Writing the Balkans
In memory of a great storyteller
There are few places where the art of storytelling has been woven into the fabric of societies as persistently as in the magical and mysterious lands of the Balkan Peninsula.
One of its finest weavers, the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, who explored Balkan history and culture in his poetry and fiction for over six decades, died yesterday, the 1st of July, from cardiac arrest. He was 88 years old.
In his long literary career, Kadare wrote novels, collections of poems, short stories, and essays.
He became internationally renowned in 1970 when his novel, The General of the Dead Army, was published in French translation, an event which “took literary Paris by storm.”
Although his name came up multiple times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he did not receive the honour.
However, in 2005, he received the inaugural Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), awarded to a living writer of any nationality for overall achievement in fiction. The finalists included such literary titans as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth. In awarding the prize, the British critic John Carey described Kadare as “a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.”
Ismail Kadare was born on the 28th of January 1936, in the southern Albanian town of Gjirokastër. He grew up on the street where one of the Eastern bloc’s most brutal and idiosyncratic dictators, Enver Hoxha, had lived a generation before. His father, Halit Kadare, was a civil servant; his mother, Hatixhe Dobi, who ran the home, was from a wealthy family.
When Hoxha’s communists seized control of Albania in 1944, Ismail was eight years old and already immersing himself in world literature.
“At the age of eleven, I had read Macbeth, which had hit me like lightning, and the Greek classics; after which nothing had any power over my spirit,”
he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Paris Review.
Nevertheless, as an adolescent, he was attracted to Communism. “There was an idealistic side to it,” he said. “You thought that perhaps certain aspects of communism were good in theory, but you could see that the practice was terrible.”
Kadare published his first collection of poetry, aged seventeen.
After studying at Tirana University, he won 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,”
he 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, in a novel that shot him to fame, The General of the Dead Army, an unnamed Italian general trudges through dreary villages and muddy fields to recover the remains of Italian soldiers who had died during the Second World War, asking himself: “When all is said and done, can a pile of bones still have a name?” And while Albanian critics condemned the novel for being “too cosmopolitan and not expressing sufficient hatred for the Italian general,” it turned Kadare into a national celebrity and, after being published in French, a prominent figure on the international literary scene.
While his growing international profile provided a certain level of protection, Kadare spent the next twenty years balancing the precarious line between his artistic expression and survival — a formidable feat in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents were executed and some 168,000 Albanians sent to prison or labour camps.
After his political poem The Red Pashas was banned in 1975, he wrote a flattering portrait of Hoxha in his 1977 novel The Great Winter.
In 1981, he published The Palace of Dreams, an allegorical attack on totalitarianism in which a young man discovers the dangerous secrets of a government office that studies dreams. It was banned within hours.
Despite all that, Kadare became an important figure in the Albanian Writers’ Union and served as a delegate in the People’s Assembly. He was also able to publish and travel abroad.
When Hoxha died in 1986, the new president, Ramiz Alia, began to take tentative steps towards reform. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Kadare met with the president to argue for change. But by October 1990, 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 claimed political asylum in France.
“The last thrust 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,”
he said.
Safely settled in Paris, Kadare began to publish work tackling totalitarianism more directly. The novella The Blinding Order explores an Ottoman sultan who decrees that subjects who carry “the evil eye” must be blinded, while The Pyramid paints the construction of the Pyramid of Giza as a megalomaniac pharaoh’s tool of control and suppression.
As his international profile grew, his critics became more vocal. The Romanian writer Renata Dumitraşcu wrote that Kadare’s career was “built on a dubious premise,” declaring “Kadare is no Solzhenitsyn and never has been.” “Like most of his homologues in other communist countries,” Dumitraşcu wrote, “Kadare was an astute chameleon, adroitly playing the rebel here and there to excite the naïve 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.” Nothing like a fellow writer to deliver a maximum amount of malice, isn’t it?
Kadare rejected the accusation that he had traded on false credentials, suggesting that his detractors should 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 publishing his intelligent fiction, the controversy faded. When his novel The Siege appeared in English in 2008, it was described as a significant work by an important, fascinating author. The Siege tells the story of an Albanian fortress resisting the Ottoman Turkish army in the fifteenth century.
A year later, Kadare insisted that he was
“not a political writer, and moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there are actually 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 mark the opening of a museum on the site of his former apartment in 2019, Kadare said 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.”
Which, I believe, is one of the best descriptions of art from the writer who, in his own words, was
“grateful for literature, because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible.”
And the overcoming the impossible is what you’ll find reading Kadare — an intriguing, masterful blend of myth and folklore with portraits of contemporary characters and local realities with a generous dash of a cunning, wry humour.
But the main reason to read Ismail Kadare is that he is a great storyteller. He tells wonderful stories and many of them.
Thank you for reading.
