag while Leman was subjected to forced agricultural labor, where, as Leman told Ypi, she never lost her dignity and, as Ypi tells us, she became something of a moral saint.

Indignity opens with the tale of its genesis. Shortly after the release of Free, Ypi’s conception of her grandmother was turned upside down by a viral Facebook post. A mysterious stranger named Çim posted a photo of the honeymooners Asllan and a smiling Leman at a luxury resort in northern Italy in late 1941. Ypi stared in shock at the photo: What did it say about her grandmother that she constantly referred to her honeymoon in Mussolini’s Italy—during the occupation of Albania and the horrors of World War II—as the best days of her life? As she considered this, comments began popping up attacking Leman as a “bitch” and “collaborator,” both fascist and communist. “Could these strangers,” Ypi wondered, “know her better than I do?” (This would not be my first thought if internet strangers called my grandma a Nazi bitch.) She decided she must figure out why her family was persecuted—and why her grandmother was smiling in that photo. It was, in other words, a quest “to rescue my grandmother from the trolls, to restore her dignity after death.”

The resulting book is a combination family saga, philosophical text, and history of interwar southeast Europe. Interspersed throughout are first-person accounts of the author’s travails in and documents from the secret police archives of the communist era. But the book is primarily a novelistic reimagining of the first thirty-five years of Leman’s life, in which she experiences every indignity the provincial outskirts of interwar Europe can serve up. Leman’s world, as narrated by Ypi, is populated by walking embodiments of different philosophical traditions’ approaches to the question of dignity, and each event in her life inevitably culminates with someone dropping a variation on the word dignity. Little Leman bounces along as plucky and naive as young Candide, and, in a heavy-handed nod to Voltaire, she even has her Pangloss in Dr. Elias Levy, who pops up periodically to provide didactic historical guideposts and earnestly repeat Voltaire’s parody of Leibnizian optimism that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

In recent public talks Ypi has explained her turn from scholarly philosophy to literature. Citing the philosophical dialogue of Kant and Schiller, she’s said that “the instrument of political education is art,” and that she wants to create “the kind of literature and the kind of art that thinks about refining moral sensibility.” As opposed to philosophy, “in literature, if you start with a premise and end with a conclusion, the writing will be schematic and dry and possibly not very good. Instead, you create characters to problematize your assumptions and demonstrate the argument.” Indeed, Indignity reads as if the author started with a list of assumptions and arguments, cross-referenced it with a list of characters, and methodically ticked off the requisite boxes in pursuit of her pedagogical aim of “reorienting human beings towards morality” through the exploration of the “moral and political meanings of dignity . . . and the connections between facts and fiction.”

But you can’t say that Ypi didn’t do her homework. Not only did she descend into Albania’s secret police archives, she visited eighteen other archives across five countries. We know this because Ypi lists them in the acknowledgments, as if to coat her narrative with a patina of facticity. And though the events of the book are largely figments of her imagination, she has stressed that her extensive research and “strict disciplining principle” keep things as close as possible to historical fact. As part of Ypi’s attempt to convince the reader that her imagination accurately reflects historical truth—or at least philosophical truth—she repeatedly breaks the fourth wall in the fiction sections to assert that what you’ve just read is straight from her grandmother’s mouth. “When she spoke to me about that fateful meeting, almost fifty years later,” Ypi writes, “she described it without emotion, explanation or interpretation. It was simply a fact.” These interjections often relate to absurd historical impossibilities or to credibility-defying quotes that overlap perfectly with Kantian conceptions of dignity.

Ypi’s archival quest is an attempt to uncover the truth, but she sets out with the naive belief that the archives of the secret police—assembled by a mob of infamous liars, murderers, and bunglers—are the “supreme arbiter[s] of truth” and that they would allow her to faithfully reconstruct the daily miscellanea and interiority of her grandmother. She soon discovers this is impossible and that the archives are full of gaps and errors. And when she realizes the file on her grandmother is largely about a different woman with the same name, she concludes that the mechanisms of historical transmission are not to be trusted and that shifting into a more philosophical mode will grant her privileged access to the truth over the traditional methods of historical inquiry. It’s fascinating to watch as a world-famous philosopher discovers basic facts about archival research, but given Ypi’s elite academic credentials one is inclined to conclude that her sophomoric belief in—and subsequent disillusionment with—the archives is a dog-and-pony show meant to legitimize her historical fanfic.

