Luca Mătăsaru reviews Lea Ypi’s Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)
Is dignity an innate human quality or is it the result of interpersonal relationships? How do facts change when they become part of a larger narrative? Are archives trustworthy repositories of historical truth? All these questions are central to Lea Ypi’s most recent book, Indignity: A Life Reimagined. Part biography, part history, part fiction, it manages to transcend genre boundaries, simultaneously offering a historical overview of 20th century Balkan Europe, from the collapse of multicultural empires to the rise of fascist and communist dictatorships, and an intimate story about the consequences of these events on the lives of ordinary people. Lea Ypi, Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy, follows her grandmother Leman Ypi’s journey from childhood into adulthood, from Ottoman Salonica to Albanian Tirana, weaving a narrative that combines personal memories, archival documents, and the power of her own imagination.
In a lecture that was held as part of the CEU 35th Anniversary Presidential Lecture Series, Lea Ypi explains that her book centers around the ability of maintaining one’s dignity of thought and action “in an age of extremes”. Starting from Immanuel Kant’s conviction that people should be treated not as means to an end, but as ends in themselves, Ypi highlights how her family story reflects larger issues of human dignity, historical injustice, and reconciliation with the past. Although her book is built around a philosophical inquiry into the nature of dignity, she strongly believes that literature offers an opportunity that abstract philosophy lacks: giving voice to the Other, to the one silenced by the archive, and who needs someone else to speak on their behalf. Considering the increasing polarization and radicalization of the current political landscape, Ypi wishes that her book will establish a connection between the struggles of its characters and the challenges we face in the present.
Indignity is built around two main narrative strands: Lea Ypi’s first-person narrative as she visits various archives in Albania and Greece in order to uncover the facts of her grandmother’s life and to discover if she was indeed a foreign spy (as the Albanian Security suspected), and Leman Ypi’s third-person narrative, which is reconstructed by combining fact and fiction. Thus, the present narrative requires a journey to the past, while the narrative in the past is moving towards the present day. This framing device allows the author to explore two main issues: the historical archive as an artificial construct and the gap between memory and the past.
While doing research in the archive, Ypi reflects on this institution’s ideal of order and categorization, an obsession which goes far beyond the simple recording of facts:
“I’ve always been in awe of the archive’s power to order the facts. It is after all a historical a priori category: all statements concerning the reality of things depend on its existence. The archive structures events in the same way grammar structures thought: regulating an amorphous mass of discourse, establishing patterns of transmission, prescribing who says what, when and with what implications.” (284)
The archive is not an unbiased database that extracts and stores information. It is built on an ideological framework even when it is not in the service of a totalitarian regime, since it believes that it has the right to determine which events and people are relevant for documentation and which are not. As such, what the archive is often more important than what is has recorded. In addition, the author discovers that the file on Leman Ypi held by the Albanian Security contains many inaccuracies, including a death certificate dated 1972, even though her grandmother died in 2006. While archive officials consider such errors to be common occurrences, the strangeness of the situation determines the author to search for a plausible explanation, eventually learning that Leman Ypi’s file actually contains more than just her grandmother’s story. Thus,
the archival documents become factually not very different from the fictional narrative the author creates by combining several historical records and personal stories with the help of her imagination, which provides not only structure but also meaning to the narrative.
