Ismail Kadare

(28 January 1936 - )

Michele LevyNorth Carolina A & T State University

Books:

Frymëzimet djaloshare. Lirika (Tirana: Ndërm. Shtetërore e Botimeve, 1954);

Ëndërrimet (Tirana: Ndërm. Shtetërore e Botimeve, 1957);

Princesha Argjiro, poemë (Tirana: Ndërmarrja Shtetërore e Botimeve, 1958);

Shekulli im. Vjersha dhe poema (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1961);

Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1963; reprinted Tirana:

Onufri, 2001);

Përse mendohen këto male. Vjersha dhe poema (Tirana: Naim Frashëri,1964);

Përbindëshi. (Tirana: Nëntori, 1965).

Vjersha dhe poema të zgjedhura (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1966);

Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur. Roman. Botimi i 2-të (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1967);

Qyteti I jugut. Tregime dhe reportazhe (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1967);

Dasma. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1968);

Motive me diell. Vjersha dhe poema (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1968; reprinted, Prishtina: Rilindja, 1978);

Vjersha dhe poema (Prishtina: Rilindja, 1969);

Kështjella. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1970; reprinted, Prishtina: Rilindja, 1976;

Onufri, 2003);

Le Général de l’armée morte (Paris: Albin Michel, 1970);

Autobiografi e popullit në vargje dhe shënime të tjera (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1971);

Kronikë në gur. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1971; reprinted, Prishtina: Rilindja, 1972; Elbasan: Onufri, 2000);

Dimri i vetmisë së madhe. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1973);

Linja të largëta. Shënime udhëtimi (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1973);

Nëntori i një kryeqyteti. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1975);

Ismail Kadare. Poezia shqipe 28 (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1976);

Koha. Vjersha dhe poema (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1976);

Dimri i madh. Botim i tretë. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1977);

Emblema e dikurshme. Tregime e novela (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1977);

Muzgu i perëndive të stepës ( 1978).

Prilli i thyer. Roman. (1978; Gjakftohtësia, 1980; Tirana: Onufri, 2003.);

Ura me tri harqe. Triptik me një intermexo (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1978);

On the Lay of the Knights (Tirana: The “8 Nëntori” Pub. House,1979);

Poezi (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1979);

Autobiografia e popullit në vargje (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1980);

Buzëqeshje mbi botë (Prishtina: Rilindja, 1980);

Gjakftohtësia. Novela (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1980);

Krushqit janë tëngrirë (1980);

Kush e solli Doruntinën (Tirana, 1980; reprinted Shtëpia BotueseOnufri, 2004);

Një dosje për Homerin (Tirana, 1980);

Sjellësi i fatkeqësisë (1980);

Viti i mbrapshtë (1980; Tirana: Onufri, 2003);

Nënpunësi i pallatit të ëndrrave. Roman (1981);

Avril Brisé. (Paris: Fayard, 1982);

Le pont aux trois arches (Paris: Fayard, 1982);

Nata me hënë (1985; Tirana, 1992; Onufri, 2004);

Koha e shkrimeve. Tregime, novela, përshkrime (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1986);

Qui a ramené Doruntine? (Paris: Fayard, 1986); L'année noire ; suivi de Le cortège de la noce s'est figé dans la glace: Récits

(Paris: Fayard, 1987);

Koncert në fund të dimrit. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1988);

Eschyle ou l’éternel perdant (Paris: Fayard, 1988); Dosja H. Roman (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1990);

Eskili, ky humbës i madh (Tirana: 8 Nëntori, 1990);

Ftesë në studio (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1990);

Migjeni ose uragani i ndërprerë (Prishtina: Pena, 1990);

Viti i mbrapshtë (Prishtina: Rilindja, 1990; reprinted Tirana: Onufri, 2003);

Ardhja e Migjenit në letërsinë shqipe (Tirana: 8 Nëntori, 1991);

Ëndërr mashtruese. Tregime e novela (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1991);

Nga një dhjetor në tjetrin. Kronikë, këmbim letrash, persiatje (Paris: Fayard, 1991);

Printemps albanais. Chronique, lettres, réflexions (Paris: Fayard, 1991);

Përbindëshi. Roman (Tirana: Lidhja e Shkrimtareve, 1991; reprinted Prizren: Vreber 1991);

Le Monstre (Paris: Fayard, 1991);

Pesha e kryqit (Paris: Fayard, 1991);

Invitation à l’atelier de l’écrivain suivi de Le Poids de la croix (Paris: Fayard, 1991);

Piramida (1991);

La Pyramide (Paris: Fayard, 1992);

Clair de lune (Paris: Fayard, 1993);

La Grande Muraille, suivi de Le Firman aveugle (Paris: Fayard, 1993);

Hija: shënime të një kineasti të dështuar . Roman (Tirana: Onufri, 2003);

L’Ombre (Paris: Fayard, 1994);

Noël. Une anthologie des plus beaux texts de la literature mondiale (Paris: L’Archipel, 1994);

Albanie. Visage des Balkans. Ecrits de lumière, with photographs by KelPjetër and Gegë Marubi Kadaré (Paris: Arthaud, 1995);

La légende des legendes (Paris: Flammarion, 1995);

Piramida. Roman (Tirana: Çabej MÇM, 1995;

Récits d’outre-temps (Paris: Stock, 1995);

Dialog me Alain Bosquet (Elbasan: Onufri, 1996);

Pallati i ëndrrave (Peja: Dukagjini, 1996);

Shkaba. Roman (Tirana: Çabej / Peja: Dukagjini, 1996);

Spiritus, roman me kaos, zbulesë dhe cmërs (Elbasan: Onufri, 1996);

Kasnecet e shiut (Peje: Dukagjini, 1997);

Kush e solli Doruntinën (Tirana: Album, 1997);

Kushëriri i engjëjve (Tirana: Onufri, 1997);

Poèmes, 1957-1997 (Paris: Fayard, 1997);

Gjirokastër, la ville de pierre (Paris: Editions Michalon, 1998);

Kombi shqiptar në prag të mijëvjeçarit të tretë (Elbasan: Onufri, 1998);

Tri këngë zie për Kosovën (Tirana: Onufri, 1998);

Ikja e shërgut (Tirana: Onufri, 1999);

La Ville sans enseignes (Paris: Stock, 1999);

Qorrfermani (Tirana: Onufri, 1999);

Ra ky mort e u pamë: ditar për Kosovën, artikuj, letra (Elbasan: Onufri, 1999);

Temps barbares: De l'Albanie au Kosovo : entretiens (Paris: Archipel, 1999);

Vjedhja e gjumit mbretëror: tregime (Tirana: Onufri, 1999);

Breznitë e Hankonatëve (Tirana: Onufri, 2000);

Kohe barbare. (Tirana: Onufri, 2000)

Lulet e ftohta të marsit (Tirana: Onufri, 2000; Froides fleurs d'avril, Paris: Fayard, 2000);

Përballë pasqyrës së një gruaje : tre romane të shkurtër (Tirana: Onufri, 2001);

Princesha Argjiro. Poëme (Tirana: Onufri, 2001);

Qyteti Pa Reklama: Roman (Elbasan: Onufri, 2001);

Shqiptarët në kërkim të një fati të ri: sprovë (Elbasan: Onufri, 2001);

Les Tambours de la pluie (Paris: Fayard, 2001);

Unaza në kthetra: sprova letrare, shkrime të ndryshme, intervista (Tirana: Onufri,

2001);

Jeta, loja dhe vdekja e Lul Mazrekut : roman (Tirana: Onufri, 2002);

Stinë e mërzitshme në Olymp (Tirana: 2002);

Vie, jeu et mort de Lul Mazrek: roman trans. By Tedi Papavrami (Paris: Fayard, 2002);

Pasardhësi : roman (Tirana : Shtëpia Botuese "55", 2003);

Vajza e Agamemnonit : roman (Tirana: Shtëpia Botuese "55", 2003);

Ca pika shiu ranë mbi qelq : dyzet poezi të zgjedhura (Tirana: Onufri, 2003);

Viti i mbrapshte. (Tirana: Onufri, 2003);

Eni vjen pej Çamërie : antologji poetike / përpiloi Ali Podrimja (Tirana : Arbëria &

Rozafa, 2004);

Kristal (Tirana: Onufri, 2004);

Poshtërimi në Ballkan : sprovë (Tirana: Onufri, 2004);

L'Albanie : entre la légende et l'histoire (Arles: Giles de Rapper Actes sud, 2004);

Editions:

Vepra letrare, 12 volumes (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1981- );

Oeuvres, 6 volumes (Paris: Fayard, 1993- );

Vepra, 12 volumes (Paris: Fayard, 1993- ).

