RTL Today – The pen as a weapon: Ismail Kadare: a bright light in Albania's darkest days

Novelist Ismail Kadare, who has died aged 88, used his pen as a stealth weapon to survive Albania's paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

His sophisticated storytelling – often compared to that of George Orwell or Franz Kafka – used metaphor and irony to reveal the nature of tyranny under Hoxha, who ruled Albania from 1946 until his death in 1985.

“Dark times bring unpleasant but beautiful surprises,” Kadare told AFP.

“Literature often produced magnificent works in the dark ages, as if seeking to remedy the misfortune inflicted on people,” he said.

He has often been tipped to win a Nobel Prize for his impressive work, which delved into the myths and history of his country to dissect the mechanisms of totalitarianism.

Kadare's novels, essays and poems have been translated into more than 40 languages, making him the best-known modern novelist in the Balkans.

The prolific writer broke with the isolated Albanian communists and fled to Paris a few months before the government fell in the early 1990s.

He wrote about his disillusionment in his book “The Albanian Spring – The Anatomy of Tyranny”.

– Demands his death –

Born in Gjirokaster, southern Albania, on January 28, 1936, Kadare was inspired by Shakespeare's “Macbeth” as a child and counted the playwright, as well as Dante and Cervantes, among his heroes.

Ironically, the dictator Hoxha was from the same mountain town.

Kadare studied languages ​​and literature in Tirana before attending the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow.

Returning to Albania in 1960, he was first acclaimed as a poet before publishing his first novel “The General of the Dead Army” in 1963, a tragi-comic tale which was later translated into dozens of others LANGUAGES.

His second novel, “The Monster,” about townspeople who live in a constant state of anxiety and paranoia after a wooden Trojan horse appears outside of town, was banned.

His 1977 novel “The Great Winter”, although somewhat favorable to the regime, angered Hoxha's followers who considered it insufficiently laudatory and demanded the execution of the “bourgeois” writer.

Yet even though some writers and other artists have been imprisoned – and even killed – by the government, Kadare has been spared.

Nexhmije, Hoxha's widow, said in her memoir that the Albanian leader, who prided himself on his penchant for literature, saved the internationally renowned author on several occasions.

Records from the Hoxha era show that Kadare was often on the verge of arrest, and after the publication of his poem “Red Pashas” in 1975, he was banished to a remote village for more than a year.

Kadare, for his part, has denied any special relationship with the brutal dictator.

“Who was Enver Hoxha protecting me from? Against Enver Hoxha? », Kadare told AFP in 2016.

– “Writers don't have to bow down” –

Scholars have often wondered whether Kadare was a Hoxha pet or a courageous perpetrator risking prison and death?

“Both are true,” suggested French publisher François Maspero, who raised the issue in his book “Balkans-Transit.”

Writing such a work under a government where a single word could be turned against its author “requires, above all, determination and courage,” Maspero writes.

“My work obeyed only the laws of literature, it obeyed no other laws,” Kadare said.

In one of his last interviews in October, when he was visibly fragile, Kadare told AFP that writing transformed “the hell of communism… into a life force, a force that helped you to survive, to keep your head high and to defeat the dictatorship. .

“I am very grateful to literature because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible. »

In 2005, Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for his body of work. The John Carey jury described him as “a universal writer in a narrative tradition that dates back to Homer”.

A father of two, Kadare told AFP that he appreciated seeing his name “mentioned among the candidates” for the Nobel Prize, even if the subject “embarrasses” him.

“I am not modest because… during the totalitarian regime, modesty was a call to submission. Writers don’t have to hang their heads. »

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