2024-07-08 09:48:54
Ismail Kadare, the best-known and most translated Albanian writer, whose works were also published in Czech, died at the age of 88. His publisher Bujar Hudhri informed about the death of the author of dozens of novels, plays and poetry collections, who received the International Man Booker Prize and the Jerusalem Prize.
Kadare, who AFP describes as a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, suffered a heart attack. Doctors tried in vain to revive him. They confirmed the death on Monday morning. “Albania and the Albanians have lost their literary genius and the liberator of their spirit, the Balkans the poet of their myths, Europe and the world one of the most renowned representatives of modern literature,” Albanian President Bajram Begaj said in a statement.
Albania will observe national mourning in Kadare’s honor on Tuesday and Wednesday. All state and public institutions will fly their flags at half-mast. On Wednesday, the public will have the opportunity to say goodbye to the late writer, who enjoyed immense respect in the Balkan country. At 1:00 p.m. on this day, the whole of Albania will observe a minute of silence, the ATA agency said.
One of Ismail Kadare’s most famous works was the novel General of the Dead Army from 1964, later filmed with actor Marcello Mastroianni and translated into Czech by Hana Tomková in 1990. It tells the story of an Italian general who, twenty years after the Second World War, comes to Albania to pick up the remains of Italian soldiers and have them buried in his homeland. While passing through the country, he gradually abandons his prejudices and begins to understand why the Albanians went to war.
Also in other prose, such as the historical Bloody April, which took place at the beginning of the 20th century in the Albanian mountains during the monarchy and told about the customary law according to which death is punished by death, the writer, according to the AFP agency, chronicled the grotesque fate of his Earth. Since the Second World War, its inhabitants have been forced to live under the cruel rule of the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha, who cut off the Balkan country from the rest of the world.
Ismail Kadare used to be accused by some of enjoying a privileged position during Hoxha’s regime. The writer became famous in the first half of the 1960s, when Hodža firmly ruled the communist country from the position of first secretary of the Stalinist Albanian Labor Party. “That’s nonsense. As Hodja, who was he supposed to protect me from? From Hodja himself?” responded to Kadare’s reprimands in 2016.
“I wrote literature as if the regime did not exist,” claimed Ismail Kadare. | Photo: J. Foley-Opale
The author pointed out that in Albania, in contrast to, for example, Central Europe, dissent was automatically punishable by death. “Literature and dissent were mutually exclusive. One had to choose one or the other. I chose literature and I think I did well. I succeeded in something that seemed impossible: I wrote literature as if the regime did not exist.” he claimed.
Although the writer spoke allegorically about the present and his works were often removed from libraries or bookshop shelves, at the same time he sat in the Albanian parliament between 1970 and 1982, for a time chaired the Albanian Union of Writers, and after Hodž’s death in 1985 he became the vice-chairman of the Democratic Front. led by the dictator’s widow Nedzmija Hodžová.
It was not until the late 1980s that Ismail Kadare became the head of a group of intellectuals who condemned the actions of the secret police and the ruling party. Just a few months before the protests that started the fall of the communist regime in 1990, Kadare fled to France and applied for political asylum. At home, meanwhile, the authorities had all his works removed from libraries and bookstores.
When the man of letters returned from French exile in 1992, over a hundred leading Albanian intellectuals were waiting for him upon arrival in Tirana.
In one of the last interviews he gave last October, Kadare described Albanian communism as “absolute hell”, as he put it. “However, literature was able to turn it into a living force that helped a person to survive, raise his head, and ultimately win over that dictatorship. That’s why I’m so grateful for literature. It gave me a chance to overcome the insurmountable,” Kadare stated.
In 2005, he became the first laureate of the International Man Booker Prize, four years later he received the Spanish Prince of Asturias Prize and, for example, in 2020 he added the Neustadt International Literary Prize.
Ismail Kadare in 2001. | Photo: ČTK/AP
Last year, the writer was appointed holder of the French Legion of Honor. The highest state award for civilian or military services to the nation was awarded to him by French President Emmanuel Macron during a visit to Tirana.
In addition to Bloody April and The General of the Dead Army, the novella Who brought Doruntina? was published in Czech from Kadare’s works. about a girl who, against the will of her brothers and mother, is married off to distant Czech lands, or the Palace of Dreams, in which the state authority establishes an office for assessing the dreams of its residents.
His prose entitled The Fortress was related to the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. “In Stalinist Albania, the occupation of Czechoslovakia by ‘Soviet fascist barbarians’ was condemned more harshly than in Western countries. I used this paradox when I compared small Albania, surrounded by the Turkish Ottomans, with the liberal Czechoslovakia surrounded by Warsaw Pact troops,” Kadare told Lidovy noviny years ago.
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