Albania under its communist dictator Enver Hoxha was a byword for paranoia, isolation and poverty. It was certainly not known for its cultural life. Yet the writer Ismail Kadare was, as one historian put it, “a rare sturdy flower growing, inexplicably, in a largely barren patch”.
He published more than 80 novels, poems and other volumes, and a million copies were sold globally as his fame spread, initially via France and then in translation into English and many other languages. Navigating the treacherous waters of life under Hoxha, where many were murdered or imprisoned for expressing any kind of dissent, was never easy, and some saw Kadare as compromising too much. But he never doubted the value of what he was doing. “The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term,” he said. “But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship.”
Kadare never wanted to be seen as an overtly political writer, nor would that kind of writing have enabled him to survive. He used instead such genres as the reworking of great mythical stories or legendary tales of Albanian history that perceptive readers could understand as veiled contemporary commentary.
The novel that made his name was The General of the Dead Army, published in 1963. It described the visit of an Italian general to Albania to trace the remains of soldiers killed during the wartime fascist occupation of the country. As he made his way through muddy fields, remote villages and bone-strewn graveyards he encountered a local culture with ancient blood feuds, and began to question his mission. There was a characteristic Kadare mix of the humorous and the macabre.
In Albania 20,000 copies of the novel were eagerly acquired before communist censors noticed that there were none of the customarily fawning references to the glorious party and its leader in Kadare’s work. He was also blamed, as he put it, for “not being optimistic, for not expressing hatred towards the Italian general, for being cosmopolitan”.
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However, the novel enjoyed great international success after it was translated into French. Le Monde called it “astonishing and full of charm”. It was also made into a film starring Marcello Mastroianni. Albanians, said Kadare, “had in me a writer who connected them with the world”. All this gave him some protection even from Hoxha, who had studied in France and liked to think of himself as a kind of francophile intellectual.
“He didn’t want to be seen as an enemy of writers,” Kadare believed. “Of course, he could have killed me in a ‘car crash’, or by ‘suicide’, as he did many others.” Kadare’s success meant however that he was now “more watched, because I was considered dangerous”.
His second novel, The Monster, portrayed a version of the Trojan horse myth where its occupants represented a kind of permanent free-thinking presence while all around them a tyrannical regime stoked its citizens’ fear. “Because the totalitarian regime is founded on this paranoia about threats from outside,” Kadare explained, “it needs an enemy to justify repression.” The authorities banned the novel after publication but copies still circulated clandestinely among Kadare’s many admirers.
In response to a poem published in 1975, The Red Pashas, in which bureaucrats wore the bloodstained coats of the murdered bourgeoisie, Kadare was more directly punished, sent for some months to a re-education camp in the provinces. He did not, however, suffer the most brutal treatment that was inflicted on many of the regime’s critics. He was a member of the Albanian parliament, paid a salary by the Writers’ Union, and allowed to own a car and travel abroad.
Some put this down to works Kadare published which appeared to show Hoxha in a more favourable light. The Great Winter was a kind of fictional portrayal of the dictator, marking his break with the Soviet Union, which Kadare suggested he wrote under duress. He had, he said, three choices: “to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; or to pay a tribute, a bribe”.
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While its tone was often flattering, others detected more critical undertones as Kadare wrestled with the dilemmas of modernisation under communism. Its achievements in alleviating poverty, improving health and emancipating women could seem positive, yet it was a hugely destructive process. Kadare knew direct criticism of the regime would be fatal. “Dissidence was a position no one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad.”
Walking this tightrope, Kadare increasingly employed fable and allegory in his work. In 1981 he published The Palace of Dreams in which an imperial sultan created a huge bureaucracy that collected and classified its citizens’ dreams, reporting those that contained dissident delusions. In The Pyramid, a ruler is told by advisers that he must build huge pyramids to assert his authority. Thousands are killed in construction as he presides over a world “drenched in death and crowded with stones”. Albanian readers would have had little difficulty relating it to Hoxha’s extraordinary scheme to build half a million concrete pillboxes all over his country.
Fearing that eventually the regime would take the most severe action against him and his work, Kadare arranged for his manuscripts to be smuggled out of Albania, sometimes in wine bottles, and deposited in a bank safe in Paris. There were times when he considered going into exile but felt a strong commitment, he said, to sustaining the literature of his homeland.
He was born in 1936 in the originally medieval southern city of Gjirokaster near the border with Greece, also Hoxha’s birthplace, an evocative place of old stones built into the valley which had known many invaders and rulers. In the Second World War he witnessed and later wrote about citizens being deported by the Italians or children killed by communist partisans.
His early cultural enthusiasm was encouraged at home where he lived with his father, a post office official, and his young mother, a sensitive figure who helped nurture his writer’s gift. He was a precocious reader. “At the age of 11 I had read Macbeth,” he recalled, “which had hit me like lightning, and the Greek classics, after which nothing had any power over my spirit.”
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Identified as a promising writer, he was sent by the communist authorities to the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow “to become an official writer of the regime”. What he found instead was “a factory for fabricating dogmatic hacks of the socialist-realism school. In fact, they took three years to kill every creativity, every originality you possessed.”
He loathed the Soviet socialist-realist novels, “full of sunshine, working in the fields, the joyous spring, the summer full of hope”. Kadare’s work by contrast was full of fog, drizzle and rain signifying more subtle and subversive moods. One of Kadare’s greatest gifts, said the critic James Wood, was that “he so brilliantly summons details that explode with symbolic reality”.
When the restless Hoxha regime then began and ended a flirtation with Maoist China, Kadare, who had visited the country, wrote witheringly about that period too with its ideological gymnastics and relentless spies.
After Hoxha’s death in 1985 Kadare had to negotiate a final spell of great political and cultural uncertainty. For a while he expressed support for the reform efforts of the new president Ramiz Alia and it was suggested he might become a political leader himself, just as the playwright Vaclav Havel had in Czechoslovakia. But he insisted that he wanted to “remain a writer, and free”.
He was concerned, moreover, that Albania was still “oscillating between democracy and dictatorship” and that he was still under threat from the notorious Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi, so decided to seek political asylum in France in 1990. Later, however, he divided his time between Paris and return visits to his homeland.
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He travelled with his family, his wife Elena Gushi who was one of the first Albanian female novelists, and two daughters, one of whom, Besiana, became Albania’s representative at the United Nations.
As Albania moved into democracy and opened up its communist-era files there was renewed debate about Kadare’s role, and how far he had collaborated with communism. Kadare insisted that his critics had not understood the murderous nature of the regime and failed to appreciate how his work had been “a very obvious form of resistance”.
He was regularly nominated for a Nobel prize and did win the Man Booker international prize in 2005. He remained a prolific writer into old age, despite claiming he only worked for two hours each day. What he always aspired to, he claimed, was “true literature”.
“You recognise it immediately, instinctively,” he added. “Every time I wrote a book, I had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship, while at the same time giving courage to the people.”
Ismail Kadare, writer, was born on January 28, 1936. He died of a heart attack on July 1, 2024, aged 88