Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly put his isolated Balkan homeland on the world literary map with dark allegorical works, died on Monday in Tirana, Albania. Indirect criticism of the country’s totalitarian state. He is 88 years old.
His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, his Albanian editor and head of publisher Onufri Publishing House. , and died in a hospital in Tirana, the capital of Albania.
In a literary career that spanned half a century, Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) wrote dozens of books, including novels and collections of poetry, short stories and essays. He rose to international fame in 1970 when his first novel, The General of the Legion of Death, was translated into French. European critics hailed it as a masterpiece.
Mr. Kadare’s name was mentioned several times as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, but he ultimately failed to receive the honor. In 2005, he won the first Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), which is awarded to a living writer of any nationality for overall achievement in fiction. Finalists include literary giants such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Philip Roth.
British critic and jury president John Carey called Mr. Kadare “a world writer who continues the tradition of Homer’s stories” when awarding the award.
Critics often compare Kadare to the likes of Kafka, Kundera and Orwell. He spent the first thirty years of his career living and writing in Albania, which was then under the control of Enver Hoxha, one of the most brutal and unique dictators of the Eastern Bloc.
Mr. Kadare walks a political tightrope to escape persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents have been executed and some 168,000 Albanians sent to prison or labor camps. He served as a deputy in the Albanian People’s Assembly for 12 years and was a member of the Writers’ Union of the regime. One of Mr. Kadare’s novels, “The Great Winter,” paints a favorable portrait of the dictator. Mr. Kadare later said he wrote the letter to curry favor.
In contrast, some of his finest works, including The Palace of Dreams (1981), subversively attacked authoritarian regimes, circumventing censorship through allegory, satire, myth and legend.
Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that Mr. Kadare “is the supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and face of oppression.”
Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in Gjirokastra, a small town in southern Albania. His father, Halit Kadare, was a civil servant; his mother, Hatixhe Dobi, was a housewife from a wealthy family.
When Hoxha’s communists seized control of Albania in 1944, Ismail was only 8 years old and already immersed in world literature. “When I was 11, I read Macbeth, which struck me like a lightning bolt, and then I read the Greek classics, and nothing could shake me mentally after that,” he told The Paris Review in 1998 recalled during the interview.
As a teenager, however, he was attracted to communism. “There’s an idealistic side to it,” he said. “You think maybe some aspects of communism are good in theory, but you can see it’s terrible in practice.”
After completing his studies at the University of Tirana, the Albanian capital, Kadare was sent to graduate school at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, which he later described as “a factory for the production of dogmatic hacks of the socialist realist school.”
In 1963, about two years after his return from Moscow, The General of the Army of the Dead was published in Albania. In the novel, an Italian general returns to the mountains of Albania 20 years after World War II to exhume and transport the bodies of soldiers; this is a story about the invasion of advanced Western countries into a strange land ruled by ancient laws of blood feud. .
Pro-government critics decried the novel as being too international and not expressing enough hatred of the Italian generals, but it made Mr. Kadare a national celebrity. In 1965, his second novel “Monster” was immediately banned by the authorities after being published in the magazine. “The Paris Review” wrote that in 1970, after the French translation of “The General of the Legion of Death” was published, it swept “Paris’s literary storm”.
Mr. Kadare’s sudden rise prompted surveillance by the dictator himself. To appease the regime, Mr. Kadare wrote “The Great Winter” (1977), a novel celebrating Hoxha’s 1961 break with the Soviet Union. “Faith, which means death”; complete silence, which means another kind of death; or it means tribute, bribery. He said that he chose the third solution and wrote “The Great Winter”.
In 1975, after Mr. Kadare wrote “Red Pasha,” a poem critical of Politburo members, he was exiled to a remote village and banned from publishing for a time.
He responded in 1981 by publishing Palace of Dreams, a scathing critique of the regime. Set in the Ottoman Empire, it depicts a vast bureaucracy dedicated to collecting citizens’ dreams and looking for signs of dissent. Ed described it in a review in The Times as “a moonlit fable about the madness of power – simultaneously murderous and suicidal.” The novel was banned in Albania, but not before it sold out.
Mr. Kadare’s success abroad provided him with a certain sense of security at home. Still, he said, he feared the regime might “kill me and call it suicide.”
To protect his work from tampering after his death, Mr. Kadare smuggled the manuscript out of Albania in 1986 to his French publisher, Claude Durand. The publisher used his trip to Tirana to smuggle in more titles.
After Hoxha’s death in 1985, the regime’s cat-and-mouse game of alternately publishing and banning Mr. Kadare’s works continued until Mr. Kadare fled to Paris in 1990. attack. In 1997, when his name was nominated for the Nobel Prize, an article in the conservative Weekly Standard urged the committee not to award him the Nobel Prize because of his “conscious collaboration” with the Hoxha regime.
In an apparent attempt to insulate himself from such criticism, Mr. Kadare published several autobiographies in the 1990s, in which he said he resisted the regime spiritually and artistically through literature.
“Every time I write a book,” he said in a 1998 interview, “I feel like I’m stabbing a dagger into a dictatorship.”
Writing in the New York Review of Books in 1997, the Oxford University historian Noel Malcolm praised the “atmospheric density” and “poetic tension” of Mr. Kadare’s writing but criticized his defensiveness manner.
“The author’s protest goes too far,” Malcolm wrote, warning that Kadare’s “omissions and omissions” from his “self-promoting work” may do more harm to his reputation than his critics’ attacks. damage. Mr. Kadare’s most important works “occur on a different level than any kind of ideological art, at once more human and more mysterious,” he wrote.
Mr Kadare was thin-skinned, accusing Mr Malcolm of displaying cultural arrogance towards a writer from a small country.
“To treat a writer so casually just because he happens to be from a small country betrays his colonial mentality,” Kadare wrote in a letter to the New York Review of Books.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
After the collapse of communism, Mr. Kadare continued to set his novels amid the suspicion and terror of Hoxha’s regime. However, there are also depictions of Albanians living in 21st century Europe, but still haunted by their country’s blood feuds, legends and myths. His best-known works include The Stone Chronicle (1971); The Three Arches (1978); Agamemnon’s Daughter (1985); its sequel The Successors (2003); and The Accident ( 2010).
Charles McGrath wrote in The Times in 2010 that all his works had a common virtue.
In 2005, after receiving the Booker International Prize, Mr. Kadare said: “In a typical Stalinist regime, the only possible act of resistance is writing.”
Amelia Nirenberg Contributed reporting.
