Ismail Kadare, Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly wrote his isolated Balkan homeland on the world’s literary map, creating works that were often allegorical, dark and obliquely critical. the country’s totalitarian state, passed away in Tirana, Albania, on Monday. He was 88 years old.
His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, head of Onufri Publishing House, his editor and publisher in Albania, who said that he had suffered a cardiac arrest at his home and died at a hospital in Tirana, capital of Albania.
In a literary career spanning half a century, Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) has written numerous books, including novels and collections of poetry, short stories and essays. He became internationally famous 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 many times for the Nobel Prize, but this honor did not come to 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. The finalists include big names in the literary world such as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.
In presenting the prize, John Carey, a British critic and chairman of the board, called Mr. Kadare “a universal writer whose storytelling tradition dates back to Homer.”
Critics often compare Mr. Kadare to Kafka, Kundera and Orwell, among others. For the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, at the time under the grip of one of the Eastern Bloc’s most brutal and eccentric dictators, Enver Hoxha.
To escape repression 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. politics. He served 12 years as a delegate in the Albanian People’s Assembly and was a member of the regime’s Writers’ Union. One of Mr. Kadare’s novels, “The Great Winter,” portrays the dictator positively. Mr. Kadare later said he wrote it to ask for favors.
On the contrary, some of his best works, including “The Palace of Dreams” (1981), attacked the overthrow of dictatorships, bypassing censorship through allegory, satire, myths and legends.
Mr. Kadare “is a supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and morphology of oppression,” says Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times in 2002.
Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in the town of Gjirokaster in southern Albania. His father, Halit Kadare, was a civil servant; His mother, Hatixhe Dobi, was a homemaker in a wealthy family.
When Hoxha’s communists took control of Albania in 1944, Ismail was eight years old and already immersed in world literature. “At 11 I read Macbeth, which struck me like a thunderbolt, and the Greek classics, and after that nothing could tame my spirit,” he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Paris Review.
However, as a teenager he was attracted to communism. “There’s an idealistic aspect to it,” he said. “You think that maybe certain aspects of communism are good in theory, but you can see that in practice it’s terrible.”
After studying at the University of Tirana, the Albanian capital, Mr. Kadare was sent for postgraduate studies at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, which he later described as “a factory for the dogmatic rhetoric of the socialist realist school.”
In 1963, about two years after returning from Moscow, “The General of the Dead Army” was published in Albania. In the novel, an Italian general returns to the Albanian mountains 20 years after World War II to exhume and repatriate the bodies of his soldiers; it’s the story of the advanced West invading a strange land, ruled by an ancient code of blood fights.
Pro-government critics denounced the novel as too international and not sufficiently hateful of the Italian general, but it made Kadare a national celebrity. In 1965, the government banned his second novel, “The Monster,” shortly after it was published in a magazine. When “The General of the Dead Army” was published in French in 1970, it “took literary Paris by storm,” wrote The Paris Review.
Mr. Kadare’s sudden popularity has drawn scrutiny from the dictator himself. To appease the regime, Mr. Kadare wrote “The Great Winter” (1977), a novel commemorating Hoxha’s separation from the Soviet Union in 1961. Mr. Kadare said he had three choices: “Follow his beliefs my own belief, that means death; complete silence, which means a different kind of death; or pay a tribute, a bribe.” He said he chose the third option 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 publishing for a time.
His reaction came in 1981, when he published “The Palace of Dreams,” a scathing critique of the regime. Set during the Ottoman Empire, the film depicts a vast bureaucracy that collects the dreams of its citizens, looking for signs of dissent. In his review for The Times, Mr. Eder described it as a “moonlit parable about the folly of power — murder and suicide at the same time.” The novel was banned in Albania but was not sold out.
Mr Kadare’s success abroad has brought him security at home. But he said he still lives in fear that the regime could “kill me and say it was suicide”.
To protect his work from manipulation in the event of his death, Mr. Kadare smuggled the manuscripts out of Albania in 1986, handing them over to his French publisher, Claude Durand. The publisher, in turn, used his own trips to Tirana to smuggle in additional 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 regime collapsed, Mr. Kadare was criticized by anti-communist critics, both in Albania and in the West, who portrayed him as a beneficiary and even an active supporter of the Stalinist state. In 1997, when his name was mentioned for the Nobel Prize, an article in the conservative Weekly Standard urged the committee not to award him the prize because of his “deliberate collaboration” with the Hoxha regime.
Apparently to shield himself from such criticism, Mr. Kadare published several autobiographical books in the 1990s, in which he argued that through his literature he had resisted the regime, both spiritually and artistically.
“Every time I write a book,” he said in a 1998 interview, “I feel like I am stabbing a knife into the dictatorship.”
Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1997, Noel Malcolm, an Oxford historian, praised the “atmospheric density” and “poetic tension” of Mr. Kadare’s work, but criticized his defensiveness toward critics.
“The author protests too much,” Mr. Malcolm wrote, warning that “the omission and omission” of Mr. Kadare’s “self-promotional episodes” could do more damage to his reputation than the attacks merit of his critics. Mr. Kadare’s most important works “take place on a different plane, both more humane and more mythical than any other form of ideological art,” he wrote.
In a fragile responseMr Kadare accused Mr Malcolm of showing cultural arrogance towards an author from a small country.
“To treat a writer so casually simply because he or she comes from a small country is a colonial 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 two daughters: Besiana Kadare, Albania’s ambassador to the United Nations, and Gresa Kadare.
After the fall of communism, Mr. Kadare continued writing his novels amid the suspicion and terror of the Hoxha regime. Some, however, depict Albanians living in 21st-century Europe but still haunted by the bloody feuds, legends and myths of their nation. His most famous works include “Chronicles in Stone” (1971); “Three Arch Bridge” (1978); “Agamemnon’s Daughter” (1985); its sequel, “The Successor” (2003); and “Accident” (2010).
All his works share a common power, Charles McGrath wrote in The Times in 2010. Mr. Kadare “seemed incapable of writing an uninteresting book.”
In 2005, after winning the International Booker Prize, Mr. Kadare said: “The only act of resistance that was possible in the classical Stalinist regime was writing.”
Amelia Nierenberg Contribute report.
