Albanian novelist and poet Ismail Kadare often created dark, allegorical works that obliquely criticized Albania’s totalitarian state, and single-handedly wrote about his isolated Balkan homeland on the map of world literature. He died Monday in Tirana, Albania. He was 88 years old.
His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, the president of Albanian editor and publisher Onufri, who said he suffered a heart attack at his home and died in a hospital in the Albanian capital Tirana.
During a literary career that spanned half a century, Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) wrote numerous books, including novels, 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 praised it as a masterpiece.
Mr. Kadare’s name has been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, but he missed out on the honor. In 2005, he won the first Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), awarded to a living author of any nationality for overall achievement in the field of fiction. The finalists included literary giants such as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.
In awarding the prize, British critic and jury chairman John Kerry called Mr Kadare “a universal writer with a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer”.
Critics have often compared Mr. Kadare to Kafka, Kundera, Orwell, and others. For the first 30 years of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, then under Enver Hoxha, one of the most brutal and idiosyncratic dictators in Eastern Europe.
To avoid persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents have been executed and about 168,000 Albanians have been sent to prisons or labor camps, Mr. Kadare has walked a political tightrope. He served as a delegate in the Albanian People’s Assembly for 12 years and was a member of the regime’s Writers’ Union. One of Mr. Kadare’s novels, “The Great Winter,” depicts the dictator favorably. Mr. Kadare later said he wrote the novel to gain favor.
In contrast, several of his greatest works, including “Palace of Dreams” (1981), circumvented censorship through fables, satire, myths, and legends to create devastating attacks on the dictatorship.
Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that Mr. Kadare is “one of the best fictional interpreters of the psychology and physiognomy of repression.”
Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in Gjirokaster, a city 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 took control of Albania in 1944, Ismail was eight years old and already immersed in world literature. “When I was 11, I read Macbeth and the Greek classics, which hit me like a lightning bolt, and since then nothing has been able to dominate my mind,” he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Paris Review.
But he was attracted to communism as a teenager. There was an idealistic side to it,” he said. “You could see that maybe certain aspects of communism were good in theory, but in practice they were terrible.”
After studying at the University of Tirana, the Albanian capital, Mr. Kadare pursued graduate studies at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow. He later described it as “a factory for the dogmatic nonsense of 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 after 20 years of World War II to dig up and repatriate the bodies of his soldiers. It is a story of the advanced West invading a strange land governed by the ancient norms of blood warfare.
Pro-government critics criticized the novel as being too international and not expressing enough hatred for the Italian general, but it made Mr. Cadare a national celebrity. In 1965, authorities banned his second novel, ‘The Monster’, soon after it was published in a magazine. When “The General of the Dead Army” was published in French translation in 1970, it “took literary Paris by storm,” wrote The Paris Review.
Mr. Cadare’s sudden fame drew scrutiny from the dictator himself. To appease the regime, Mr. Kadare wrote “The Great Winter” (1977), a novel commemorating Hoxha’s break with the Soviet Union in 1961. Mr Kadare said he had three choices. ; Complete silence meant another kind of death. or to pay tribute or bribe.” He said he chose his third solution while writing “The Great Winter.”
In 1975, Mr. Kadare was exiled to a remote village and banned from publishing for a time after writing the poem “Red Pasha”, which was critical of members of the Politburo.
His response came in 1981, when he published “The Palace of Dreams,” a scathing critique of the regime. Set in the Ottoman Empire, it depicts a vast bureaucracy dedicated to collecting the dreams of its citizens and searching for signs of dissent. In his review in The Times, Mr. Eder described the work as “a moonlit parable of the madness of power – murderous and suicidal.” The novel was banned in Albania, but not before it sold out.
Mr. Kadare’s success abroad gave him a sense of security at home. Still, he said, he lived in fear that the regime “would kill me and call it suicide.”
To prevent his work from being manipulated after his death, Mr. Kadare smuggled the manuscript out of Albania in 1986 and delivered it to the French publisher Claude Durand, who used his trip to Tirana to smuggle additional works.
The cat-and-mouse game in which regimes alternately published and banned Mr. Kadare’s work continued from Hoxha’s death in 1985 until Mr. Kadare fled to Paris in 1990. After the regime collapsed, Mr. Kadare came under attack from dissidents. -Communist critics in Albania and the West portrayed him as a beneficiary and active supporter of the Stalinist state. When his name was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in 1997, 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 hedge against such criticism, Mr. Kadare published several autobiographies in the 1990s, in which he suggested that he resisted the regime spiritually and artistically through his literature.
“Every time I wrote a book, I felt like I was sticking a dagger into a dictatorship,” he said in a 1998 interview.
Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1997, the Oxford historian Noel Malcolm praised the “atmospheric density” and “poetic tension” of Mr. Kadare’s writing, but chastised him for being defensive toward critics.
“He protests too much.” “The author protests too much,” Mr. Malcolm wrote, warning that the “erasures and omissions” in Mr. Cadare’s “self-promotional book” could do more damage to his reputation than the critics’ attacks. He wrote that Mr. Cadare’s most important works “worked on a different plane, more human and more mythological than any kind of ideological art.”
In his shallow response, Mr. Kadare accused Mr. Malcolm of displaying cultural arrogance toward a writer from a small country.
“To allow a writer such freedom simply because he or she is from a small country betrays a colonial mindset,” Kadare wrote in a letter to The New York Review of Books.
Mr. Kadare is survived by his wife, Elena Kadare, a writer, and two daughters, Besiana Kadare and Gresa Kadare, Albania’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Even after the collapse of communism, Mr. Kadare continued to write novels despite the suspicion and fear of the Hoxha regime. However, several of his works depicted Albanians living in 21st-century Europe but still haunted by their country’s blood feuds, legends, and myths. His best-known works include “Chronicle in Stone” (1971); “Three Arched Bridges” (1978); “Agamemnon’s Daughter” (1985); sequel “The Successor” (2003); and “Accident” (2010).
Charles McGrath wrote in The Times in 2010 that all his works shared a common strength: Mr. Kadare “seems to be incapable of writing uninteresting books.”
“In a classic Stalinist regime, the only possible act of resistance is writing,” Mr. Kadare said after winning the Booker International Prize in 2005.
Amelia Nierenberg contributed to the report.
