I haven't posted much in this thread, but let me add my two cents, on Ismail Kadare as I know a thing or two about him. it feels a little awkward every time I talk about him as my username is kadare and I risk being regarded as biased, but anyways I am more familiar with this writer so this topic is where I can contribute more.
- First, I.Kadare is a very talented and versatile writer.
-Second, he is much more that just some writer from a small country. What he achieved while living in a Stalinist dictatorship is impressive, to say the least, and it hasn't been replicated anywhere else in the Eastern Bloc.
-Third, Kadare had all the odds against him. He was born in a small backward country, with barely 1 million people, who just 30 years before had emerged from the ruins of the feudal Ottoman Empire where Albanian culture had been suppressed for five centuries, and which after WWII had seen the establishment of a 40 year long Stalinist dictatorship where literature was supposed to aid the Communist Party educate the masses and form the New Man, while Western influences were deemed "heretical". The writer under communism was supposed to write about themes such as the struggle of the communist partisans against the Nazi occupation; or the building of a sunny socialist paradise by the happy working class and the definitely-not-hungry peasants. A black and white portrayal was expected: the communists- fully good, their opponents- fully bad. There were periods of "thaw" and "frost" and what period it was determined the repercussions one would face for going against the Party line in literature. There were periods when somewhat liberal tendencies in arts were somehow tolerated temporarily, then came periods where one could be executed for a harmless poem about autumn.
- Kadare believed he was talented, so he had no plans to write propaganda-literature for the peasants and the proletariat, instead he started deviating from the party line early on, but luckily for him it was a period of liberalism (the 60s after the country had cut off its relations to the Soviet Union since it wanted to keep Stalinism, which it did until 1990) so his works were only banned and criticized. His most famous novel The General of the Dead Army is from this early period and it paid off as this launched his international career.
- He had to act outwardly as a conformist, but he still was something like weird guy for communist standards. Not the smiling New Socialist Man, rather this insufferable grumpy, reserved and even a little arrogant talented guy.
-Kadare, having an above average intelligence, used various tricks to outwit his opponents, be that censors, critics or ordinary communist officials, but unfortunately not the dictator who was very cunning as well. For example, Kadare fooled the editor-in-chief of a literary journal into publishing his modernist novel The Monster, by persuading him it was an avant-garde work the communist world had been waiting for but only their country could produce. Not surprisingly it was instantly banned after it appeared. In fact only a single novel was well-received, all the others were frowned upon or worse, some were banned, some were not.
- But then Le General de l'Arme Morte, his non-conformist novel made him famous in the West and that made him to a certain degree untouchable for the regime. From that point on, Kadare just started writing more and more audacious works, regardless of the negative repercussions, which kept getting only stronger and stronger. They still weren't openly dissident as no such thing was tolerated. In fact, he played a little dumb and apologized each time, but he was "insufferable". In 1973 it was a 3 month long hate campaign a la Pasternak in the media, as a response to one of his provocative novels, in 1975 he was banished and banned from publishing novels, for a poem in which he portrayed high communist officials will their arms soaked in blood up to their elbows. That is when he barely escaped the arrest. It was made clear to him that this was the last time he would escape with such a mild punishment. A writer famous in the West was just too precious of a card to be thrown away.
-And this is when Kadare went full bersek mode. In communist Albania it was common for folks to send anonymous letters to the authorities with denunciations about a person or a perceived danger, and it was one such letter criticizing the dress of a TV host of a singing contest, which was rumored to have launched a huge purge against liberal artists in 1973. In 1981 Kadare tricked the censors into publishing a novel about people sending their dreams to the authorities in a fictionalized Ottoman Empire and the authorities analyzing them to find potential dangers for the state. Not surprisingly, in the novel it is a harmless dream about a musical instrument and a bridge which unleashes a huge purge.
-Of course the communists weren't dumb, The Palace of Dreams was banned quickly, albeit too late. This unleashed a reaction in Paris, where Kadare was famous; rumor has it that even François Mitterrand was involved but I don't know how much that is true. It is for sure that French intellectuals didn't stay quiet. Kadare didn't get arrested because the authorities didn't want another Solzhenitsyn, they didn't dare to etc, or so it was thought until this year, but this summer the person who served as the Chief Investigator of Albania in 1982, revealed that the order for Kadare's arrest had been given, everything had been prepared for the arrest, the trial and execution of Kadare as part of a huge purge. After The Palace of Dreams/Le Palais des Reves, the dictator had had enough, his fragile ego couldn't let it slide that he had been fooled for so long by the Hamlet-like enemy right under his nose. Long story shor, the Investigator discouraged him from arresting Kadare at that time for a number of reasons and the dictator died soon so no new opportunity presented itself. Curiously enough, right when the dictator fell into a coma before succumbing to his disease, high officials gathered in order to ban and condemn Kadare's newest novel Clair de Lune.
-Ironically, only after communism fell, did the communists manage to retaliate against Kadare. As of today, the archives and the files of the secret police have yet to be opened for the public. It is not sure who was who under communism. People who collaborated with the secret police would claim to have been persecuted, some by Kadare. In the 90s and 2000s they managed to persuade a great deal of the population that Kadare had been a communist and to this day there are a lot of people who hate him for no reason. The communists have done a great deal to ruin his reputation abroad, by sending letters with denunciations or by ruining his reputation at home which would still influence the one or other journalist or historian abroad. Someone from Nobel Academy once informed Kadare about a denunciation which they found very grotesque: somebody had denounced him that he doesn't write in Albanian. Throughout the 90s it is rumored that a ton of letters with denunciations against Kadare have gone from Albania to the Nobel Academy. It could very well be that he was in the shorlist during the 90s but was skipped and lost his momentum because the SA weren't sure about his role during communism. Only during the 2010s as documents from the archives emerged, and some high ranking communist officials spoke to clear their conscience, did Kadare's name get completely cleared for the extreme sceptics. IBut it is not clear if the SA would want to award a "Solzhenitsyn" in 2020, 30 years after the fall of communism.
www.scotsman.com