Oeuvres. Ismail Kadaré ; introduction et notes de présentation d'Eric Faye (Paris:

Fayard, 2001 -- )

Editions in English:

The General of the Dead Army, translated from French by Derek Coltman (London: W. H. A. Allen / New York: Grossman, 1971; reprinted, Tirana: 8 Nëntori, 1974; reprinted, New York: New Amsterdam, 1990);

The Wedding, translated by Ali Cungu (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1968; reprinted, New York: Gamma, 1972, 1974, 1982);

The Castle, translated by Pavli Qesku (Tirana: 8 Nëntori, 1974;reprinted, New York: Gamma, 1980 / University Press of the Pacific, 2002);

On the Lay of the Knights (Tirana: 8 Nëntori, 1979);

Autobiography of the People in Verse (Tirana: 8 Nëntori, 1987);

Chronicle in Stone (New York: Meredith Press, 1987; reprinted NewYork: New

Amsterdam, 1990);

Doruntine, translated by Jon Rothschild (New York: New Amsterdam, 1988; reprinted

New Amsterdam, 1990);

Broken April, translated by John Hodgson (New York: New Amsterdam and Saqi,

1990; reprinted New Amsterdam, 1998);

The Palace of Dreams, translated from French by Barbara Bray (New York: William

Morrow & Co. / London: Harvill, 1993; New York: Arcade Publishing,

1998);

Albanian Spring. The Anatomy of Tyranny, translated from French by Emile Capouya

(London: Saqi, 1994; 2001);

The Pyramid (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996);

The Concert, translated from French by Bray (New York: WilliamMorrow & Co. /

London: Harvill, 1994; New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998);

The Three-Arched Bridge, translated by Hodgson (London: Saqi, 1994 / Franklin NY:

New Amsterdam, 1995; New York: Vintage, 1998);

The Pyramid, translated from French by David Bellos (London: Harvill, 1996 / New

York: Arcade Publishing, 1996);

The File on H, translated from French by Bellos (London: Harvill, 1997; New York:

Arcade Publishing, 2002);

Elegy for Kosovo, translated by Peter Constantine (New York: Arcade Publishing,

2000);

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost translated by Bellos (New York: ArcadePublishing,

2002);

The Successor, translated from the French of Tedi Papavrami byBellos.(New York: Arcade Pub., 2006).

Besides limited media coverage (including the Italian

film L’America, 1994, and Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog, 1997)

after “opening” to the world in 1991 and during the Kosovo

Crisis of 1998-99, when the television media offered

repeated images of Kosovar Albanians in Macedonian refugee

camps, Albania has remained off the mental screen of the

West. Its artists have likewise generally failed to achieve

fame outside their national boundaries. But Ismail Kadare

remains the clear exception. His enormous body of works

includes poetry, novels, stories, literary studies, memoir,

and, increasingly since 2000, interviews and presentations

on Albanian culture and development within the context of

the Balkans, the European Union, and the aftermath of the

Bosnian War and the Kosovo crisis.

The evocative power of Kadare’s novels has inspired

several recent films. His first published novel, Gjenerali i

ushtrisë së vdekur (1963; The General of The Dead Army, 1971),

resulted in the Italian Il Generale dell’armata morte (1983),

starring two of Europe’s most famous actors, Marcello

Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée. Thereafter Prilli i thyer (1978;

Avril Brisé,1982; Broken April,1990) spawned three films, one

Nigerian with an Albanian director (1986), one French with a

French-Albanian director (1987), and the most well-known a

joint Swiss-French-Brazilian effort, Abril Despedaçado (2001,

released in English as Behind the Sun). For Kadare’s darkly

intense novel attracted Walter Salles, the Brazilian

director whose Central Station (1999) won many awards at

international film festivals, including a Best Foreign

Picture nomination at the Academy Awards. In winter 2005,

prize-winning Albanian director Fatmir Koçi began showing

his new film, Man and Woman, adapted from Kadare’s Viti i

mbrashtë (The Dark Year).

Based largely on his novels, translated into the major European, many

Slavic, and even some Asian languages, Kadare has been

recommended for the Nobel Prize repeatedly, achieved

membership in the prestigious French Académie des Sciences

Morale et Politiques, and been named Officier de la Légion

d’honneur. Finally, on 2 June 2005, Albania’s perpetual

nominee for global honors became only the second author to

receive England’s annual Man Booker International Award,

about which the judges’ chair commented, “Ismail Kadaré is a

writer who maps a whole culture - its history, its passion,

its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal

writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to

Homer.” Kadare’s reputation has indeed gone global.

Yet despite his fame, scholars disagree about the merit

of his literary contribution. Some cast him as a

propagandist for Enver Hoxha’s repressive, isolationist

communist rule, or suggest that his failure to adopt a clear

dissident voice marks him as at least complicit with that

regime. To validate their views, they cite Kadare’s favored

status among Albanian artists, which enabled him to publish

and travel abroad, a position virtually unique among

Albanian artists. Others label his primary works epics that

transcend their specific time and space and intentionally,

if subtly, subvert Hoxha’s Stalinistic rule. So Robert

Elsie, the pre-eminent American scholar of modern Albanian

literature, declares:

There can be no doubt that Ismail Kadare was a profoundly dissident writer who, at the same time,led an extremely conformist, if you will, collaborationist life. Dissent in Kadare’s prose up to the fall of the dictatorship was very discreet but ubiquitous. Notwithstanding its subtle nature, it was sufficiently evident at all times to the educated Albanian reader, and this isone of the major factors which contributed to his popularity at home.

Recalling Dostoevsky’s narrator in Zapiski iz mertogo doma

(1861, translated as Notes from The House of the Dead), in 2001

Kadare himself described the writer’s lot under totalitarian

rule in this way:

When a writer lives in a dictatorial system, this means that a normal human being is living in an abnormal system. The whole secret is whether the writer loses or preserves his inner freedom. The inner freedom has nothing to do with the external freedom. A writer can be free in an enslaved world, or he can be enslaved in a free country.

In fact, Kadare emerges in his corpus as one of many artists

within totalitarian Soviet and Eastern European regimes who

chose to tread carefully the precarious tightrope between

praise and critique, flattering the ruling powers while

employing such devices as Aesopian language or historical

allegory to conceal from censors the vision revealed to

their readers.

Twentieth century literary elites often initially

embraced communism’s promise to diminish social inequities

while easing rigid traditions that restricted human freedom.

Whether in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, or Hoxha’s

Albania, young idealists spurned foreign influence on behalf

of a new, indigenous government they hoped would loose the

bonds of traditional institutions and practices that

enslaved their people. Kadare’s early poem, “Përse mendohen

këto male” (What Are These Mountains Thinking About, 1966),

perfectly illustrates this phenomenon, sketching a history

of Albania that lauds the possibilities awaiting the country

through communism. Albania “wandered without knowing where

to go…/Grey and ponderous, as though born of night,”

discovering that “the centuries have gnawed away at your

body/Until your very sinew and ribs were exposed.” Having

“devoured” its children “in blood feuds/ And on these feuds

the minarets and bell towers/ Bestowed their blessings,”

Albania settled into a brief calm after World War II “Until

twilight, the fortresses, hunger, the epic legends/ Jumped

on their backs again,” when it began “waiting for a

leader, /Albania was waiting/ For the Communist Party.” The

poem may indeed exemplify what David Bellos, among Kadare’s

leading English translators, calls his “duty” works,

designed to buy the approval of the communist elite. But it

also voices a youthful hope. Indeed, just as leading

literary artists revealed the truth of their experience with

communism in Koestler’s The God That Failed, Kadare’s mature

works increasingly depicted the ridigity, hypocrisy, and

violence of Hoxha’s system.

While Fatos Lubonja, echoing those Albanian critics who

find Kadare an apologist for Hoxha, harshly critiques

Kadare’s work for its “nationalist-communist syncretism,”

which mythologizes Albania’s history to enhance Hoxha’s

stature, a special kind of resistance nationalism common to

colonized nations further complicates critical judgment of

this author. In the Balkans, many artists believed that

communism would preserve the “indigenous” culture against

the powerful intrusions of foreign cultures, whether the

Ottoman Empire, Russia, or the West. In practice, however,

that ideology proved highly paradoxical, on the one hand

championing indigenous identity, associated with

conservatism and tradition, over its colonized version,

linked to liberalism and modernity, on the other espousing

greater individual freedom. Living in a nation caught

between tradition and modernity, under a political system

that attacked and preserved both, Kadare crafts works that

extol the uniqueness of Albanian traditional culture and the

revolutionary Hoxha government while critiquing both for

their inherently life defying tendencies.

Kadare’s work, meanwhile, has attracted a number of

conflicting labels. Some connect him to the classics, i.e.