Is Indignity a memoir or a philosophy tract? A historical novel or a historical lecture? A whodunit archival thriller or Candide for the twenty-first century? It’s never made clear, and the book’s attempt to be all things and all genres, which Ypi seems to take as its strength, leads to it failing to be any one thing successfully. The reader is thus treated to concocted plot twists, wooden dialogue, shallow philosophizing, and incoherent characterization. Take Leman. Instead of the living breathing character from Free, we’re served an unconvincing authorial self-portrait. At one point we’re told she’s a ballsy fourteen-year-old union agitator “whose gaze pierced everything it beheld, as if trying to strip away all the outer layers to reveal an inner essence.” None of this squares with her portrayal elsewhere as passive and moony, someone who begins shaking violently whenever she’s stressed. The main reason she moves from Greece to Albania? “The name intrigued her. She was fascinated by the disjunction between what the country was called by foreigners (Albania) and how its own people referred to it (Shqipëria) . . . In this abyss between two unknowns, in the odd space between such disparate words, Albania and Shqipëria, she hoped to find the truth about herself.” But would the real Leman—who spoke French, Albanian, Italian, Ladino, and Greek—really be so wowed by the idea that places have different names in different languages?

Some of the worst howlers come amid pages of head-scratching hysteria as Ypi first encounters the archive’s documents on Leman. Upon seeing Leman described as a Greek citizen under investigation as a possible foreign spy, Ypi starts shaking violently. “This is so strange. I am completely confused now,” she thinks. “It’s bizarre to think of my grandmother as Greek,” she explains before berating the archive staff and disassociating. “Why Greek? I keep shaking my head.” She can’t concentrate and she shivers, “as if I were standing naked outside in the freezing cold.” She becomes paralyzed. “The strange word ‘Greek’ keeps recurring. ‘Leman Ypi, born in Salonica, of Greek citizenship.’” She feels nauseous.

I continue to scroll down the file, and up again, but at this point my brain has decided to play a trick on me. I am only able to read the sentences where the term “Greek” appears. The rest is entirely unintelligible; it might as well have been written in the language of Aristotle. . . . I read the paragraph again. Each word looks like a lump of metal and by the time I encounter “Greek” and “Greece”, the air feels trapped inside my lungs, as if imprisoned behind bars. My vision blurs, and I can hardly engage with the rest of the file.

Looking past the bizarre melodrama and ill-formed similes, Ypi’s shock at seeing her grandmother described as a Greek citizen is mystifying given that central to Leman’s mystique is that she was born in Greece, spent the first twenty years of her life in Salonica, and often used Greek in the house when Ypi was a child. What’s more, when Ypi was a young teenager, she and Leman traveled to Thessaloniki and Athens together, and spent weeks there tracking down distant family and acquaintances in a failed attempt to reclaim the family’s vast estates. Nor is there anything remotely surprising about the espionage accusation; as Ypi is well aware, anyone with friends or family abroad was liable to be seen as a potential spy by the famously paranoid Hoxha regime. Any act of historical reimagination will require some looseness with historical veracity, but these overwrought passages scan as so self-evidently false that it’s hard to imagine Ypi herself believing them. It’s less that the book is historically inaccurate, and more that it is built on emotional deception that depends on the readers’ gullibility.

Ypi’s nominally nonfiction first-person accounts are as riddled with misrepresentation and omission as anything in the secret police archives. The viral Facebook photo is a prime example. For one thing, the post has 295 likes, 41 comments, and 12 shares as of this writing, so it’s a stretch to say it “went viral across Albania.” Ypi describes being affronted by this mysterious stranger posting the picture and confused about where he found it, but in reality there’s no puzzle. The real-life “Çim” is the former director of the secret police archive who for years has been posting daily archival photos on his personal Facebook page (he’s even thanked, under his real name, in the book’s acknowledgements).

Ypi was disturbed to see the “hundreds of derogatory comments” which are an insult to her grandmother’s dignity and which together form a caricature “stripped of context, memory, evidence, or even the basic sympathy we extend to strangers when we encounter them in person.” But it’s not made clear how Leman’s dignity—which withstood dispossession, proscription, horrific poverty, rape, and a decade of shoveling muck—could possibly be threatened by any Facebook comment, let alone ones that describe her as “a woman of extraordinary culture and with a big heart.” Perhaps hundreds of nasty comments have been deleted, but a representative comment of the currently existing ones reads: “Mrs. Leman, for those who knew her, was a true lady, with a broad culture and above all, she was a noble woman.”

Ypi’s answer to the question of why her family was persecuted is one of the more maddening fabulations in the book. The central figure here is British soldier Vandeleur Robinson. The name comes up in Asllan’s trial documents in which he’s sentenced for collaboration with British intelligence. Ypi has Robinson befriending Leman and Asllan during their honeymoon and immediately moving to Tirana, where he’s a frequent house guest and nightly customer at Asllan’s bar. Wooing the ladies and gayly sharing classified military secrets with the couple, Robinson is a flamboyant gadfly living openly in occupied Tirana. When he’s not playing tennis at the country club, he’s incessantly taking photos of donkeys.

