Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly put his sovereign Balkan fatherland on the worldwide literary map with increasingly bleak, allegorical works indirectly criticizing the pastoral totalitarian state, died on Monday in the Albanian capital Tirana. has expired. He was 88 years old.
The news of his death was reported by Bujar Hudri, head of the Onufri Publishing Area, who was his editor and writer in Albania. He noted that Mr Kadare suffered a cardiac arrest at his home and died at a clinic.
In a literary career that spanned nearly a century, Mr. Kadare (pronounced Kah-dah-ray) wrote numerous books, including novels and collections of poems, short stories, and essays. He achieved global fame in 1970 when his first book, “The General of the Dead Army”, was translated into French. ECU critics praised it as a masterpiece.
Shri Kadare’s name was put forward several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he could not get this honour. In 2005, he won the first Guy Booker World Prize (now the World Booker Prize), awarded to a living author of any nationality for a breakthrough in fiction. Finalists included literary giants such as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.
While presenting the award, the panel’s chairman, British critic John Carey, known as Mr. Kadare, said he was “a universal writer in the tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.”
Critics constantly compare Mr. Kadare to Kafka, Kundera, and Orwell, among others. During the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, under the tutelage of Enver Hoxha, one of the Jap Bloc’s most brutal and eccentric dictators.
To stop the persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents have been executed and some 168,000 Albanians have been sent to prison or military camps, Mr. Kadare took a political leap. He served for 12 years as a deputy in Albania’s mob meetings, and used to be a member of the regime’s Writers’ Union. Certainly one of Mr. Kadare’s novels, “The Great Winter,” contained a good portrayal of the dictator. Mr. Kadare then mentioned that he wrote it partly for the sake of fun.
In contrast, many of his most grandiose works, including “The Palace of Dreams” (1981), launched a subversive attack on the dictatorship, bypassing censorship through allegory, satire, fiction, and legend.
Richard Eder wrote in The Pristine York Instances in 2002 that Mr. Kadare is “a supremely fictional interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of oppression.”
Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastër. His father, Halit Kadare, used to be a civil servant; His mother, Hatshe Dobie, who ran the household, was from a wealthy family.
When Hoxha’s communists took over Albania in 1944, Ismail was 8 years old and already immersed in global literature. “At the age of 11 I read ‘Macbeth’, which had a lightning-like effect on me, and the Greek classics, after which nothing had any power over my soul,” he wrote in a 1998 article with Paris Evaluate. Recalled in interview.
But, as a young man, he was attracted to communism. “There was an idealistic side to it,” he said. “You thought maybe some aspects of communism were good in theory, but you could see that the practice was terrible.”
Following further education at the College of Tirana, Mr. Kadare was sent for postgraduate study to the Gorky Institute for International Literature in Moscow, which he then described as “a factory for producing dogmatic hacks of the socialist-realism school.”
In 1963, almost two years after his return from Moscow, “The General of the Dead Army” was printed in Albania. The book follows an Italian general who returns to the mountains of Albania two decades after the Second World War to disinter and recover the bodies of his comrades. This is the story of the complex West’s incursion into an unusual land, dominated through a historical code of blood feuds.
Professional-government critics condemned the book for being too cosmopolitan and not expressing enough hatred of the Italian general, but it made Mr. Kadare a nationwide superstar. In 1965, the government simultaneously protested his second book, “The Monster”, which was published in a pamphlet near his newspaper.
In 1970, when “The General of the Dead Army” appeared in French translation, it “took literary Paris by storm,” The Paris Review wrote.
Mr. Kadare’s astonishing prominence attracted the attention of the dictator himself. To placate the regime, Mr. Kadare wrote “The Great Winter” (1977), a book celebrating Hoxha’s break with the Soviet Union in 1961. Mr Kadare noted that he had 3 possible options: “To conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; or to pay tribute, a bribe.” He chose the third answer, by writing, as he called it, “The Great Winter”.
In 1975, when he wrote “The Red Pashas”, a poem criticizing members of the Politburo, Mr. Kadare was exiled to a remote village and ostensibly barred from publishing.
His response came in 1981, when he published “The Palace of Dreams”, a serious criticism of the regime. Curated throughout the Ottoman Empire, it featured a massive document dedicated to gathering the dreams of its voters, looking for signs of dissent. In The Instances, Mr. Ader described it as “a moonlit parable about the madness of power – murderous and suicidal at the same time.” The book met with opposition in Albania, but it soon sold out.
Mr Kadare’s fortune in another country provided him with some security at home. However, he said, he lived with the fear that the regime “might kill me and say it was a suicide.”
To protect his paintings from manipulation at the time of his death, Mr. Kadare smuggled the manuscripts out of Albania in 1986 and handed them over to their French author, Claude Durand. The author made his personal trips to Tirana to smuggle out old works.
The cat-and-mouse game in which the regime alternately published and opposed Mr. Kadare’s works followed Hoxha’s death in 1985 until Mr. Kadare fled to Paris in 1990. After the fall of the regime, attacks on Sri Kadare began. Anti-Communist critics, both in Albania and in the West, portrayed him as a beneficiary or even an active supporter of the Stalinist situation. In 1997, when his name was being discussed for the Nobel, an editorial in the conservative weekly General advised the committee not to award him the prize because of his “conscious collaboration” with the Hoxha regime.
It would appear that to arm himself against such a complaint, Mr. Kadare published several autobiographical books in the nineties, in which he suggested that he had opposed the regime spiritually and artistically through his literature. did.
“Every time I wrote a book, I felt like I was stabbing a dictatorship,” he said in a 1998 interview.
Writing in The Pristine York Evaluate of Books in 1997, Oxford historian Noel Malcolm praised the “atmospheric density” and “poetic solidity” of Mr Kadare’s writing, although criticized his defensiveness with critics.
“The author protests too much,” Mr. Malcolm wrote, giving the ultimatum that the “exaggerations and omissions” of Mr. Kadare’s “self-promoted versions” could harm his recognition more than the attacks from his critics. Mr. Kadare’s most important works “occurred on a different level, more human and more mythological than any kind of conceptual art,” he wrote.
In a thinly veiled response, Mr Kadare accused Mr Malcolm of showing cultural arrogance towards the creator of a small nation.
In a letter to The Pristine York Evaluate of Books, he wrote, “To take such liberties with an author just because he comes from a small country is to expose the colonialist mentality.”
Mr. Kadare’s survivors include his wife Elena Kadare, also a writer, and two daughters: Bessiana Kadare, the former Albanian ambassador to the United Nations, and Greça Kadare.
After the fall of communism, Mr. Kadare wrote his novels amid the hesitation and terror of the Hoxha regime. On the other hand, some portrayed Albanians living in 21st century Europe, but still troubled by the blood feuds, legends and myths of their population. His most famous works come with “Chronicle in Stone” (1971); “The Three-Arched Bridge” (1978); “Agamemnon’s Daughter” (1985); its sequel, “The Successor” (2003); and “The Accident” (2010).
Charles McGrath wrote in The Instances in 2010 that there is an energy in all his work: Mr. Kadare “seems incapable of writing a book that fails to be interesting.”
In 2005, after receiving the Booker World Prize, Mr. Kadare noted, “It was possible to write the only act of resistance in the classic Stalinist regime.”
Amelia Nirenberg Contributed to the reporting.
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