Dante, Homer, and the epic poets, while others make more

modern links, to Kafka, socialist realism, and magic

realism(whether of Borges and Marquez or of what critics

have begun to call “Balkan magic realism,” neither of which

Kadare accepts as valid, arguing that the criteria that draw

these labels inhere in literature throughout time).

Moreover, adjectives like “fantastic,” “mysterious,” and

particularly “surreal” abound. But as with writers like

Bosnia’s Meša Selimović, whose Derviš i smrt (1966; translated

as Death and The Dervish, 1996) has likewise been seen to

reflect this apparently “surreal” quality despite its

profound realism, the source of that “surreality” emanates

in the conditions of existence under such totalitarian

regimes as Hoxha’s Albania or the Ottoman Empire. These

contesting terms, each in some way valid, together help to

describe the essence of Kadare’s work, shaped by the bizarre

history of modern Albania.

The son of a civil servant, Ismail Kadare was born 28

January 1936 in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastër

(literally the Silver Fortress, so named for a fourth

century fortress that grew to include the town itself),

which lies between the Gjere mountains and the Drino River.

Often referred to as a “museum city” because of its many

museums and well-preserved old houses and quarter

(considerably damaged during the post-pyramid scheme

disturbances of 1997), Gjirokaster is home to the Tosk, who

speak their own dialect and commonly practice Orthodox

Christianity. Given their geographical situation, these

tribes have historically been more open to outsiders than

the northern Ghegs, whose mountains at once protect and

isolate them. That Enver Hoxha (1908-1985) also came from

this city created a natural bond between the two, a factor

that both rendered Kadare more “visible” to the party, a

potential danger, and helped to sustain his favored position

among Albanian artists.

Kadare’s first ten years, 1936-1946, spanned a

turbulent period in Albania’s chaotic recent history. A

cauldron of contesting forces thus shaped the young boy’s

zeitgeist. The nation had first achieved independence from the

dying Ottoman Empire in 1912, after which came the Balkan

Wars (1912-1913), the Italian occupation of 1918, and a

fledgling post-1921 democracy under the Popular Party of

Xhafer Xpi and his Minister of Internal Affairs, Ahmed Zogu.

In 1922, over strong opposition, Zogu became Prime Minister.

Forced to flee to Yugoslavia in 1924, where he remained

until1928, he returned to Albania and had himself crowned

Zog I, “King of The Albanians.” Italy’s attempts to

penetrate Albania increasingly compromised Zog’s already

shaky rule. When Italian forces finally invaded in 1939,

Zog fled to Greece and Italy’s Victor Emmanuel III replaced

him as Albania’s king. After Zog’s departure, the Albanian

constitution was nullified, its fascist party formed, and

its army absorbed by the Italian military. Yet despite their

status as foreign invaders, the Italians garnered some

support among even patriotic Albanians for defending

Albanian claims to Kosovo against Yugoslavia.

Enver Hoxha first emerged as a potential political

power when the leader of Yugoslavia’s communist party, Josip

Broz Tito, organized the Albanian Communist Party in 1941,

of which Hoxha became first secretary. In 1942, the ACP

created the National Liberation Movement, while non-

communist forces organized their own resistance. During

1942-1945, Albania mirrored Yugoslavia as communists and

nationalists fought both the Italians and the Germans, who

had invaded in 1943, and sometimes one another, while

occasionally carrying out attacks on, or resisting attacks

from, Balkan neighbors over traditionally disputed

territories. After Mussolini’s fall in 1943, Albanians were

able to concentrate their resistance on the Germans.

Meanwhile, in 1944 the communists organized a national

government with Hoxha first as chairman of the executive

committee and leader of the National Liberation Movement

forces and later as prime minister. When the war ended, the

allies recognized Hoxha and his government, as did the

communist government of Tito’s Yugoslavia, whereupon Hoxha

began to consolidate his control. Allying with Yugoslavia,

Hoxha’s government rejected the Marshall Plan in favor of

aid from Tito. But in 1948 Hoxha broke with Tito and

embraced Stalin’s USSR. Kadare revisits this history in many

of his works, and directly in his first published novel,

Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur (1963; translated as The General of the

Dead Army, 1971), the 1975 Nëntori i një kryeqyteti (November of a

Capital City), and the autobiographical novel, Kronikë në gur

(1971, translated as Chronicle in Stone).

Beyond the swirling currents that shaped his outside

world, Kadare’s reading contributed vitally to his aesthetic

development. At ten he encountered Macbeth, which affected

him so strongly that he was moved to copy it over page by

page. From this moment, the power of its word-created world

sustained him in his literary evolution, as evidenced in his

declaration that Shakespeare is the world’s greatest writer,

“the most complete of all, more visionary than the writers

of Antiquity to whom I am also greatly indebted.”

Thereafter, he immersed himself in the nineteenth century

French writers, including Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, as

well as “Le pont des soupirs,” a once popular work by the now

virtually forgotten Michel Zévaco. In this he resembled

many Balkan literati for whom, after the Napoleonic Wars

first opened the region to Western ideas (especially

nationalism), French literature came to symbolize modern

concepts, forms and styles—a bond eroded under communism,

when Russian commonly replaced French in the schools.

In 1954, at just eighteen, Kadare published his first

work, a slim volume of verse aptly titled Frymëzimet djaloshare

(Youthful Inspiration). He had left Gjirokastër to pursue

languages and literature at the University of Tirana, where

he earned a Teacher’s Certificate from the Faculty of

History and Philology in 1956. A second volume of verse,

Ëndërrimet (Dreams), followed in 1957. These collections

established him as an original, if not yet fully polished,

talent.

Meanwhile, Albania’s status as founding member of the

Warsaw Pact in 1955 facilitated warm cultural relations with

the Soviet Union. Thus Kadare won a scholarship to the

Gorky Institute in Moscow, where he studied world literature

until another political storm erupted in 1961. After

Khruschev’s “secret speech” of 1956, which revealed Stalin’s

crimes, Hoxha defended the dead dictator. The USSR’s

growing rapprochement with Yugoslavia further annoyed Hoxha,

who had by then stepped down as prime minister but still

controlled Albania. In 1960 Hoxha took China’s side in the

growing Sino-Soviet dispute, strongly supporting China at

the International Communist Conference in Moscow. Then in

1961 he formally terminated Albania’s tie to the Soviet

Union, embracing Mao instead. At this point, all Albanian

students, including Kadare, were abruptly summoned home.

While in Moscow, Kadare continued to write poetry and

associated with the Russian intelligentsia, including

Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, whose influence some find in

his verse. But he also experienced first-hand the deadening

effect of officially sanctioned policies regulating art,

including pedantic defenses of socialist realism and charges

of “decadence” for any work that did not conform to the

latest definitions. Living the world of Masolit that

Bulgakov portrayed in Master i Margarita (1938; translated as

Master and Margarita, 1967), Kadare began to write his first

novel, La Ville sans enseignes, filled with unsavory underworld

characters, diseased prostitutes, and three unscrupulous

Albanian students who manipulate historical documents for

their own ends. Hardly the stuff of socialist realism, the

novel constituted his first attempt to counter official

hypocrisy. On his return to Albania, a newspaper published

some thirty pages of the text, which the government

immediately banned, unwilling to condone so grim a

representation of Albania. While this effort represents

Kadare’s first venture into the genre that made him famous,

the novel itself did not appear until 1999, in France, in a

form essentially unchanged from the 1959 original.

Though he had begun working in prose, Kadare did not

abandon poetry. His collection Shekulli im (My Century)

appeared in 1961, simultaneously with those of two other

poets, Dritëro Agolli and Fatos Arapi. Their works together

constituted a rebirth of Albanian verse that freed it from

rigid formal and ideological constraints. Fortuitously for

the three, at the Joint Party Congress of 1961 Hoxha, who

saw himself as a reformer, resolved a split between

traditionalists and modernizers. Permitted to continue

their groundbreaking work, these artists exerted a powerful

impact on modern Albanian culture. But of the three Kadare

explored broader themes, including the love lyric, largely

abandoned by Albanian poets. This earned him a cadre of

young Albanian readers. Indeed, his standing soon resembled

that of Yevtushenko, whom the young lionized even as many

critics in and out of the USSR critiqued both his poetry and

his actions. For many of Kadare’s poems from this period,

though innovative in form, overtly tow the party line, as

witness the previously cited “Përse mendohen këto male (What

Are These Mountains Thinking About),” a virtual paeon to the

party.

