Kadare is a prolific Albanian novelist who has also written some poetry and short stories, occasional works of literary scholarship and criticism, one play, and a sizable amount of autobiographical and political material. Nearly all of Kadare’s writing focuses on Albania and Albanians, with fiction set in nearly all phases of that country’s history from medieval times to post-communism. The largest body of material is situated in the centuries when the Albanian lands were part of the Ottoman Empire and in the decades when the nation-state of Albania (which had been founded as a monarchy in 1912 without Kosovo) labored under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, a disciple of Stalin. Kadare’s first novel that was known widely outside Albania was The General of the Dead Army, which has also been filmed twice; this is a work of subtly subverted socialist realism which fits neatly into both Kadare’s oeuvre (in terms of style and themes) and his biography (in terms of the ups and downs of his relationship with the ideologically hidebound and often brutal and mercurial Party of Labor of Albania). His other most popular works in the Anglophone world include the novels Broken April, Chronicle in Stone, and The Palace of Dreams, along with the short stories in Three Elegies for Kosovo.
Kadare’s enormous talent and long career have made him the most famous Albanian writer ever. His style is spectral, modernist, often cerebral, with flashes of the grotesque and the post-modern. One could say that Kadare has three main interconnected missions in the world of his art: to complete the (oft-interrupted) construction of a modern Albanian national identity, to find an innovative and sufficiently powerful idiom to express the horrors of Stalinism, and to test the limits of the “wall” that filters out most, but not all, symbols and portents and even visitors from the other world or underworld – a ghost-world outside of time that is much more likely to archive and avenge human misery and injustice than to host ranks of cherubs or provide peace and paradise to the faithful. His thematic concerns include both the generation and interpretation of Albanian folklore, the legacy of classical Greece, individual rights and social cohesion under dictatorship, and the stark civilizational differences between Europe and Asia.
Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936, in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokaster. His father was a civil servant in the post office; his mother was descended from local gentry. The second world war hit Albania in 1939 and brought considerable violence as well as civil war and, by 1945, communist rule. Kadare attended high school in Gjirokaster and then moved to the Albanian capital, Tirana, for his university studies. In 1958 he completed his degree in the Faculty of History and Philology and then traveled to the Soviet Union, with which Albania was at that time still allied, for graduate study. For two years he studied at the Maksim Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, a famous institution that has attracted writers from all over the world. The emerging rupture in relations between the post-Stalinist USSR under Nikita Khrushchev and the still-Stalinist Albania under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha forced Kadare to truncate his studies and return to Albania. He then began to work as a journalist.
Kadare’s career as a writer had begun earlier, however, in the domain of poetry. It is also fair to say that he made not only his literary start in poetry, but also his first contribution to the advancement of the world of Albanian letters, since his works evince a certain preoccupation with individualistic, romantic love; this, in the opinion of many observers, led Kadare to certain formal innovations in form and lyricism as well, even though much of his poetry hewed to topical themes. He published two volumes of verse in the late 1950s, followed by three more in the 1960s and one in 1980; like many other writers, poetry is more or less a phenomenon of Kadare’s youth and figures less and less in his literary output over the decades.
Kadare was eventually a delegate to the people’s assembly and a contributor to several government scholarly initiatives; he joined the communist party (Party of Labor, or PLA) under extreme pressure, but he still had his works banned on occasion and had to demonstrate, through certain modes of writing, his loyalty to his country, which was of course interpreted by the PLA as his loyalty to the regime. Kadare has eschewed the title of dissident a la Solzhenitsyn, just as he declined a post-communist role as a political leader a la Havel. Albania’s system was so repressive that there was virtually no space for civil society or individual dissidents to operate. Kadare did emigrate to Paris in 1990 (and now splits his time between France and Albania) but, even though he was occasionally allowed to travel abroad, he did not choose to flee the country earlier, possibly for reasons of patriotism, family, art, or career.
Many of Kadare’s works could only be published in Albania after the death of Enver Hoxha (1985) or even the fall of the communist government (1992). He has, however, maintained a rigorous pace of writing and public engagement, shying neither from unfashionable concerns nor from controversy. Some of his very best works are not yet available in English translation, such as the novels The Monster and The Life, Gamble and Death of Lul Mazrek as well as the short story “The Caravan of Veils”.
Kadare is often compared in the press to Franz Kafka because of his menace-saturated dystopias such as The Palace of Dreams and to Ivo Andrić or Nikos Kazantzakis because of his frequent use of powerful, common Balkan metaphors in works like The Three-Arched Bridge. These comparisons are apt as far as they go. But they only partially illuminate his oeuvre and his cohesive, consistent, integrated fictional world and its overarching and underlying intellectual concerns. Kadare’s repertory of thematic concerns is much greater than his anti-authoritarianism, his classical Albanian nationalism (reflecting traditional concerns of cultural and territorial unity, not expansionism or ethnic intolerance), and his occasionally orientalist preoccupations with a “clash of civilizations”. His is a very sophisticated take, for instance, on how folklore such as legends, poems, and ballads, reproduces itself and affects contemporary mentalities. Furthermore, his works are a storehouse of information on daily life and the struggle for social and political justice in Albania, and this material related to ethnography, social history, and political critique is generally presented very artfully in his works. His style spans a wide and bracing range as well: some of his works, such as The Successor, can rightfully be called intellectual thrillers. Several others, for instance The Wedding, are written in the style of socialist realism that was sometimes demanded by the government even of leading artists like Kadare. Kadare’s finest novel might well be Broken April, which has been filmed both in Albania and Brazil (in the latter adaptation, under the title Behind the Sun). This work, which is far more than just the intriguing study of a Balkan vendetta that it appears to be, combines nationalist folklore with powerful questions of social justice and even pacifism, and, along with The Palace of Dreams, it is one of the few of Kadare’s novels to give readers a three-dimensional protagonist to whom we can form a strong emotional connection.
Above all, the search for an idiom to convey the brutal, corrosive effects of Stalinism ties much of Kadare’s work together. As an artist of the first rank who lived through the complications, fear, compromises, distortions, and dangers of an ideological dictatorship, as did Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, Jiři Menzel, and many others, Kadare is well placed to spark discussion on the nature of such regimes. His works tie both the Ottoman experience and insights gleamed from the pinnacles of European high culture such as Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare into his quest to dissect life under dictatorship. That his point of reference is a dependent and divided Albanian state resting afloat a sluggish, opaque sea of memories and messengers from another world provide cohesiveness, passion, and a luxurious specificity to his fictional world.
In 2009, Kadare won the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters, consolidating his prominent international position inaugurated by his receipt of the first-ever Man Booker International Prize in 2005. He is also a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in France. Most English, American, French, and German reviews of his works are extremely laudatory, although they often see Kadare simply as an exponent of the complicated world of Balkan history, with its (ostensible) “ancient ethnic hatreds” and (supposedly) religious warfare.
A note on Kadare’s works
Many of Kadare’s works have never been translated into English, and some of those that have been translated into English, German, or French, have been revised, retitled, retranslated (via the French or into English in two versions), and repackaged or recombined. Hence bibliographic work on Kadare is both complex and continuously evolving. The short stories and poetry are especially hard to catalogue; thus, only stories in English translation are given in the worklist, along with the main work of translated poetry (in French). The dates refer to the year of publication in Albania or composition in Albanian. The titles are the published English titles of available translations or informal working translations to aid readers’ reference to untranslated works.
1577 words
Citation: Cox, John. "Ismail Kadare". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 March 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11957, accessed 16 October 2024.]
