Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly put his isolated Balkan country on the map of world literature, creating often dark, allegorical works that indirectly criticized the country’s totalitarian state, died Monday in Tirana, Albania. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, director of the Onufri publishing house, his publisher and publisher in Albania, who said he suffered a cardiac arrest at his home and died in a hospital in Tirana , the Albanian capital.
In a literary career that spanned half a century, Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) wrote numerous works, including novels, collections of poems, short stories and essays. He gained international fame in 1970 when his first novel, “The General of the Dead Army,” was translated into French. European critics hailed it as a masterpiece.
Mr. Kadare’s name has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, but the honor has eluded him. In 2005, he received the first Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), awarded to a living writer of any nationality for overall achievement in fiction. Finalists included literary titans such as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.
In awarding the prize, John Carey, British critic and president of the jury, called Mr. Kadare “a universal writer in a narrative tradition that dates back to Homer.”
Critics have often compared Mr. Kadare to Kafka, Kundera and Orwell, among others. For the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, then under the thumb of one of the Eastern bloc’s most brutal and idiosyncratic dictators. Enver Hoxha.
To escape persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents were executed and some 168,000 Albanians were sent to prison or labor camps, Mr. Kadare had to walk a tightrope. He was a member of the Albanian People’s Assembly for 12 years and a member of the regime’s Writers’ Union. One of Mr. Kadare’s novels, “The Great Winter,” painted a favorable portrait of the dictator. Mr. Kadare later said he wrote it to curry favor with the regime.
On the other hand, several of his most brilliant works, including “The Palace of Dreams” (1981), subversively attacked the dictatorship, circumventing censorship through allegory, satire, myth and legend.
Mr. Kadare “is a supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and physicality of oppression,” Richard Eder said wrote in the New York Times in 2002.
Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in Gjirokaster, a town in southern Albania. His father, Halit Kadare, was a civil servant and his mother, Hatixhe Dobi, was a housewife from a wealthy family.
When Hoxha’s communists took control of Albania in 1944, Ismail was 8 years old and already immersing himself in world literature. “At the age of 11, I had read Macbeth, which struck me like lightning, and the Greek classics, after which nothing had any power over my mind,” he recalls in a interview given to The Paris Review in 1998.
However, as a teenager, he was attracted to communism. “There was an idealistic side,” he says. We thought that some aspects of communism might be good in theory, but we saw that the practice was terrible. »
After studying at the University of Tirana in the Albanian capital, Mr. Kadare was sent for postgraduate studies to the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, which he later described as “a factory for fabricating dogmatic hacks from the school of socialist realism.”
In 1963, about two years after his return from Moscow, “The General of the Dead Army” was published in Albania. In this novel, an Italian general returns to the mountains of Albania 20 years after World War II to exhume and repatriate the bodies of his soldiers. It is the story of the West’s invasion of a foreign country, governed by an ancient code of bloody feuds.
Pro-government critics condemned the novel as too cosmopolitan and lacking sufficient hatred for the Italian general, but it made Mr. Kadare a national celebrity. In 1965, the authorities banned his second novel, “The Monster,” immediately after it was published in a magazine. In 1970, when “The General of the Dead Army” was published in a French translation, it “took literary Paris by storm,” wrote The Paris Review.
Mr. Kadare’s sudden notoriety drew scrutiny from the dictator himself. To appease the regime, Mr. Kadare wrote “The Great Winter” (1977), a novel celebrating Hoxha’s break from the Soviet Union in 1961. Mr. Kadare said he had three choices: “comply with my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; or pay tribute, a bribe. » He chose the third solution, he declared, by writing “The Great Winter”.
In 1975, after Mr. Kadare wrote “The Red Pashas,” a poem critical of members of the Politburo, he was banished to a remote village and banned from publication for a time.
In 1981, he published The Palace of Dreams, a damning critique of the regime. Set in the era of the Ottoman Empire, the novel depicts a vast bureaucracy dedicated to collecting the dreams of its citizens, looking for signs of dissent. In his review for The Times, Mr. Eder describes it as a “moonlight parable about the madness of power – murderous and suicidal at the same time.” The novel was banned in Albania, but not before it was out of print.
Mr. Kadare’s success abroad has given him some security at home. However, he said he lived in fear that the regime would “kill him and say it was suicide.”
To protect his work from manipulation in the event of his death, Mr. Kadare smuggled manuscripts out of Albania in 1986 and entrusted them to his French publisher, Claude Durand. The publisher then used his own trips to Tirana to smuggle out other writings.
The cat-and-mouse game in which the regime alternately published and banned Mr. Kadare’s works continued after Hoxha’s death in 1985, until Mr. Kadare fled to Paris in 1990. After the collapse of the regime, Mr. Kadare was attacked by opponents. -communist critics, both in Albania and in the West, who presented him as a beneficiary and even an active supporter of the Stalinist state. In 1997, when his name was being considered for the Nobel, an article in the conservative Weekly Standard urged the committee not to award him the prize because of his “conscious collaboration” with the Hoxha regime.
Apparently to protect himself from such criticism, Mr. Kadare published several autobiographical books in the 1990s, in which he suggested that through his literature he had resisted the regime, both spiritually and artistically.
“Every time I wrote a book,” he said in the 1998 interview, “I felt like I was stabbing the dictatorship.”
In a 1997 article in the New York Review of Books, Noel Malcolm, an Oxford historian, praised the “atmospheric density” and “poetic tension” of Mr. Kadare’s writing but criticized his defensiveness toward critics.
“The author protests too much,” Mr. Malcolm writes, warning that Mr. Kadare’s “elisions and omissions” in his “self-promoting volumes” could damage his reputation more than attacks from his critics. Mr. Kadare’s most important works “are on a different plane, both more human and more mythical, from that of any type of ideological art,” he writes.
In a thin-skinned responseMr Kadare accused Mr Malcolm of showing cultural arrogance towards an author from a small country.
“To take such liberty with a writer simply because he comes from a small country reveals a colonialist mentality,” Mr. Kadare wrote in a letter to the New York Review of Books.
Mr. Kadare is survived by his wife, Elena Kadare, also an author, and his two daughters: Besiana Kadare, Albanian Ambassador to the United Nations, and Gresa Kadare.
After the collapse of communism, Mr. Kadare continued to set his novels in the climate of suspicion and terror of the Hoxha regime. A few, however, depicted Albanians living in 21st-century Europe, but still haunted by the bloody feuds, legends and myths of their nation. His best-known works include “Chronicle in Stone” (1971); “The Three-Arch Bridge” (1978); “Agamemnon’s Daughter” (1985); its sequel, “The Successor” (2003); and “The Accident” (2010).
All his works shared a strength, Charles McGrath wrote in the Times: in 2010. Mr. Kadare is “apparently incapable of writing a book that is not interesting.”
In 2005, after winning the Booker International Prize, Mr. Kadare said: “The only act of resistance possible in a classic Stalinist regime was to write. »
Amelia Nierenberg contribution to the report.