Nevertheless, at a time when Albanian poetry generally

celebrated the glories of Hoxha’s regime and its brand of

socialist realism, Kadare ventured beyond those boundaries

into the realm of memory and dream, as in “Këto orare

trenash” (Train Schedules -), in which he muses, “Thus pass

the days of your life through the stations of your being/

Filled with voices, noises, signals/ And the heavy ore of

memory. Likewise, in “Kinemaja e vjetër” (The Old Cinema,

1966), he addresses an abandoned cinema “Where no films, not

even reruns, have been shown for a long time.” This “poem

of seats, long and abandoned” evokes his childhood, when “We

too were patched up,

/ Patched up was the Republic, /Time, elbows, States were

patched up.” But “On that bit of screen/We saw a bit of the

whole world, /For the first time. /On six square metres/The

world had no limits, /The world was splendid/ Even though

the screen was patched up.” Interestingly, his “Rekuiem për

Majakovskin” (Requiem for Mayakovski) pays homage to a poet

whose life in some ways parallels his own, a former champion

of the state who grew to satirize it. Kadare here revisits

his Russian experiences, “I ate at the same table with his

assassins,” recalling how “They thumped their chests and

talked of socialist realism/In the presidial chamber of red

velvet/ under the emblem with a star. For “Behind the crowd

of his assassins, whom he knew, /He saw the first clouds of

the counter-revolution darken the sky.” Describing

Mayakovsky’s vision, he reveals his own. In “Poezia”

(Poetry), finally, Kadare’s persona directly addresses his

muse: And you, /Not holding my infidelity against me/

Stroke my hair tenderly/My last stop, / Poetry.”

His earliest novel unpublished, in 1963 his second,

Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur, appeared. The first Albanian novel

released in America, translated throughout the seventies

into major and minor European languages as well as

Vietnamese, this work propelled Kadare onto the world stage.

Uncharacteristically devoid of socialist realist cant for an

Albanian work of that period, it powerfully depicted

Albania’s grim post-war reality.

Already with this novel, the problem of translating

Kadare’s work arose. Before 1994 Albania had signed no

copyright convention. Lacking protection under

international law, Albanian literature was thus free to

anyone who might wish to publish a translation, but off-

limits to legitimate publishers, since extra-legal and so

governed by no laws at all. This accounts for some poorly

translated early Albanian editions of several Kadare works,

most of which do not list their translators. Moreover,

since few writers exist outside Albania with fluency in its

language, many of his novels have simply been translated

from the French, resulting in doubly mediated texts.

Jusuf Vrioni, who died in 2002, became the leading

translator of Kadare into French. Having acquired that

language in France before World War II, upon his return to

Hoxha’s Albania he was arrested for belonging to the upper-

class. In prison, he began translating to avoid going mad

(much as Constance Garnett began translating Russian texts

to occupy herself during pregnancy). Once Vrioni’s

translation of Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur found its way to France

(Indeed, many of Kadare’s works were smuggled out of Albania

and published first abroad, as in the case of Soviet

tamizdat.), where the publishing house of Albin Michel bought

it, an Italian edition followed and the process of Kadare’s

internationalization had begun.

Far from furthering a communist agenda (i.e.

celebrating nationalism and the glories of Enver Hoxha), as

some have claimed, Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur makes a strong case

against war. Implicitly critiquing Hoxha’s government, the

novel details the painful odyssey of an Italian general

assigned to excavate and bring home for burial the remains

of Italian soldiers killed during World War II. With his

uniform, the priest who accompanies him, and the tools he

wields to help him achieve his goal, the general embodies

the West. This motif of an invading power with superior

technology and training weaves throughout Kadare’s work.

But as the general sets about his funereal task in the mud

of bleak Albanian fields, under a steady rain, he begins to

question his purpose and that of the original expedition.

The climax occurs at a rural wedding feast, at which

the general listens to war tales and hero songs that revisit

the eternal suffering of the Albanian people, including that

created by the very dead whom he seeks. Witnessing the

austere reality of these downtrodden people, whose new

rulers have failed to provide them the bounties of the

Marxist ideal, the general’s own foundation crumbles. As

Albanian folk beliefs invade his psyche, his identity

dissolves: The victims defeat the victimizer. But even as

Kadare depicts a West forced to critique its assumptions,

and shows how the core ethos of his own nation colonizes and

debilitates the colonizer, he also highlights Hoxha’s

failure to bring socialist sunshine into the lives of

Albanians.

Following this work of non-socialist realism, Kadare

turned for the first time to another genre that has become

for him a staple: mythology. In 1965 his short novel,

Përbindëshi (The Monster), appeared in the official Tirana

literary journal, Nëntori. It recast material from Homeric

myth, depicting the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. But

the city and its inhabitants shuttle back and forth between

past and present, and characters from then become people of

now. So despite its ideologically appropriate theme, a

righteous people destroyed by the wiles of a materially

advanced invader, its temporal disruption and fluid

identity, so common today in postmodern and postcolonial

literature, unsettled Hoxha’s dogmatic censors, who

condemned and banned it. Perhaps their intuition was

accurate. For as in this case, Kadare has consistently

employed myth to produce allegories within which even

communism can appear a Trojan horse, a Western import that

colonized and enslaved a desperate people locked in a

rigidifying culture.

On the political front, meanwhile, the Chinese Cultural

Revolution began in 1966, dedicated to eliminating

intellectual and artistic freedom. Allied to China after its

rupture with the USSR, Albania underwent its own version.

Perhaps this explains Kadare’s swift departure from

potentially dangerous territories of thematic, stylistic,

and structural innovation for the relative safety of

realism. For he then produced a collection of short

stories, Qteti i jugut (The Southern City, 1967), that clearly

advanced Hoxha’s agenda--to wipe out religion, whether the

Islam of the majority, or the insular Roman Catholicism and

Orthodox Christianity of the minority, thereby freeing women

from its confining strictures. In slices of life from the

“new” Albania, Kadare portrayed the struggle between

traditional and modern culture, as in Hoxha’s ban on

arranged marriage. The censors of course found this text

acceptable. But in fact the women of Albania were (and

still are) constrained by traditional customs.

Yet here, too, Kadare goes beyond merely lauding the

regime. In such stories as “Winter Season at The Café

Riviera,” he also depicts a leadership that secretly

perpetuates tradition. Like other writers from recently

decolonized countries who scrutinize their governments’

predisposition to create and enforce the power of new

institutions from which they exempt themselves

(nationalization, collectivization, etc.), he thus takes aim

at the hypocrisy of Albania’s self-proclaimed “liberators.”

In Dasma (1968; translated as The Wedding, 1972), Kadare

reworked these materials into another realistic novel that

garnered communist approval. Katrina, its protagonist, must

leave the isolated, traditional mountain society of Northern

Albania to work in a communist camp in the more open and

industrialized south. There she encounters new

possibilities and falls in love. Promised to another by her

family, she rejects that match, setting in motion a violent

encounter between her father and the matchmaker that occurs

not far from the wedding itself (a thematic structure that

recalls Tolstoy’s Vlast’ t’my [1886, The Power of Darknes ], Lorca’s

Bodas de Sangre [1933, Blood Wedding], and countless modern

texts focused on the marriage rite as a nexus of conflicting

socio-economic forces). In the wake of the Cultural

Revolution, Kadare here endorses the communist ideal of

freedom from capitalist oppression, under which marriage

transports social and real capital and the ancient besa

(oath) perpetuates Albania’s blood feuds.

Fortunately for Albania’s people, the Cultural

Revolution ended in 1969, and by 1970 Kadare had acquired

sufficient influence to become a member of Albania’s

legislative body, the People’s Assembly. This enabled him

to travel and publish outside the country, a privilege

restricted to a tiny elite. In that year he published

Kështjella (translated as The Castle, 1974). Retreating to the

fifteenth century, he interlaced history and myth to produce

a rousing patriotic work that glorified Albania’s past and

implicitly its Hoxha-led present. Filtered through the

psyche of the Turkish pasha in charge, the novel details the

Ottoman siege of an Albanian fortress during the time of

Skanderberg, Albania’s greatest hero (a Christian-born

convert to Islam who reclaimed his religion and fought

successfully on its behalf against the Turks). While the

Ottoman troops employ all their considerable powers against

an under-armed and smaller Albanian force, the latter

prevail. As one of the victors asserts:

They have made every effort against us, from the huge cannons

to the infected rats. We have withstood and will withstand them. We know that this resistance costs us dearly and maycost

even dearer. But someone had to rise up and stand inthe path of this demented horde, and the choice of History fell on us... Thus, we might have ended our days in peace, by our ploughs and under the shade of the olive trees, but that would have been the peace of death...Those who come after us in thisworld will understand that we have not found it easy to rise inthis gigantic war against the most powerful monster of that time.

Given Albania’s rupture with Stalin, the Soviet invasion of

Czechoslovakia in 1968, which Hoxha had sharply denounced,

Albania’s subsequent withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and

lingering insecurities regarding its neighbors, Greece (with

whom a state of war dating from World War II still existed)

and Yugoslavia, Kështjella mined Albania’s past to empower its

sense of identity in a precarious present. Clearly

embodying what Lubonja calls Kadare’s “nationalist-communist

syncretism,” this work mythologizes the past to foster

nationalism in the present. Interestingly, Kadare

republished this novel in 2003, after the fall of communism,

adding the Christian icons that political exigency had

caused him to exclude from the original.

