Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare was born on 28 January 1936 in Gjirokastër in Albania, to Halit Kadare, a post office employee,[9] and Hatixhe Dobi, a homemaker. When he was 13 years of age, he read Macbeth and so he was attached with literature. At this age he wrote his first short stories that were published at the Pionieri journal in Tirana,[10] In 1954 he published his first collection of poems Boyish inspirations ("Frymëzime djaloshare"). At 17 years old, he wrote two poems about Stalin, that—according to Noel Malcolm—helped in the process of publishing his collection of poems after a year.[2] He attended primary and secondary schools in Gjirokastër and studied Languages and Literature at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana. In 1956 Kadare received a teacher's diploma. He later studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow from 1958 to 1960.[6]

While studying literature in Moscow, he managed to get a collection of his poems published in Russian, and there he also wrote his first novel The City with no Signs in 1959.[11] Two years of study-abroad experience enabled him to catch literature's core and its relationship with politics. He perceived the Pasternak incident and understood the writer's part and the potential dangers of literary creation.[12]

After returning home in 1960 because of the Soviet-Albanian split, he worked as a journalist and then embarked on a literary career.[9] He tried to publish a fragment of his first novel camouflaged as a short story titled "Coffeehouse Days". Upon being published in the literary magazine Zëri i Rinisë in 1962, it was immediately banned by the authorities.[13] He was advised by his close friends not to tell anybody about the actual novel, so it stayed in his drawers for decades until the communist regime fell in 1990.

In 1963, he published his first novel titled The General of the Dead Army, which was not received well by communist critics in Albania at the time.[14] His next novel, The Monster, published in the magazine Nëntori in 1965, was banned immediately. After the success of The General, he was chosen as a member of the People's Assembly until 1982,[1] and was forced to be part of the Party of Labour of Albania.[15] After offending the authorities with a political poem in 1975, as a punishment he was sent to do manual labor deep in the countryside for a period of time, and he was also forbidden to publish any novels in the future. In response, after his return to Tirana, Kadare began to camouflage his novels as "novellas" and publish them as such.[16]

In 1981, he published The Palace of Dreams, an anti-totalitarian novel written and published in the heart of a totalitarian country.[17] The novel was harshly condemned in a Writers’ Plenum and the writer was accused of making allusions to Communist Albania in it, citing several ambiguous passages as proof for these claims. As a result, the work was banned.[18] Kadare was also 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. Western press reacted to the condemnation of the novel and protests mounted in the West in defense of the author.[16] Around this time, the communist ruler Enver Hoxha had initiated the process of eliminating Kadare, but backed off due to Western reaction.[19] In January 1985 his novel A Moonlit Night was published, only to be banned by the authorities a few months later.[20] At that time he wrote Agamemnon's Daughter, and according to his French publisher Claude Durand, he smuggled out of the country a part of his writings conceiling them and accredit them to Siegfried Lenz.[21]

At the end of October 1990 he was allowed to go for treatment in France according to a source,[22] according to another he fled with a regular visa for his entire family,[23] and applied for political asylum in France, where after settling he was able to exercise his profession in complete freedom. His exile in Paris was fruitful and enabled him to succeed further, both in Albanian and in French.[24] The official position of the state authorities on the occasion of his escape that "the Act is punishable, the writer remains".[23] In 1994 he began to work on the first bilingual volume of his work with the French publishing house Fayard.[25] During the 1990s and 2000s he was offered multiple times to become President of Albania, but declined.[26] He returned to Albania for the first time after 12 years in 2002.[24]

He is married to an Albanian author, Helena Kadare (née Gushi), and has two daughters. His daughter Besiana Kadare is the Albanian Ambassador to the United Nations.[27] Kadare has been a resident of France since the early 90s.