As a result of the author’s constant search for truth, the elusiveness of the past is another theme that comes to the forefront of the book. On the one hand, the confusion generated by the archive demonstrates that its ambition to be a reliable register of the past is just an illusion. On the other hand, Ypi realizes that the stories her grandmother shared about her youth do not necessarily reflect how she actually experienced them. The reason is twofold: firstly, telling a story means thinking about the audience that will hear it. Leman Ypi related these stories to her granddaughter in order to teach her various life lessons. Consequently, the meaning of the narrative becomes more important than its precise factuality. Secondly, the grandmother’s memory is selective and sometimes merges several distinct moments into a single one, such as in the case of her proposal to marry Asllan Ypi, the author’s grandfather, during the evening of King Zog’s wedding. Thus, memory allows only a mediated connection to the past, as it is a highly subjective psychological faculty shaped by present circumstances. As the author poetically expresses,
“the past is never past; it’s like a distant relative who continues to age far away, as we are busy taking care of the present. It changes, it becomes bitter, it starts to resent us. Memory, [my grandmother] would say with Saint Augustine, is the stomach of the mind, it stores things without consuming them.” (284)
The question of indignity lies at the core of Lea Ypi’s motivation for deciphering who her grandmother really was. The author starts investigating her family’s past after she sees a post on social media containing an old photograph of her grandparents during their honeymoon in the Italian Alps. The reactions to this photo range from empathy to accusations. Some comments constitute personal attacks on Lea Ypi for her Marxist beliefs, saying that she disgraces her grandmother, who suffered under the Albanian communist regime, through her anti-capitalist stance. At the same time, the author is shocked to find many comments that use strong words for accusing her grandmother of being either a fascist or a communist spy (or both). Knowing that her grandmother can no longer respond to these attacks, Ypi decides to take it upon herself to verify the truth of these claims and to defend her grandmother’s memory. This situation also prompts the author to begin her reflection on the nature of dignity, which represents the philosophical foundation of the book:
“Does dignity require someone’s continuing existence – an active capacity to defend that dignity, protect it from assault, stand up in its name? Is it a relationship dependent on external recognition, on the fulfilment of our commitments – a way of being in the world, both individually and with others? Or is it an inherent quality we possess just because of who we are – disciplined by a will that is free, and for that reason also susceptible to error?” (22)
But the narrative transcends Leman Ypi’s personal dignity and also focuses on the problem of collective dignity. As the book’s plot illustrates, the 20th century was marked by several great indignities to which various communities were subjected: the deportations resulting from the “unmixing of peoples” after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the tragedy of the Holocaust, forced collectivization under communism etc. Thus, the Ypi family’s microhistory reflects Balkan macrohistory. By emphasizing her grandmother’s assertiveness and strength of character, the author suggests that even “minor” nations such as Albania can become the masters of their own destiny. Combating Xhafer Ypi, the father of Asllan, who tells him that “[t]here may be nations out there who make history. We are not among them, dear boy. To us history is done” (169), Lea Ypi wants to restore the dignity of the Albanian people by reinstating them as agents of history, thus attempting to cure the negative consequences of their victim complex.
The book’s many strengths derive both from its innovative form and from its deeply reflexive themes. It is very accessible even for readers unfamiliar with Albanian and Balkan history, since Ypi provides the necessary background information for understanding the historical context without overwhelming the reader with too many expository details. The blending of biography, history, philosophy, and literature is achieved seamlessly and creates a story that is multifaceted yet thematically consistent. For instance, documents from the archives of the Albanian Security are used to both create tension for future events and to fill in gaps in the fictionalized story being reconstructed. Additionally, by presenting the hardships Leman Ypi and her family had to endure, reflecting Albania’s precarious position in the 20th century, the author’s aim is not to create portraits of history’s victims, but to show how willpower and dignity become especially important in times of crisis and conflict. While the author does not trivialize the tragedies and suffering of her characters, she uses fiction primarily to offer a voice to those who were robbed of it by the “makers” and recorders of history.
It is hard to find weak points in Lea Ypi’s book. However, the careful fictional reconstruction of Leman Ypi’s story might to some extent undermine the fact that the frame narrative revolves around managing information gaps. While the author sometimes specifies that she is not sure about the accurate retelling of some events in her grandmother’s life, the story usually overlooks the difficulty of using imagination in order to create a consistent narrative from filtered memories and questionable archival material. Nevertheless, since the tightness of the narrative is a key aspect that makes it easy to recommend to a large public, sacrificing it for literary artifice might not have worked in the book’s favor.
Overall, Lea Ypi’s Indignity: A Life Reimagined manages to find the perfect balance between ethical responsibility, historical accuracy, and literary merit. The author manages to write a novel of ideas that is both thoroughly researched and marked by a granddaughter’s love for her grandmother. Just as the real Leman Ypi represented both a mentor and a model of autonomy and morality for the author, so her fictionalized double is meant to serve as a prime example that “[t]here is something about the human spirit […] that withstands all attempts at offence, injury or humiliation”. And this something, as Lea Ypi has learned from her grandmother, is precisely the essence of humanity: dignity.
Luca Mătăsaru is Assistant Editor at the review of Democracy.