1971 saw the publication of Kadare’s autobiographical

novel, Kronikë në gur (translated as Chronicle in Stone, 1987).

Tracing the childhood of a young Albanian boy growing up in

Kadare’s hometown, Gjirokastër, it evokes the lived

experience of Albanians before and during World War II. The

narrator’s child vision, which early conjures the fantastic

with the real, matures through the text as it grows to

recognize and accommodate the increasing strangeness of

actual images and events. The italicized remarks of an

older voice, as well as the “Fragment of a Chronicle” or

“News from Granny Sose (in lieu of a chronicle), frame each

of its chapters. The first begins: “a strange city… like some

prehistoric creature that was not clawing its way up the mountainside…It was

hard to believe that under this powerful carapace the tender flesh of life survived

and reproduced…. Many things in it were simply bizarre, and others seemed to

belong to a dream…It was not easy to be a child in that city” (11). This

prepares the reader for a portrait of the city that captures

its genuine strangeness—from its ancient source to that

improbable period during which Italian fascists, Nazis, and

Greek partisans swept in and briefly determined the fate of

its occupants.

Kronikë në gur ends by reprising that initial recollection

as the city’s inhabitants, having fled before the Germans,

make their slow return: “Again the tender flesh of life was

filling the carapace of stone.” Critics often label this

work magic realism, linking it to Marquez. But the device

of the child narrator enables Kadare to render the genuinely

“fantastic” nature of both the city itself and its history

during that period. In any case, this text, along with

Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur, remains among Kadare’s most popular.

In 1971 Kadare also wrote the first of many literary

and cultural studies, Autobiografi e popullit në vargje dhe shënime të

tjera (Autobiography of the People in Verse, 1987), which

examined the origins and structures of Albanian folk epics,

legends, and myths. This material has occupied his interest

throughout his career, serving as a source for his fiction

and allowing him to advance his belief regarding the

uniqueness of Albanian folk culture.

From 1967-1970 (a period that includes the Cultural

Revolution), Kadare came under increased scrutiny. Then the

1973 Fourth Plenary Session of the Central Commissioners

issued its crackdown on dissidents. Already in the

spotlight, having authored works that flirted with and

indeed crossed boundaries of various kinds, Kadare exercised

caution to avoid the ranks of those consigned to Albania’s

infamous prison camps. He saw just three choices: “to

conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete

silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a

tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The

Long Winter.” These remarks from 1998 may constitute an

attempt after the fact to rationalize his actions, but his

literary output supports them. In fact, the text he cites,

Dimri i vetmisë së madhe (1973), continues that syncretism that

weds history and nationalist myth, representing both the

politics of the Albanian-Soviet rupture, 1960-61, and its

affect on Albanians’ personal realities.

Still playing it safe, Kadare depicted in Nëntori i një

kryeqyteti (November of a Capital City, 1975) the partisan

struggle against the German occupation of Tirana in 1944,

another celebration of loyal Albanians heroically enduring

against the superior might of an invading Western army. But

while touting the party line, the novel features convincing

characters from all sectors of Albanian life, including some

with complex attitudes toward the events themselves. In

1989-90 Kadare revisited this text, deleting its most

straightforwardly propagandistic portions—including a

chapter in which Hoxha materializes to inspire and guide the

troops. This self-correction of sections originally

designed to curry political favor both diminishes the

evidence of his earlier ties to Hoxha and strengthens the

work’s aesthetics.

Yet in January 1974, half a year after the famous

Fourth Plenary Session, Kadare squandered much of the

political capital these last works brought him by writing

“Pashallarët e Kuq” (The Red Pashas), a poem that satirized the

labyrinthine Albanian bureaucracy. Banned just prior to its

publication in Drita (The Light) in 1975, “Pashallarët e Kuq”

openly condemns communism for betraying its ideals:

Everything may seem fine at the top,Socialist competition, song-singing,Posters and our heroes of socialist labour,On the First of May in the local paper.

Telegrams of congratulation, sunshineAt public meetings and in the verse of young

writers,But, down below,Yes, in the foundations,A black tumor grows slowly. …With what do we fight bureaucracy?…The Red Pashas, beys with party membership cards,Baron-secretaries, petroleum mafia, all lined up,A somber procession, to the chanting of liturgy,They bear the revolution’s coffin to the grave…

The poem in fact went missing for years before materializing

in 2002 in a Tirana archive, which prompted Maks Velo to

write “The Disappearance of Kadare’s ‘The Red Pashas’:

Inquiry into a Literary Crime (Tirana 2002).” In any case,

the government severely reprimanded Kadare for the poem,

halted his publications, and sentenced him to a brief period

of internal exile.

Perhaps that spurred him in 1977 to amplify his 1973

version of Dimri i vetmisë së madhe, published as Dimri i madh (The

Great Winter). Here Besnik Struga, a Tirana journalist sent

to Moscow as an interpreter for the Albanian delegation,

makes his first appearance (returning in Koncert, 1988, which

depicts the breakup with China). Kadare constructed this

“mythic” narrative, in which the leader of his small,

backward country successfully confronts the mighty Soviets,

from Hoxha’s memoirs and the actual minutes of the

negotiations that had ended his study at the Gorky

Institute. This favorable portrait of Hoxha redeemed some

of Kadare’s lost status.

But the following year he drew on his experience at the

Gorky Institute for the autobiographical Muzgu i perëndive të

stepës (Twilight of the Gods of The Steppes). Echoing

“Requiem to Mayakovsi,” Kadare here represented Moscow’s art

world, devoting a chapter to Nobel Laureate Boris Pasternak.

A prominent icon for the role of the Soviet artist,

Pasternak early supported communism but was expelled from

the Union of Soviet Writers for his later portrait of the

Russian Revolution and Stalinism in Dr. Zhivago (written in

1956, first published in Italy and America in 1957, and only

published in the USSR in 1959, to a hostile critical

reception). But the Soviet milieu and the fate of Pasternak

mirrored that of Albanian writers and, to some extent,

Kadare himself. Ultimately, then, this critique of the

Soviets by a carefully watched but clearly favored writer

(who began it in the Moscow that had kept Pasternak from

accepting his prize) simultaneously served Hoxha’s agenda

and masked an implicit attack on Hoxha’s own policies.

As if to counter any possible misreadings of Muzgu i

perëndive të stepës, Kadare again returned to safer ground, in

both Komisioni i festës (The Celebration Commission, 1977) and

Pashallëqet e mëdha (The Great Pashalics, 1978) rendering the

nineteenth century period of Ottoman occupation and Albanian

unrest. Komisioni i festës recounted an heroic martyrdom-- the

slaughter of southern Albanian rebel chiefs and their

families gathered at Monastir to celebrate a truce that

proved only an Ottoman ploy. Pashallëqet e mëdha told of Ali

Pasha, the so-called Lion of Janina, famed throughout the

southern Balkans for his cruelty, yet elevated by Albanians

to hero status for his defiance of Constantinople. Having

created his own small empire through tact and guile, Ali

Pasha was finally captured and beheaded. In both works

Kadare’s celebration of traditional Albanian heroes and the

deceit of Turks furthers the nationalist-communist agenda as

it allegorizes Albania’s relations with outside powers,

particularly the Soviets and, increasingly, the Chinese.

For Hoxha had begun to criticize China in 1976 for its

overtures to the US and in 1977 purged his top military

leaders in the wake of the alleged “Chinese Conspiracy.”

Finally, China severed economic and military ties with

Albania in 1978, leaving it virtually isolated.

From this period too came Ura me tri harqe. Triptik me një

intermexo (1978; translated as The Three-Arched Bridge, 1994),

which both echoes Ivo Andric’s Na Drini cuprija (1945;

translated as The Bridge on the Drina, 1959) in its focus on

immurement and repatriates that motif from Yugoslavia to

Albania. Serving both nationalism and Hoxha’s communism,

Kadare the mythographer here sets forth, as he does in other

texts (including his literary studies), the myth that

Albanians descend directly from the original Illyrians and

so constitute the only culture indigenous to the Balkan

peninsula. Through the ritual of human or animal sacrifice

(extremely common throughout the Balkans whether in medieval

Serbian lays or Serbian-Muslim Nataša Radojcic-Kane’s 2002

novel Homecoming), he highlights the appropriation of

Albanian myths by invading foreign powers for their own

ends. Set in 1377, just prior to the Turkish occupation,

the novel follows the building of a three-arched bridge in

southern Albania by a foreign group that has secured the

right to do so by stealth. When locals find a mason immured

at the foot of an arch, an Albanian lord with ties to one of

the groups retains a monk, Gjon, to unravel the mystery.

