  Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch |
|
Ismail Kadaré (1936-2024) |
|
Albanian writer, frequently
mentioned as a
candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a leading figure of
Albanian cultural life from the 1960s. During the terror of the Hoxha
regime, Ismail Kadaré hide in his works the true character of totalitarian rule under subtle allegories. As a
committed Marxist he officially supported the rebuilding of Albania
from its backward past. Since 1990 Kadaré lived in France. Kadaré's
best-known works include The General of the Dead Army (1963),
about an Italian general who is immersed in his gruesome
mission in Albania – to bring back the remains of his fellow soldiers. "At the bottom of those abysses and on those abrupt slopes, beneath the rain, lay the army he had come to unearth. Now that he was seeing it for the first time, this foreign land, he was suddenly much more clearly aware of the vague fear that had always begun coalescing inside him whenever he tried to confront the feeling of unreality that seemed bound up with his mission. The army was there, below him, outside time, frozen, petrified, covered with earth. It was his mission to draw it up from the mud. And when he contemplated that task, it made him afraid. It was a mission that exceeded the bounds of nature, a mission in which there must be something blind, something deaf, something deepley absurd. A mission that bore unforeseeable consequences in its womb." (from The General of the Dead Army, translated from the French by Derek Coltman, with an introduction by David Smiley, Quartet Books, 1986, p. 14) Ismail
Kadaré was born in the museum-city of Gjirokastra, in
southern Albania – it was also the birthplace of Enver Hoxha, which
perhaps explains that the communist dictator never sent the writer to
prison. Kadaré denied the protection, but admitted that he
once received a laudatory phone call from Hoxha. Kadaré's father, Halit, worked in the civil service. Hatixhe Dobi, Kadaré's mother, took care of the home. During the years of World War II, when Kadaré grew up, he witnessed the occupation of his home country by fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. To escape from the occupiers, the family fled to the mountains. When the fighting ended, they returned only to find their town ravaged. "It was not easy to be a child in that city," Kadaré later said. ('Kadare, Ismail', in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby, 1995, p- 439) Kadaré attended primary and secondary schools in Gjirokastra, and went on to study languages and literature at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana. In 1956 Kadaré received a teacher's diploma. He also studied in Moscow at the prestigious Gorky Institute of World Literature, founded in 1932. A collection of his poetry was translated into Russian with a preface by the poet David Samoilov. Kadaré himself translated Mayakovsky's poem 'A Cloud in Trousers'. However, the institute failed to make Kadaré a Socialist Realist. His experiences Kadaré recalled in the novel Le Crépuscule des dieux de la steppe (1981), in which the protagonist is adviced not to say a word about Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. In 1961 Albania broke with the Soviet Union, and finally with
all other Socialist countries, including China. From the cultural
standstill arose a new generation of writers, among them Kadaré, Fatos
Arapi, and Dritėro Agolli, who was for many years head of the Albanian
Union of Writers, although his work was occasionally felt to be out of
touch with the party line. In Albania Kadaré first won fame as a poet
at the same time when writers hostile to Hoxha suffered persecution. Kadare's attitude to the Hoxha regime was ambiguous. Gjenerali i ushtrisė sė vdekur (The General of the Dead Army), his first novel, begins in a pouring rain. The general's mission is to dig up and repatriate the bones of soldiers, who had died in the country during the war. Before completing his work, the general reveals his empty moral compass. The book was fully accepted by Communist authorities, who regarded it as a strong nationalist statement. Also Dasma (1968, The Wedding) was well received in Albania. The heroine, a young peasant girl, is rescued from a traditional arranged marriage by factory work. She meets and marries a man she loves, thus breaking the traditions. The first trip Kadaré made outside the Eastern Block was to Finland. He served as a delegate to the People's Assembly in 1970
and he was given freedom to travel and to publish abroad. Chronicle
in Stone (1971) was praised by John Updike in The New Yorker as
"drawing strength from its roots in one of Europe's most privitive
societies. Kadare has been likened to Gabriel Garcķa Mįrquez . . .
Kadare's nameless mountain city, no doubt based upon his own native
Gjirokastėr, seems less whimsical than Garcķa Mįrquez's Macondo, less
willfully twisted into surreality." ('Other Countries Heard from', in Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism, Knopf, 1991, p. 557) Kėshtjella (1970, The Castle), a story of
Albania's struggle against the Ottoman Turks, and Ura me tri harqe
(1978, The Three-Arched Bridge), an account of the events
surrounding the construction of a bridge across a river,
depicted the feudal Albania. Cultural conservatives in the Sigurimi (State Security) referred Kadaré
as an agent of the West. After offending the authorities with 'The
Red Pashas' (1975), a politically satirical poem, Kadaré was subjected
a
self-criticism session at the Writers' Union and forbidden to publish
for three years. Later Kadaré said that The Great Winter (1977),
which flattered Enver Hoxha, was written in an attempt to avoid
confrontation with the authorities. The period between 1973 and 1975 in
Albania has been compared to Stalinist purges in the 1930s. However,
Kadare himself was sent only to the country to work alongside the
people. (Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship 1957-1990 by Peter Morgan, 2010, Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge, 2010, p. 169) In Prilli i thyer (1978, Broken April), a story about the blood feud,
Kadaré returned to one of his favorite themes – how the past affects
the present, this time exemplified by the unwritten law of Kanun.
