The Albanian writer Ismaíl Kadaré under the regime of Enver Hoxha: the other ways of (not) being a dissident

How did Ismaíl Kadaré come to be published abroad during the times of Enver Hoxha's dictatorship?

It was a bit by chance.

A local publishing house was dedicated to translating Albanian authors into the most important European languages, French among them.

The director of Europe

magazine

, Pierre Paraf, a French journalist and enthusiast of Albanian culture since the time of King Zog I, passed through Tirana and picked up a copy of

The General of the Dead Army

.

Paraf was captivated by the text and asked the Albanian ambassador in Paris if it could be published in France.

Kadaré (Gjirokastra, 88 years old) remembers: “The Albanian ambassador did not say yes or no, because he was afraid.”

Paraf took the license and handed the novel over to the publisher Albin Michel, without a contract and without anything.

It was 1970. The book would later become a movie in 1983, starring Marcello Mastroianni.

In his meeting with the Albanian ambassador, already in Paris, he wanted to see the invitation to travel abroad, but the Albanian writer did not have it.

While in Tirana, they had called Kadaré from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to tell him that since the enemy assumed that the invitation was not going to be accepted, they had decided to contradict him, so he had to leave.

More information

Ismaíl Kadaré: “As a child I thought I was Shakespeare”

The next question is how he managed to maintain himself as a writer in that regime.

His phrase has become popular: “Literature led me to freedom, not the other way around.”

In fact, his stay between 1958 and 1960 at the Gorky Institute in Moscow was a turning point;

an institution where, according to the writer, writers were manufactured for the regime.

He enjoyed his time in Moscow, a city in those days less repressive than Tirana.

He met Boris Pasternak, while the purge that weighed on the Russian writer began, after obtaining (and rejecting) the Nobel Prize.

This experience gave him a more accurate look at literary life under a communist dictatorship.

In a documentary by Piro Milkani, Kadaré relates that, although he was against those reprisals, he did not intercede, and he also felt that as a foreigner he could not get involved.

Precisely, Three Minutes

has just been published in Spanish .

On the mystery of Stalin's call to Pasternak

(Alianza, 2023, translation by MR González), included a few days ago on the list of finalists for the International Booker Prize 2024. The work tells different versions of the telephone conversation held between Stalin and Pasternak in June 1934 (cultural talk in Soviet times).

The Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré receives the Prince of Asturias for Letters in 2009. EFE

The Albanian writer Bashkim Shehu, on the occasion of the 2009 Prince of Asturias award to Kadaré, said that he was neither a dissident nor a spokesperson for the regime: "Neither of those two terms is adequate to unravel the literary phenomenon of Kadaré."

José Carlos Rodrigo Breto, expert and author of the essay

Ismaíl Kadaré: the great stratagem

(Ediciones del subsuelo, 2018), maintains that, until the year 90, the author “was not a dissident, but a fighter, a fierce and tenacious opponent of the regime".

The margins of creative discretion were restricted, but the regime operated so that writers not only did not challenge the State, but so that they addressed the issues that interested the power.

Kadaré measured the times and periods of détente.

More than a decade after Albania broke relations with the Soviet Union, the writer first published

The Great Winter

(Vosa, 1991, trans. J. Hernández), where he encouraged to fictionalize the meeting between Hoxha and Nikita Khrushchev (with a deliberately flattering portrait of the first) and, later,

The Twilight of the Steppe Gods

(Anaya, 1991, trans. RS Lizarralde), where the mediocrity of the Soviet Union is emphasized as a result of the Pasternak case.

After Albania broke relations with China, he published

The Concert

(Anaya, 1991, RS Lizarralde), where criticism against the Asian giant is aired.

In these works the narrative strategy is recurring: based on criticism of the enemy power, he veiledly questioned both countries.

The “subtle dissident”, as defined by the specialist Robert Elsie, resorted to several other strategies.

Kadaré sets his novels in suffocating and fatal atmospheres, with cold and rainy days, as is the case of

Abril quebrado

(Anaya, 1990, trans. RS Lizarralde), environments divorced from the Albanian Mediterranean climate, with which he confronted the luminous story of the official propaganda.

The recourse to mythology, as allegory or ambiguity, is another means of masking his political reproach.

For John Cox, a professor at the University of North Dakota, Kadaré's work recounts “experiences that look inward and outward at the same time.

The careful stratification or enumeration of possibilities also encourages the contemplation of alternative ethical outcomes.”

And this awareness full of subterfuge can be extended to his way of dealing with the regime.

Claude Durand, Fayard's editor, went to Albania on two occasions to collect manuscripts that at that time were not publishable, but which Kadaré contemplated releasing when the times were favorable.

In 1981, with the publication of

The Palace of Dreams

(Cátedra, 2005, trans. RS Lizarralde), his best-known novel, Kadaré, as Rodrigo Breto declares, “his life will be risked.”

As his great discoverer for the Spanish public, Ramón Sánchez Lizarralde, pointed out, “on many occasions the author fragmented his most committed novels, disguised them among other less aggressive texts, prepared the ground for them by giving to the public light stories that would later be published. grow and develop (…)”.

The novel, a fable between Kafkaesque and Orwellian, set in Ottoman times, but directed against the regime, addresses the social control exercised by the Sultan, by having an institution dedicated to interpreting the dreams of his subjects.

He conceived it between 1972 and 1973, but it was not published until nine years later and immediately sold 20,000 copies.

However, in early 1982, an emergency meeting of the Albanian Writers' Union was called, where there were several members of the Politburo, including Ramiz Alia, who would take power in 1985, after Hoxha's death.

It has become famous how Alia rebuked the writer: “The people and the Party have elevated you to Olympus, but if you are not faithful to them, they will throw you into the abyss.”

Cover of the book 'Three minutes.

On the mystery of Stalin's call to Pasternak' by Alianza Editorial.

Kadaré left for France in 1990, concerned about his own destiny and that of his country, which would live through a turbulent decade from then on.

The author never considered himself either a hero or a dissident, as he himself declared in 1998. The answer to whether he was does not lie in his condition as such, given that the epic of dissidence is as attractive as the prey of idealization, but in highlighting how a creator made his way through the cracks and contradictions of a paranoid system, until he managed to maintain his sphere of freedom according to circumstances and acquiescence, seeking the favor of the elite when it was necessary or forced by it as an asset of the regime, while he was a member of the Party or deputy.

In Cox's terms: “He was primarily an artistic dissident, as opposed to a dissident artist, but he was also a bit of the latter.

“Not all dissidents have to be Solzhenitsyns or Havels.”

Miguel Roán is director of the Balcanismos think tank and author of 

Belgrade brut.