Recapitulating the exploitation of Albanian simplicity

by outsiders with greater material power, the novel appears

ideologically safe. But the priest’s function as narrator

deconstructs that surface reading. For he comes to see that

the builders played on Albanian superstitions to hide a

crime designed to protect their interests from a powerful

rival. His discerning eye thus constitutes a riposte to

Hoxha’s almost militant atheism, which saw the clergy as

reactionary forces in Albanian culture and carriers of

superstition. Moreover, Gjon apprehends both the outsiders’

deception and the reality that the blindly superstitious

ordinary Albanians are complicit in their victimization.

Through this narrator Kadare not only skewers powerful

foreign interests and indigenous collaborators (as he had in

“Pashallarët e Kuq”), but also the insulated Albanians

themselves. This essential multivalence establishes the

paradigm for most of Kadare’s later works.

In 1978 Kadare also published Prilli i thyer (translated as

Broken April, 1990), which in its French edition captured the

imagination of the West (as shown by the three films it

engendered). Here, too, he weaves history and myth into a

multivalent braid. This dark novel unfolds in the near-past

of pre-war Albania, in the northern Albanian mountains still

ruled by the kanun, the medieval Code of Lekë Dukagjinit

embodied in the blood feud, which, suppressed by Hoxha,

reappeared after the fall of communism. In its spare plot,

tradition and modernity collide. The young mountaineer Gjorg

becomes a pawn forced to enact his role in the blood feud.

Having killed a familial enemy according to the code, now

awaiting his prescribed death at the hands of the enemy’s

avenger, he questions his fate even while preparing to

fulfill it, causing one critic to describe the novel as “The

Castle without K.” Meanwhile, an educated urban couple

honeymoons in the mountains because the writer-husband

exalts the mythic grandeur of those subject to the Code,

linking them to Homer’s Greece.

This text, too, sustains opposing readings. It

critiques the traditional rigidity of the kanun, thus

validating Hoxha’s goal of modernization. Yet even as it

parodies the romantic vision and passivity of a Westernized

elite that transforms impoverished Albanians into cartoons

from Greek myth, the novel endows Gjorg with the gragic

weight of myth through the empathy of the new bride, who

scorns her husband’s tainted vision. Further, the

ridiculed husband resembles Kadare himself, who will later

advise Walter Salles, the director of the recent Brazilian

film version, to steep himself in Aeschylus so that he might

grasp more fully the tragic core and universal scope of the

Albanian text. Thus Kadare both celebrates and critiques

traditional Albanian culture.

Prilli i thyer likewise satirizes Hoxha’s bureaucracy,

recalling “Pashallarët e Kuq.” For embedded in the novel’s

core, in the Orosh Castle to which the blood-touched bring

their blood tax, resides the steward of the blood. As the

principal tax collector and pawn of the central authority,

he detests those who criticize the besa as having been

reduced to “a capitalist enterprise carried on for the sake

of profit.” But after meeting Gjorg and the honeymooners,

he, too, begins to question his role in “the machinery of

death” and comes to recognize his own complicity, as someone

who should really act as “chief instigator of feuds and acts

of vengeance” to fill the Orosh family coffers. “Blood-

sick,” he leaves the castle, rejecting the very authority by

which he once defined himself. Thus at the center of this

mythic-historical novel lies an unstable sign that points

directly to contemporary Albania, to Hoxha, and, perhaps, to

the writer himself.

Also in 1979 another study of the Albanian hero songs,

Mbi eposin e Kreshnikëve (On the Epic of the Frontier Warriors),

appeared in Tirana as On the Lay of the Knights). In this text

Kadare again puts forward his view that Albanian folk

materials predate those of the South Slavic tradition,

whether Serb or Bosnian—a position that scholars have been

unable to verify. But the reading is fully consistent with

his treatment of the Albanian rhapsodes in both Nënpunësi i

pallatit të ëndrrave (1981; translated as The Palace of Dreams, 1993)

and Dosja H (1990; translated as The File on H, 1997).

Kadare followed this work with Kush e solli Doruntinën

(1980; translated as Doruntine, 1988). Using the popular

medieval legend of Constantine and Doruntine--in which after

his death a brother fulfills a besa (vow) made earlier,

returning his sister to her dying mother far away--Kadare

reshaped the materials into a mystery whose source a low-

level bureaucrat must determine in order to preserve the

interests of church and state. Here, too, the power of the

indigenous Albanian culture, with its strong familial bonds

and its loyalty to the besa, collides with that of the

political institutions seeking to maintain control, a

dynamic operative in Hoxha’s Albania.

In 1981 appeared the earlier-mentioned Nënpunësi i pallatit

të ëndrrave, which many consider among Kadare’s finest novels,

often comparing it to Kafka and Orwell. For although the

novel has an actual historical context, the late nineteenth

century heart of the dying Ottoman Empire, it unfolds as an

allegory of abusive power that applies to both Turkish and

communist oppression of Albania. Again a low-level

bureaucrat occupies its center. Mark-Alem, the son of an

ancient family known for its loyal public service, obtains

an entry-level position in the Tabir Surrail, the Palace of

Dreams, which exists to help the central authority monitor

even the dreams of its subjects. In this way it hopes to

prevent rebellion and retain total power (here recalling

Philip Dick’s 1956 science fiction short story, “Minority

Report”). Painstakingly considering each dream, fearful of

being demoted for doing a poor job but intuiting his

potential impact on the dreamers, the young protagonist

immediately grasps how subjective the readings are. Yet he

must fulfill the task or face repercussions to himself and

his family. Some critics find the novel humorous. If so,

it belongs to the black comedy of Kafka and Beckett, as it

reflects the tragic funhouse of distorted mirrors that

characterized human existence in Ottoman Turkey and Hoxha’s

Albania.

Nënpunësi i pallatit të ëndrrave continues Kadare’s

preoccupation with the collision between Albanian national

folk culture and the state. That the family’s Albanian

name, shed in deference to their status as Ottoman insiders,

is Quprili (bridge), weaves into the allegory that mythic

strand Kadare first manipulated in Ura me tri harqe. Once

again the bridge itself becomes a contested myth, as Bosnian

guslars compete with their Albanian counterparts in singing

its tale. Moreover, this link to Albanian folk culture

renders the Quprili family’s identity problematic to Turkish

authorities. In fact, Marc-Alem’s self-conscious reading of

a dream involving a bridge, which at first he deems of

little relevance, causes the death of his nationalist uncle

while increasing his own power.

Finally, Nënpunësi i pallatit të ëndrrave persuasively evokes

the vicissitudes and essential instability of life under a

totalitarian regime in which purely subjective and often

self-serving responses, disguised as “political acumen,”

determine government policy toward individuals, including

swift and “effective” punishment, whether liquidation or

prison. It likewise shows how the state rewards suppression

of nationalist identities and punishes those who would claim

them. But the state in question, while identified as

Ottoman, mirrors Hoxha’s Albania. Indeed, this text was

promptly banned by the regime.

In 1980 Hoxha chose Ramiz Alia as his successor over

Mehmet Shehu, an opponent of isolationism who died

mysteriously in 1981 after being accused of spying for

Yugoslavia. Alia gradually took over from Hoxha, who

retired in 1983. Moreover, Yugoslavia’s Tito had died in

1980, destabilizing that neighborly rival. The uprisings in

Kosovo that following introduced a new thread into Balkan

politics generally, and Albania in particular. The one-time

Serb majority in Kosovo, originally an autonomous region

under the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia, had traditionally

regarded the territory as their motherland, and the Serbian

Aleksandar Ranković harshly oppressed Albanian Kosovars

during his reign as head of Yugoslavia’s secret police. In

1963 Kosovo became a province, and the growing Albanian

population hoped this would bring greater autonomy. By 1981

the Kosovars, already 77.5% of Kosovo’s population, demanded

full republic status, which would remove them from Serbia’s

authority. Their request was denied, and the speech

Milošević delivered to his Serb supporters there initiated

his rise to power, the end of Yugoslavia, and the full-blown

Kosovo crisis of 1999.

During this difficult period, Kadare came under direct

attack at the 1982 assembly of the League of Albanian

Writers and Artists. Its president, Dritëro Agolli, who

with Kadare had first emerged in the fifties as a major

poet, accused his fellow artist of creating works whose base

in history and folklore rendered them inappropriately

ambiguous. Since the state publishing house boasted a short

story editor who less rigidly enforced the party conventions

than did its resident editor of novels, from 1977 to 1986

Kadare published a number of innovative short stories, some

of them actually short novels, in Emblema e dikurshme (Signs of

the Past, 1977), Gjakftohtësia (Cold Bloodness, 1980), and Koha

e shkrimeve (Epoch of Writings, 1986), that stretched generic

boundaries in structure and style. Among them, Krushqit janë të

ngrirë (The Wedding Procession Turned to Ice) constituted

Kadare’s first attempt to treat directly the problem of

Kosovo, wherein the creation myths of cohabiting populations

rendered them rivals.