You don’t have to be a historian to suspect this all might be contrary to a “strict disciplining principle” of hewing to historical fact. Military-aged British men were not gallivanting around Italy in December 1941, chatting up tourists. Though Robinson was in Albania around 1944–45, he spent most of the war in London. Ypi places him in Albania almost two years prior to there being any Allied presence in the country, and anyways, the British soldiers who were there largely lived in remote huts and caves. Tirana was not wartime Lisbon, there was no James Bond in Albania, and Robinson’s many photos from wartime Albania are easily accessible online and by my count only five contain donkeys.

But so what if readers walk away misinformed about Albania during World War II? Ypi, after all, carves out the right—no—the moral duty, to imagine. But in this case the literary license Ypi takes is in service of a gross misrepresentation: she suggests that Asllan’s contacts with Robinson and the Brits were solely responsible for her family’s persecution. And she’s bitter about it. When Ypi learns that one of these Brits bought a home on the Greek island Paxos after the war, and that the villa was now being sold for 5.5 million pounds, she quips, “I should ask for a few weeks of free holiday in Paxos as compensation for historical injustice.” Though the premise of the book is that the secret police archives are an untrustworthy source for reconstructing her family story, in this one case she takes the trial documents of a Stalinist purge at face value and invents a corresponding caricature of Robinson and wartime Albania. But it is willful historical illiteracy to suggest that, if not for social ties to some British officers, the son of the first fascist leader of occupied Albania could have avoided persecution by the vengeful and paranoid Stalinists who took over after.

With its dual timelines and hybrid genre, Indignity is on the surface a very different book from Free. But there are parallels. The latter is, after all, a book in which the main character experiences every confusion the shifting ideological terrain of late communist/early capitalist Albania can serve up. Little Ypi’s world is populated by walking embodiments of various philosophical traditions’ approaches to the question of freedom, and each event in her life inevitably culminates with someone dropping a variation on the word free. Assumptions are problematized. Arguments are demonstrated. It’s enough to make one wonder to what degree Free is itself “a life reimagined.”

This was the line of attack taken up by Albanian critics after noticing fabulations sprinkled throughout the book. The most egregious of these comes in the first sentence: “I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.” Ypi describes encountering anti-regime protesters on her walk home from school one day in 1990. Scared, she runs to the safety of the local Stalin statue, but as she hugs Uncle Stalin’s leg she looks up in terror to find the statue has been beheaded. The anecdote serves as a load-bearing metaphor throughout the book as well as the basis of the U.S. edition’s cover. The problem is that in real life no such statute ever existed. What is the reader to make of Ypi’s chapter-length reflections on “the meaning of freedom” spurred on by this event that never happened?

Ypi has been dismissive of her Albanian critics and frustrated that the book’s truth claims were questioned. “I came from philosophy. I was interested in literature, and I was trying to blend them somehow in my writing just because I enjoyed doing it,” she’s said. “I think of it as writing and I don’t think we need to worry too much about how we define the genre.” But if we did want to define the genre, all we would have to do is look at Ypi’s own words. She’s said that the characters in Free are “human embodiments of ideals” that are “relevant to conveying certain ideas of freedom,” and that they are “a philosophical device, and a fictional device in the service of ideas.” This sounds less like a traditional memoir and more like a pedagogical tale rearranged for the sake of the audience, like Indignity, a didactic story meant to refine readers’ moral sensibilities. Why bother with petty, small-minded historical accuracy, Ypi seems to be saying, when she’s serving up philosophical truths? In fact, she’s said just that: “The truth of someone’s life, . . . and the ultimate meaning of their dignity, is not in the historical truth about her, but in the philosophical reconstruction of the truth.”

Despite the wild popularity of Free and the intense media coverage, hardly any of the controversy over fact and fiction escaped the Albania’s borders. But the wall has come down and Albania is no longer shrouded in obscurity, thanks in no small part to Ypi herself. Now we all have the chance to decide whether we agree with Ypi that her imagination, powered by Kant, grants privileged access to the truth. If she pushed the conventions of creative nonfiction to the limit with Free, with the prequel Ypi is addressing her Albanian critics and doubling down. Alongside the epigraphs from Kant and Schiller, perhaps Ypi should have given one to Pangloss, who says at the end of Candide: “I hold firmly to my original views . . . I am a philosopher after all.”