 Kadare did not help matters with his honest admission that he never considered himself a dissident, insisting he was not a political writer. Although he was deeply interested in Albanian politics, he took refuge in historical and allegorical fiction. His masterpiece, The Palace of Dreams, is set in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, where dreams are scrutinized for signs of political unrest. It is seen as an allegory of the authoritarian regime's mania for surveillance.