Acting upon the eye-for-eye principle, Gjorg Berisha avenges the murder
of his brother, but in so doing he also seals his own fate. "Gjorg came
out of the concealment and walked towards the body. The road was
deserted. The only sound was the sound of his own footsteps. The dead
man had fallen in a heap. Gjorg bent down and laid his hand on the
man's shoulder, as if to wake him. 'What am I doing?' he said to
himself. He gripped the dead man's shoulder again, as if he wanted to
bring him back to life. 'Why am I doing this?' he thought." (Ibid., Rowman & Littlefield, 1990, p. 9) Kadaré's major themes include the historical experience of the Balkan peoples, the Communist experiment in Albania, and the representations of the classical myths in modern contexts. Nėnpunėsi i pallatit tė ėndrrave (1981, The Palace of Dreams) was a political allegory of totalitarianism, set in an Ottoman capital. The central character is a young man, Mark-Alem, whose job is to select, sort, and interpret the dreams of the imperial populace in order to discover the "master-dream" that will predict the overthrow of the rulers. This basically humorous novel for others than the Albanian authorities was almost immediately banned after its publication. In 1982 Kadaré was accused by the president of the League of Albanian Writers and Artists of deliberately evading politics by cloaking much of his fiction in history and folklore. Hoxha died in 1985, and his successor, Ramiz Ali, was a less
powerful figure. Pasardhėsi (2003, The Successor), a thriller, was loosely based on the suspected suicide of
Mehmet Shehu, who was long regarded as Hoxha's right-hand man. Kadaré
plays with the complex relationship between the Designated Successor,
living in a constant fear of a political error, and the dictator
(called the Guide in the novel), who can't
trust anyone. At the end the Successor himself reveals in his
interior monologue, what really happened on the night of his death.
"The events of this novel draw on the infinite well of human memory,"
Kadaré wrote in the beginning, "whose treasures may be brought to the
surface in any period, including our own." A
few months before the collapse of the communist regime,
Kadaré settled with his family in self-imposed exile in Paris. His name was on Sigurimi's list of intellectuals, who would be arrested. Ftesė nė
studio (1990, Invitation to the writer's studio) was the last work
Kadaré published before leaving Albania. "Although I was convinced that
the farewell was only temporary, a departure is a small death," Kadaré
said in an interview. ('An Interview with Ismail Kadare' by Gjeke Marinaj, in Translation Review, Number Seventy-six, 2008, p. 12) Koncert nė fund tė dimrit (1988, The Concert)
was considered the best novel of the year 1991 by the French literary
magazine Lire. The story is laid against Albania's break with
China. In exile Kadaré was able to express his disappointment and bitterness. La Pyramide (1992), written in French, was set in Egypt in the twenty-sixth century B.C. and after. Kadaré mocked Hoxha's fondness for elaborate statutes, and the hierarchical order of his system. In October 1996 Kadaré was elected an associate member of the prestigious French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. From the 1960s until his death in 2002, Jusuf Vrioni was Kadare's sole translator into French. ('On Translating Ismail Kadare' by David Bellos, in Translation Review, Number Seventy-six, 2008, p. 18) Before being awarded in 2005 the Man Booker International Prize (£60,000), Kadaré was comparatively unknown to the general public in the English-speaking world. Kadaré hoped that the honour would show the Balkans was not just "notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness," but could be the home of "achievement in the [...] arts, literature, and civilization." (James Kidd, in Defining Moments in Books: The Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Shook the Literary World, edited by Lucy Daniel, 2007, p. 775) In 2015 Kadare receieved the prestigious Jerusalem prize. Several of Kadare's books have been adapted to the screen. Broken April has been filmed three times. A film version of The General of the Dead Army, entitled Il generale dell'armata morte(1983), was made in Italy, starring Marcello Mastroianni (General Ariosto), Anouk Aimée and Michel Piccoli. The film failed commercially. Shirin Neshath, who won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival in 2009, optioned The Palace of Dreams for her second film. Aksidenti (2010, The Accident) was a multilayered
novel about two lovers, whose death launches an investigation not only
of their relationship, but also of Balkan politics. A playwright is questioned about the death of a young girl in E punguare (2009, A Girl in Exile); the novel also touches on the myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice. Kadare's short autobiographical novel, Kukulla (2015, The Doll), centered on the relationship between narrator and his mother, the Doll of the title. Kur sunduesit grinden (2018, A Dictator Calls)
told about what happened after Stalin made his famous phone call to
Boris Pasternak, asking questions about Pasternak's friend, the poet
Osip Mandelstam. Ismail Kadare died of a heart attack in Tirane, on July 1, 2024, at the age of 88. For further reading: Ismail Kadare, le rhapsode albanais by Anne-Marie Mitchel (1990); Eric Faye: Ismail Kadare by Eric Faye (1991); Contemporary Albanian Literature by Arshi Pipa (1991); Ismail Kadare by Fabienne Terpan (1992); Universi letrar i Kadaresė by Tefik Caushi (1993); Kadareja i panjohur by Enea Naumi (1993); Ekskursion nė dy vepra tė Kadaresė by Injac Zamputi (1993); Njė fund dhe njė fillim by R. Elsie (1995); 'Kadare, Ismail', in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby (1995); Studies in Modern Albanian Literature and Culture by Robert Elsie (1996); Pengu i moskuptimit by Shaban Sinani (1997); Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship, 1957-1990 by Peter Morgan (2010); Visages d'Ismail Kadaré by Ariane Eissen (2015); 'Social and Historic Contextuality of Contemporary Albanian Literature' by Vjollca Dibra, in Prizren Social Science Journal, Volume 2, Issue 3 (2018); Kadare dhe muzika: mbi veprën letrare të Ismail Kadaresë by Vasil S. Tole (2019); Arti letrar i Ismail Kadaresë by Isak Shema (2020); Ismail Kadaré par lui-même: les dits et non-dits de l'autobiographie by Alexandre Zotos (2022) - Note: Kadaré's birthdate is in some sources Jan. 28, 1936 or Jan. 26, 1936. In this calendar: Jan. 27, 1936. Selected works:
|
