Ismail Kadare (1936-2024): Balkan Conscience

“WHEN ALL IS said and done, can a pile of bones still have a name?” asks the unnamed Italian general tasked with finding the remains of dead Italian soldiers of World War II across Albania in Ismail Kadare’s first novel The General of the Dead Army (1963). How do you write about the vagaries and atrocities of a totalitarian state, with the censors snapping at your heels, from inside that system? A solution is recourse to allegory, to dreams and myths. But for Kadare, steeped in ancient Greek tragedies and Romanticism of particularly the Byronic vari­ety, allegory and metaphor were not a failsafe but the default instrument.

Kadare, who died on July 1 after a career that produced more than 80 novels and a substantial oeuvre of poems (he was a published poet at 17 and a novelist only later), was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, the hometown of Albania’s Stalinist-turned-Maoist dictator Enver Hoxha, and came of age on the very street where Hoxha had once lived. That physical proximity would underpin the paradox of Kadare’s life and career—he was so close to power and yet so far. It made him controversial, with other communist-suppressed Eastern European writers questioning his credentials. Kadare’s response was asking critics to read his books while reiterating that he was not a political writer, that good literature couldn’t be any more political than the Greek plays.

Albania, Muslim along with Bosnia and Europe’s poorest country, remained an outlier even after the fall of the Ottomans. And Hoxha’s Albania was an especially nasty place, its strongman’s paranoia still evident in the anti-invasion underground bunkers along the coast which are today a tourist attraction. After Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, Hoxha refused to de-Stalinise and at the height of the Cultural Revolution, allied with Mao’s China and stuck with Beijing after the Sino-Soviet split, thus making Tirana capital non grata even in Soviet East Europe, and without the benefits of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Kadare did a tightrope walk with every book he was allowed to publish and fell off that rope with every book that was banned.

The Palace of Dreams (1981) portrays a government office that studies dreams, an allegory set in Ottoman Turkey but barely disguised in its attack on totalitarianism. The censors wasted no time in banning it. The Siege (1970) ostensibly deals with the Turkish invasion of the 15th century. The poignant Broken April (1978), about the blood feud as legitimised by ancient law, is a vindication of the Albania of old against communist attempts to create a new identity of a modern state with faceless, soulless individuals. History, myth, folklore, religion, the supernatural—these were essential to Kadare in his allegorical battle against a system that sought to erase the past as easily and as consistently as Milan Kundera’s Czechoslovakia changed street names. Kadare paid his price. A poem indirectly criticising the Party in 1975 saw him banished to the wilderness (literally) and undergoing a trademark apparatchik-monitored self-criticism session.

And yet Kadare was not a dissident. He flattered Hoxha in his 1977 novel The Great Winter. He was one of the few individuals communist Albania allowed to travel abroad and the reputation he gained outside offered him a level of security at home. Much earlier, he had received a government scholarship to the Gorky Institute in Moscow. Later, he was appointed a member of parliament, although he never attended a session. “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,” he said.

Kadare was the first winner of the International Man Booker in 2005. He won the Prince of Asturias Award (Princess since 2014) in 2009, the Légion d’honneur in 2016, and a host of other awards. After Hoxha’s death in 1985, Kadare had asked his successor Ramiz Alia for faster reforms. Instead, by the early 1990s, he was convinced that the regime would double down. The Sigurimi, the secret police, was preparing to arrest intellectuals and suppress mass protests as communism fell in East Europe. He found asylum in Paris. The truth about Kadare and the regime is grey. But his life and career can be condensed to a few words: “The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term. But literature transformed that into

a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship.” He was one of the greatest writers of all time, anywhere.

About The Author

Sudeep Paul

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