According to his friend, writer and ex-minister Teodor Laço "few could know the pains, troubles and the eavesdropping atmosphere surrounding him, hence Kadare was seen as a privileged man."[23] Genuinely valued for his talent, in the 1960s he was endorsed by figures such as Todi Lubonja[28] and Fadil Paçrami.[29]

After the success of The General in the West in 1970, he was chosen member of the People's Assembly for 12 years in a row,[1] and was mandatory for him to adhere the Party of Labour of Albania.[15] The older generation of Albanian writers and official literary critics became extremely embittered by it: "This novel was published by the bourgeoisie and this can not be accepted", says a report by the Sigurimi.[30]

The central theme of his works is totalitarianism and its mechanisms.[48] Kadare's novels draw on legends surrounding the historical experiences of Albanian people, the representation of classical myths in modern contexts, and the totalitarian regime in Albania. They are obliquely ironic as a result of trying to withstand political scrutiny. Among his best-known books are The General of the Dead Army (1963), The Siege (1970), The Ghost Rider (1980), Broken April (1980),[6] The Palace of Dreams (1981), The Pyramid (1992), and The Successor (2003).

The Pyramid (1992) is a political allegory set in Egypt in the 26th century BC and after. In it, Kadare mocked any dictator's love for hierarchy and useless monuments. In some of Kadare's novels, comprising the so-called "Ottoman Cycle", the Ottoman Empire is used as the archetype of a totalitarian state. Kadare's 1996 novel Spiritus, marks a narrative and compositional turning point in his literary career. The influence of this novel will be felt in all of Kadare's subsequent novels.[49] It deals with group of foreigners who are touring Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and hear exciting rumours during their stay in Albania about the capture of the spirit from the dead. As it turns out, the spirit is in fact a listening device known to the notorious secret service as a "hornet".[50]

In 1996 Kadare became a foreign associate to the chair left vacant by the death of Karl Popper of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France,[51] where he replaced the philosopher Karl Popper. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, and in 2005 he was awarded with the inaugural Man Booker International Prize. In 2009, Kadare was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature.[52] In the same year he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Science in Social and Institutional Communication by the University of Palermo in Sicily. In 2015, he was awarded the bi-annual Jerusalem Prize.[53] He won the 2019 Park Kyong-ni Prize, an international award based in South Korea.[54] The Fall of the Stone City (2008) was awarded the Rexhai Surroi Prize in Kosovo, and was shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2013.[55] In 2019, Kadare was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature by Bulgarian poet and writer Kapka Kassobova. He was selected as the 2020 Neustadt laureate by the Prize's jury on October 16, 2019.[56]

Kadare was born in a Muslim and bourgeois family.[57] On his mother's side of the family, his great-grandfather was a bejtexhi of the Bektashi sufi tariqa known as Hoxhë Dobi.[58] During the Albanian Cultural Revolution of 1967, Kadare was one of the top intellectuals proned to be a cutting edge against religion.[59] Although coming from a Muslim background,[60] Kadare himself claimed to be an atheist, according to John Murray in The Independent on 25 January 1998.[61]

After the 1990s, he attacked Islam openly, declaring in 1992 that: “Albanians are among those people who have suffered equally from Communism and from Islam”, causing strong protests by the Albanian Muslim Diaspora in New York as a result.[62] Joining some Christian intellectuals, he argued that in order to get an opening towards Europe it is required to give up Islam by the population of Muslim origin, and maybe even convert to Christianity.[63]

After the exposition of Orientalism in socialist-era artistic production, modern scholars have cogitated on his Islamophobia, racism,[7] Orientalist agenda,[37][64][65] by employing his reputation to interpolate malevolence towards Albania's Ottoman past, doing so in mainstream media habitually.[37] By doing so he equates the reintroduction of the Muslim faith in Albania as a step in a benighted past,[66] labelling it as a by-product of foreign (Ottoman) invasion, and ought be abandoned.[67]

Kadare has been mentioned as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. His works have been published in about 20 languages.[69][70]

The following Kadare novels have been translated into English:

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ismail Kadare.

• National Library of Albania
• Shusha Guppy (Summer 1998). "Ismail Kadare, The Art of Fiction No. 153". The Paris Review.
• In the Palace of Nightmares’: An Exchange – New York Review of Books
• Petri Liukkonen. "Ismail Kadare". Books and Writers