Ismail Kedare, giant of Albanian literature, dies at 88.
Ismail Kadare, a towering figure in Albanian literature, passed away at the age of 88. Known for his allegorical stories deeply informed by life under state communism, Kadare garnered international acclaim, although he firmly denied being a political writer.
Bujar Hudhri, Kadare’s editor at the Tirana-based publishing house Onufri, reported that Kadare died on Monday after being rushed to the hospital. According to Reuters, the writer suffered cardiac arrest.
Kadare’s works, written under the oppressive regime of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, scrutinized contemporary society through the use of allegory and myth. His notable novels include “The General of the Dead Army,” “The Siege,” and “The Palace of Dreams.” Kadare fled to Paris just months before the collapse of Albania’s communist government in 1990, and his literary reputation continued to flourish as he revisited themes related to his homeland in his fiction. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages, earning him numerous accolades, including the prestigious Man Booker International Prize.
The giant of Albanian literature, was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, an Ottoman fortress city near the Greek border, Kadare grew up on the same street where Hoxha had lived a generation earlier. He published his first collection of poetry at the age of 17. After studying at Tirana University, Kadare received a government scholarship to study literature at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. He returned to Tirana in 1960 with a novel about two students reinventing a lost Albanian text. When he published an extract in a magazine, it was promptly banned.
“It was a good thing this happened,” Kadare told the Guardian in 2005. “In the early 60s, life in Albania was pleasant and well-organised. A writer would not have known he should not write about the falsification of history.”
Three years later, Kadare successfully navigated the censors with “The General of the Dead Army,” a novel about an Italian general who travels across Albania in the 1960s to recover the remains of Italian soldiers who died during World War II. The unnamed general trudges through dismal villages and muddy fields, questioning the point of his gloomy mission: “When all is said and done, can a pile of bones still have a name?”
Despite criticism from Albanian critics who found the novel divergent from the socialist realism demanded by Hoxha’s regime, its publication in France in 1970 caused a sensation. Le Monde praised it as “astonishing and full of charm.”
While Kadare’s international profile provided some protection, he spent the next 20 years balancing artistic expression with the need to survive. After his political poem “The Red Pashas” was banned in 1975, he depicted Hoxha favorably in his 1977 novel “The Great Winter.” In 1981, he published “The Palace of Dreams,” an allegorical critique of totalitarianism in which a young man discovers the perilous secrets of a government office that studies dreams. The book was banned within hours. Despite these setbacks, Kadare remained an influential figure in the Albanian writers’ union and served as a delegate in the People’s Assembly. He was also permitted to publish and travel abroad.
Following Hoxha’s death in 1986, the new president, Ramiz Alia, initiated tentative reforms. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the giant of Albanian literature, Kadare met with the president to advocate for change. By October 1990, however, he concluded that there was “no possibility of legal opposition in Albania” and that “more than any action I could take in Albania, my defection would help the democratisation of my country.”
Citing a list of 100 intellectuals targeted for arrest by the Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi, Kadare fled to Paris and sought political asylum in France.
“The final thrust,” he told the New York Times, “was the direct or indirect threats from the Sigurimi, which wanted to settle old scores. The Sigurimi would have used the first signs of unrest to settle those scores.”
In Paris, Kadare began publishing works that more directly addressed totalitarianism. His novella “The Blinding Order” explores an Ottoman sultan who decrees that subjects with “the evil eye” must be blinded, while “The Pyramid” portrays the construction of the Pyramid of Giza as a tool of control and oppression by a megalomaniac pharaoh.
As Kadare’s reputation grew, he received numerous honors, including the Légion d’Honneur and the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005. However, this recognition sparked criticism, with Romanian writer Renata Dumitrascu arguing that his career was “built on a dubious premise,” and asserting, “Kadare is no Solzhenitsyn and never has been.”
“Like most of his homologues in other communist countries,” Dumitrascu wrote, “Kadare was an astute chameleon, adroitly playing the rebel here and there to excite the naive westerners who were scouting for voices of dissent from the east. But there is absolutely no question about what kind of animal he was and what pack he ran with; in fact, his résumé screams careerism and conformity.”
Kadare rejected these accusations, suggesting critics focus on his work instead.
“I have never claimed to be a ‘dissident’ in the proper meaning of the term,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “Open opposition to Hoxha’s regime, like open opposition to Stalin during Stalin’s reign in Russia, was simply impossible. Dissidence was a position no one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance to the regime.”
As Kadare continued to publish his nuanced fiction, the controversy began to fade. When his novel about an Albanian fortress resisting the Ottoman Turkish army in the 15th century appeared in English in 2008, the LA Times remarked that he was “among the most problematic of major writers in contemporary western letters. But that shouldn’t prevent readers from savouring The Siege for what it is, a significant work by an important, fascinating author.” A year later, Kadare insisted that he was “not a political writer, and, moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there actually are no political writers. I think that my writing is no more political than ancient Greek theatre. I would have become the writer I am in any political regime.”
Returning to Tirana to commemorate the opening of a museum at the site of his former apartment in 2019, Kadare told France 24 that his work “obeyed only the laws of literature, it obeyed no other law.”
“The people who lived through this period were unhappy,” he said, “but art is above all that. Art is neither unhappy nor happy under a regime.”
The Giant of Albanian literature, Ismail kedara, sleep on!