Kadare built this tale around a folk belief that the

procession of those whose wedding transgresses clan codes

would transform into ice before reaching its destination.

Then he set it in Pristhina, Kosovo’s capital, exploring two

days in the life of a Kosovar Albanian doctor during the

period of unrest. Again he destabilizes realism by

inserting strange events whose sources cannot be clearly

determined. Did Serbs or Albanians set them in motion? The

doctor must finally choose between her loyalty to

Yugoslavia, of which she is a citizen, and her tie to her

people. Given its political stance, Yugoslavia banned it.

Also appearing in Koha e shkrimeve, Viti i mbrapshtë (The Bad

Year) focuses on 1914, fateful for both Europe and the new

Albanian state. A comet that appears in the sky over

Albania comes to symbolize the chaos that grips the country

after the Europeans choose the German Prince Wilhelm zu Wied

as its ruler. Vying forces both within and outside the

country begin to compete for power. A rumor that the prince

will undergo circumcision as a gesture of good will to the

Muslim population he hopes to win over to his authority sets

the plot in motion, while the urban elite come under

scrutiny, together with mountain warlords, invading

neighbors, and Albanian diplomats trying to decipher what a

Turkish gift of baklava to the British consul might portend.

Once more Kadare’s particular way of playing with history,

genre, and myth invokes with the dark comedy of Hoxha’s

tragic regime. Indeed, the blurb hyping the 2005 film

adapted from this novel declares, “Man and Woman, though,

doesn’t tell old romantic tales; its drama—if not its

solution—is taken wholly from the present.”

Finally, Kadare published Nata me hënë (1985), which was

banned by the regime after a few months. Here Kadare again

foregrounds the hypocrisy of Albanian communism regarding

the liberation of women, one of the mainstays of its

original platform. When his innocent protagonist wonders to

a potential beau about whether love as emotion varies

according to gender, the rumor mill takes over. Ultimately,

a meeting of her peer workers requires that she document her

virginity to prove her moral purity. This young woman’s

humiliation suggests that despite Hoxha and Alia,

traditional gender roles derived from patriarchy remain

powerful in Albania. But more importantly, it shows how

Hoxha’s regime espoused the people’s liberation from

tyrannical traditions while wielding societal pressure to

subjugate the individual. The ban on the novel, later

published in French and Albanian in 1991 and 1992

respectively, perfectly underscores this point.

In the latter eighties, Albania’s fortunes began to

shift. Hoxha died in 1985 (five years after Yugoslavia’s

Tito), Alia took total control of the party and the country,

and in 1987 Greece finally ended its state of war with

Albania, which had endured since the end of World War II.

When Greece and Albania entered into a number of long-term

agreements, the period of Albania’s total estrangement from

its neighbors ended. Meanwhile, at the Eighth Plenum of the

Central Committee in 1989, Alia’s announcement of necessary

economic changes brought angry demonstrations.

Amid this confusion, Kadare published Koncert në fund të

dimrit (1988; translated as The Concert, 1994). Spotlighting

Albania’s breakup with China, this novel shared Dimri i madh’s

epic scope, themes, structures, literary devices, and

principal characters. Kadare had begun the text as the

rupture occurred but completed it only in 1988, with the end

of Albania’s isolation. Critiquing ideologues of all

persuasions, the novel offers a portrait of Mao’s

“occidentalizing” that reflects Hoxha’s own paranoia. Once

again Kadare’s unique brand of realism evokes a nightmarish

world strangely akin to that of the allegorical Nënpunësi i

pallatit të ëndrrave, wherein individuals live under threat of

random persecution based on subjective readings of absurd

signs. This text, too, was banned by the regime.

By 1990 the situation in Albania was rapidly

deteriorating. Demonstrations occurred from January through

July and the government reacted by declaring a state of

emergency before showing signs of capitulation. Despite

Alia’s diplomatic gestures toward the Soviet Union, itself

rapidly unraveling, and the United States, as well as

reforms of the criminal code and the courts, the unrest

continued.

Against this backdrop Kadare published Dosja H (The File

on H, 1997), revisiting in a lighter vein the northern

mountains of Prilli i thyer. This riff on Albert Lord’s The Singer

of Tales (1960) reworks material about which Kadare cares

deeply. Lord’s text, building on the scholarship of his

mentor, Adam Parry, argues that a direct link exists between

the Bosnian Muslim epic songs and Homer’s verse. Kadare

inverts that finding, tracing instead the Albanian “odyssey”

of two young American who connect Homeric verse to the hero

songs of Albanian mountaineers. The tale emerges through

the consciousness of a clumsy spy for the Albanian secret

police, dispatched by a suspicious local bureaucrat. While

the latter’s wife enjoys the exotic charms of the two naïve

foreigners, the local peasants, urged on by a Serbian monk

who believes Serbian songs pre-date the Albanian, rifle the

scholars’ quarters and destroy all their tapes of local

rhapsodes. Preparing to travel home empty-handed, the two

accidentally discover that their adventure has been woven

into Albanian epic, which validates their thesis.

Though set before World War II, the novel captures the

intrigue and xenophobia of Hoxha’s postwar regime, which

feared distant foreigners less than rival neighbors,

Yugoslavia, the USSR, and even Greece (until, of course,

China became suspect as well). And like the foreign

companies of Ura me tri harqe, the Serb manipulates indigenous

superstitions for his own end—the theft of Albania’s

cultural heritage. But if its gentle humor seems to chide

both Serbs and Albanians for their competing claims to

primacy, the novel ultimately validates Kadare’s nationalist

thesis, articulated in his earlier literary studies, that

Albanian oral epics surpass in age and authenticity those of

the South Slavs. Given Hoxha’s death and a dying communism,

the cultural nationalism here displayed must belong to

Kadare himself.

In 1990 Kadare also penned another major literary

study, Eskili, ky humbës i madh (Aeschylus, The Great Loser), in

which he details his admiration for this first great

tragedian of classical Greek drama, whom he connects to

Albanian literature. Tracing the schema of Aeschylus’ seven

extant plays, he also attempts to read the mind of the

playwrite, who in this work mirrors Kadare, the state artist

whose task is to portray the national culture in his work.

In the early fall of 1990, Ftesë në studio appeared, which

included a collection of poems by Kadare, his translations

from classical Greek, Chinese, French, Romanian, and

Russian, and the first in a series of pieces on contemporary

events in politics and art. But his comments regarding

contemporary Albanian dissident writers who either emigrated

or were imprisoned, revealing personal biases and

grievances, lack the complexity that enriches his fictions.

Just two months before the communist dictatorship of

Albania at last collapsed in October 1990, the French

government granted Kadare political asylum and Albania’s

most famous writer fled the country. In a 2005 interview he

said of his strangely timed departure:

I could have left Albanian during Hoxha’s lifetime. In fact, the opportunity presented itself twice. But at that time leaving would haveachieved nothing. In contrast, in 1990, when I finally decided to leave, the possibility of the country opening up to democracy really existed. Iwas convinced that the country needed a shock if it was to shake off its last remaining inhibitions.

His exodus did cause a stir. To some it called for action

on behalf of change; to others it smacked of political

opportunism. In any case, after arriving in Paris with his

writer wife, Elena Gushi Kadare (author of the first novel

by a woman ever published in Albania, in 1970), and their

two daughters, he became not just a famous writer, but also

a public spokesman for Albania, its interests in the

Balkans, and the importance of peace in the region.

A barrage of pieces about the times followed, beginning

with an article in Le Monde that explained his flight to

Paris. Then came Nga një dhjetor në tjetrin (From One December to

the Next, 1991), a personal history of the period from 1989

to1990, which appeared simultaneously in France as Printemps

albanais (translated as Albanian Spring, 1994). This text

included Kadare’s correspondence with then President Ramiz

Alia in May 1990, in which he urged Alia to open Albania, as

well as observations on dictatorships generally and

Albania’s in particular. Like Ftesë në studio, it lacks the

complexities and subtlety of his best fictional work,

showcasing instead his personal grudges and desires. Pesha e

kryqit (The Weight of the Cross, 1991) continued this

exploration, printed with Ftesë në studio as Invitation à l’atelier de

l’écrivain suivi de Le Poids de la croix (Invitation to the Writer’s

Studio and The Weight of the Cross, 1991). The three works

showcase a “national” writer buffeted by the capricious

winds of Hoxha’s Stalinist regime, always subject to the

whim of the master. Yet unlike such works as Milosz’s Native

Realm (1958), in which Eastern Europe’s tragic history

emerges from the narration of the author’s struggles, these

texts focus more on Kadare than Albania.

