Ismail Kadare, Albania’s most famous writer, who criticized Hoxha’s regime in his biting fables – obituary

Ismail Kadare, who has died aged 88, was Albania’s most successful writer, both at home and abroad. Over a million of his books were sold in Albania, one for every three Albanians. Abroad, he was best known in France, where his works were first published in translation and where he moved in 1990; but he also gained an appreciative readership in Britain, especially after winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

His novels range from allegorical denunciations of the communist regime that Albania endured for 40 years to haunting evocations of Albanian and Balkan rituals. Rather than his preferred genre of socialist realism, he remained faithful to fables that lie somewhere between Orwell and Aeschylus.

Half of the books he published under communism were banned and he had to smuggle the pages out of the country packed in wine bottles; however, his tolerance of the other half led some to accuse him of being Hoxha’s “official dissident”.

It was certainly a game of cat and mouse. In 1970 he was forced to write a sympathetic fictional portrait of the dictator in The Great Winter – the price of being able to continue writing – but he managed to turn what he called a “bribe” into a subtle criticism. From 1970 to 1982 he was also a puppet member of the Albanian parliament and lived in relative luxury. In a country where private transport was banned, he even enjoyed the luxury of owning his own VW Golf.

This proved to be his undoing in the 1990s, when an American critic provoked a backlash in an article entitled “Don’t give the Nobel Prize to an Albanian party writer!” Kadare vigorously denied that he had been a collaborator, nor did he make false claims that he had been a dissident – a position that would have led to a firing squad within days. Instead, his work spoke for itself as “a very obvious form of resistance.”

His approach, wrote the critic Julian Evans, was never “that of an ideologue but that of a novelist: a writer not of speeches but of sensitivity to every human inconsistency, to every irony and every hidden thought.”

Ismail Kadare, the son of a minor civil servant, was born on January 28, 1936, in a street called “The Alley of the Madmen” in Gjirokaster, a town near the Greek border that also produced the communist dictator who was even more Stalinist than Stalin. Enver Hoxha.

Kadare began his writing career as a teenage poet (he was obsessed with Macbeth but was not afraid to sing effusive praises of the Communist Party) before continuing his studies at the University of Tirana and the Gorky Institute in Moscow.

His stay in Russia was cut short when Hoxha fell out with the then leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, whom Hoxha considered a dangerous reformer. Albania broke off relations with the Soviet Union and fell into the arms of China, which was also at odds with Russia and was desperately seeking friendly relations with any socialist country in Eastern Europe.

In the wake of the Sino-Soviet rapprochement, Albania broke off relations with China and fell into almost complete isolation. One of Kadare’s later novels, The Concert (1988), is a grotesquely comic account of this bizarre period.

His first novel, The General of the Dead Army (1963), was more home-grown, however. It was based on the true story of an Italian general who travelled to Gjirokastra to find and repatriate the bodies of Italian soldiers killed in World War II when Albania was occupied by Italy. (Marcello Mastroianni later played the lead role in an Italian film adaptation.)

At the time of its publication, there was little pre-censorship in Albania, simply because there were no disobedient authors. 20,000 copies of the first edition were snapped up before the Communist Party noticed its challenging content: no mention of class struggle or the party, and a sympathetic portrayal of a foreign general.

Although the novel was strongly condemned by the party newspapers, Kadare was allowed to continue writing because Hoxha wanted Western attention at the time – shortly after the break with Moscow. And after its French translation in 1970, this novel was received in the West like nothing before in Albania. Hoxha also saw himself as a writer and was keen to paint a picture of Albania as a cultured country in which, unlike the Soviet Union, good writers were tolerated.

Kadare’s next novel, The Monster (1965), was another scandalous success. In it, Troy does not fall, but lives with the Wooden Horse for 3,000 years and becomes a tyrannical police state, while the inhabitants of the Wooden Horse remain freethinkers. The Albanian authorities even forbade their citizens from mentioning the title of the novel.

Kadare continued to be harassed by the party and its security organs, but he was never sent to one of the many camps for regime enemies. The closest he came to a bullet in the head was in 1975 when he wrote his poem “The Red Pashas,” a macabre satire in which communist bureaucrats roam the city in the bloodstained coats of the dead bourgeoisie. For this, he was exiled to a remote village for several months.

Not all of his novels dealt with oppositional themes: in Chronicle in Stone (1971) he wrote about the tangled history of his birthplace; one of his most famous novels, Broken April (1978), deals with the Albanian tradition of vendetta, or blood feud, and is set in pre-communist Albania.

But the book generally considered his masterpiece, The Palace of Dreams (1982), had a more obvious political significance. It is set in Albania during the four-century occupation by the Ottomans, who set up a ministry to sift through and interpret the dreams of their Albanian subjects and to report those with dangerous delusions to the Sultan.

For this he was condemned by the party, but by this time he was perhaps too well known internationally to be punished. In fact he had been granted permission to travel – a rare privilege under Hoxha – and at literary conferences abroad he tried to explain some of the measures and policies of the Albanian government, even if he did not go so far as to give it his enthusiastic support.

After Hoxha’s death in 1985, the new president, Ramiz Alia, won Kadare’s support for a reform program and in 1989 Kadare became deputy chairman of the Democratic Front, a communist organization led by Hoxha’s widow. He was even touted as Alia’s possible successor and in 1990, when Vaclav Havel headed the government in Prague, he was considered the next writer-president of Eastern Europe.

Kadare said he had believed Alia could be an Albanian Gorbachev, but when the pace of reforms slowed, he quickly changed his mind. In September 1990, while his wife and family were also in the West, he asked for and received political asylum on a trip to see his publisher in Paris. He said harassment by the secret police had become too severe and his public conversion would accelerate the reform process “more than any action I could take in Albania.”

From 1992, Kadare began to divide his time between Paris and Tirana, but stayed out of politics. He was often asked why he did not do more to accelerate change in Albania. His answer was short and to the point: he did not want to be shot.

His works have been translated into more than 20 languages ​​and published in over 40 countries. He was the first Albanian to be awarded the Legion of Honor and was long believed to be on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize.

For many years, Albania was an unknown and unimaginable country, considered dangerous, backward and dark. If anyone brought it to light, it was Ismail Kadare.

He leaves behind his wife, the author Helena Gushi, and their two daughters, one of whom, Besiana, served as Albania’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Ismail Kadare, born on January 28, 1936, died on July 1, 2024

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