During his years of residence in France, Kadare became

a member of the French Academy and something of a media

celebrity, granting interviews to journals, publishing

increasingly on the political and cultural history of

Albania, and holding forth on Balkan events. But he has not

stopped his literary production. Nor has his style and

content altered, despite his freedom from Albania’s

oppressive politics. He continues to wed history and myth,

the fantastic and the real. In 1990 his banned early work,

Përbindëshi, appeared in France as Le Monstre. Pirimida (1991;

translated as The Pyramid, 1996) recounts the building of a

pyramid in ancient Egypt. Begun as a short story in the

newborn opposition newspaper, aptly entitled Rilindja

Demokratike (Democratic Renaissance), the novel directly

invokes a central emblem of Hoxha’s regime, the great marble

pyramid topped with its huge red plastic star, built to show

his power. This monument came to signify the enormous waste

of labor and money on utterly useless structures (as in the

bunkers that dot Albania’s landscape) expended by its

communist “father” at a time when his “children” languished

in poverty and isolation from the rest of the world. So in

the novel the building of a pyramid in ancient Egypt mirrors

the squandered human resources, cruelty, and final futility

of Hoxha’s regime.

Stored in a French bank vault until the regime’s end,

L’Ombre (The Shadow, 1994) reshaped material Kadare had

written in 1984-85, in which an Albanian movie director

travels to France. In this way, Kadare contrasts two

different universes: the open West and hermetically sealed

communist Albania. In Shkaba (1996, The Eagle), meanwhile,

a long story rather than a novel, the protagonist runs a

mundane errand, only to fall into an alternative reality, a

town that resembles his own, but from which no escape exists

beyond the legendary eagle whom one must ply with meat,

human flesh, or one’s soul. This Faust-like allegory

addesses the fate of countless Albanians, among them Kadare,

who ran afoul of the regime in ways they might never know

and faced internal exile. The eagle here signifies that

power which many, including the author himself, fed in order

to survive in Hoxha’s Albania.

Spiritus, roman me kaos, zbulesë dhe cmërs, (Spiritus, 1996)

unfolds as another in Kadare’s series of mythic histories,

this one set in post-communist Albania. A group of

foreigners touring Eastern Europe in search of the exotic

hear that in Albania a spirit has been captured from the

dead. The spirit in question is, in fact, an “ear,” or

listening device, buried with a dead actor. For the aging,

paranoid despot has commanded that his spies plant bugs

virtually everywhere. The Hoxha-figure here resembles the

Mao of Koncert.

Dialog me Alain Bosquet (Dialogues with Alain Bosquet,

1996) continues the trend of interview-like works that

address aspects of Kadare’s writing and history, hero tales

in which Kadare emerges the literary dissident who fed the

eagle when necessary in order to buy the right to shape

allegories that condemned it. Yet while Kadare’s fictional

universe swirls with complexities, filled with contestation

as it invokes his highly politicized reality, the

straightforward assertions of his monologic voice prove

problematic. Even so, these pieces constitute important

tiles in the mosaic of Kadare’s life and work.

In 1998 Kosovo began to explode, resulting in the

crisis and NATO bombings of 1999. Having concerned himself

with Kosovo since the eighties, Kadare published Tri këngë zie

për Kosovën (translated as Elegy for Kosovo, 2000), once more

melding history and myth to shape a powerful allegory in

three short stories. Set before and just after the Battle

of Kosovo in 1389, when a joint force of Albanians and Serbs

lost to the Ottoman Turks, the first piece focuses on the

allied minstrels, their traditional role to sing their

ancient rivalry and so rouse the home troops to glory. Here

charged with raising the spirits of Albanians and Serbs

together, they fail. The second story details their flight

from the Field of Blackbirds to a West that finds them

alien. Invited to sing of the joint battle, they can only

intone the same old songs of ancient rivalries. In the last

story, the dead Sultan Ahmed, perhaps murdered by a Serb

hero, perhaps by Ottoman strategists hoping for the ascent

of his oldest son, surveys the devastation of the Balkans,

including its most recent manifestation, that followed the

burial of his blood on that field in Kosovo (a macabre

historical fact). At first blaming the Balkan tribes

themselves, ultimately he locates this violence in the

presence of his blood, sign of imperial ambition and

colonial desire. Here Kadare exposes the roots of conflict

in the Balkans not by indicting any single group, but by

implicating those power-hungry leaders who manipulate

nationalist myths and utopias to promote their own political

agendas. “Bound by ancient stones,” the minstrels can only

transport their stock-in-trade, traditional myths. They

remain incapable of shaping new ones that reflect a changed

reality. Interestingly, while emanating in the Kosovo

crisis, this text reads as a gloss on the role of the

artist, indeed of Kadare himself, under Hoxha.

In 1999 Kadare returned to an Albania no longer

isolated from the world. But he continues to shuttles back

and forth between his home and France. He has also kept up

a steady publication pace. Ikja e shërgut (The Stork’s Flight)

comprises three short fictions that take as their focus

various icons of communist Albania: a hunting lodge that

once served the leaders of Fascist Italy as a vacation

escape, then Hoxha and his circle as both a hotel and a

space in which to commit crimes undetected; the history of

the Albanian Writers’ Union; a famed Albanian poet who lost

everything to the regime but his memory of a celebrated love

affair. Lulet e ftohta të marsit (2002; translated as Spring Flowers,

Spring Frost, 2002) satirizes post-communist Albania, both

massively chaotic and still under tight political control.

Set in the northern Albania of Prilli i thyer, it interweaves a

lovelorn artist, the revival of the blood laws by political

powers who hope thereby to control art, and the legend of a

woman who marries a snake, to highlight once more Albania’s

vulnerability to the political exploitation of its

traditions, as true of its “new” openness as of Hoxha’s old

rigidity.

Jeta, loja dhe vdekja e Lul Mazrekut (The Life, Game, and Death

of Lul Mazneki, (2002) is a love story, Stinë e mërzitshme në

Olymp (A Boring Season on Olympus, 2002) a tragic drama.

Pasardhësi (2003; translated as The Successor, 2006), meanwhile,

explores the strange death of Mehmet Shehu, the man whom

Hoxha passed over in favor of Ramiz Alia and whose reported

suicide may well have been political assassination. Vajza e

Agamemnonit (Agamemnon’s Daughter, 2003) continues Kadare’s

penchant for coupling Greek myth and contemporary history,

in this case also the communist era. Ca pika shiu ranë mbi qelq :

dyzet poezi të zgjedhura (2003) and Kristal (2004) are poetry

collections, while L'Albanie: entre la légende et l'histoire (2004) is

the fitting title of his most recent work, a rumination on

his country that renders in non-fiction prose what his

fictional texts have always delineated: the strange world

of an isolated country whose history reads like myth.

In fall 2004 Kadare visited the United States for the

first time, spending a month as Writer-in-Residence at Bard

College. The prestigious Man Booker Award of June 2005 will

certainly enhance Kadare’s already considerable global

prestige as writer, critic, and historian. Indeed, given

the continuing tensions in Kosovo, the precarious peace in

Bosnia, and the vulnerability of a weakened Serbia, Kadare

seems poised to become the leading spokesman among Balkan

intellectuals. As a final comment on the achievements of

this major literary artist whose ambivalent works point in

as many directions as his career itself, consider the words

of Albanian musicologist Eno Koço, like Kadare trained in

Russia:

I want to stress once again that people in the free world perhaps sometimes forget how privilegedthey are to be able express their thoughts freely,to compose and perform in a completely unrestricted way and to live in democratic societies. We must not forget that under totalitarian systems, in spite of the appellation “socialist,” the regimes were conservative and aesthetic expression was rigidly controlled. In spite of such restrictions, Shostakovich and Kadaré persistently strove to liberate music and literature in their respective countries from communist repression and, thankfully, survived theattempt, though not without a great deal of difficulty and stress.

However history judges him, Kadare has become an

internationally celebrated chronicler of his people. And in

the dream-like contours of his fictional universe, however

remote from our own, resides a transcendent human reality.

Interviews:

Tirthankar Chanda, “A Conversation with the Albanian Writer,Ismail Kadare,” The

Written Word, 33: 9 (1998), <www.france.diplomatie.fr/label!france/ENGLISH/LETTRES/Kadare/kadare.html>;

Shusha Guppy, “Ismail Kadare,” The Paris Review, 147, Summer 1998,

<www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/1105>.

Keida Kostreci, “Kadare: Eastern Europe Needs a Unified West,” New Europe

Review, May 2005, <http://www.neweuropereview.com/English/Kadare-English.cfm.>.

Press Release:

Man Booker Press Release, “Man Booker International Prize 2005,”

<http://www.manbookerinternational.com/media/20050602.php>.

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