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New York Times about Kadare: The writer who put the small Balkan country on the map of world literature

2024-07-01 17:57:32Aktualitet SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

New York Times about Kadare: The writer who put the small Balkan country on the

Ismail Kadare, whose novels revealed the oppression in Albania to the world, dies at the age of 88.

Ismail Kadare, Albanian novelist and poet who put the small Balkan country on the map of world literature, died today in Tirana at the age of 88.

The death was confirmed by the head of his Onufri publishing house, Bujar Hudhri, who said that he suffered a cardiac arrest and died in the hospital where he was taken to Tirana.

In his literary career of more than half a century, Kadare wrote dozens of books, collections of poems and short stories.

He became famous with his first novel in 1970, The General of the Dead Army, which was first translated into French and critics called it a 'masterpiece'.

Kadare has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize but failed to receive it, competing with literary names such as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.

The New York Times writes that Kadare has often been compared to Kafka, Kundera and Orwell. In the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, when the country was under the harsh dictatorship of communist leader Enver Hoxha.

To escape persecution in a country with some 6,000 political dissidents executed and 160,000 sent to concentration camps, Kadare had to exercise great caution in his writings.

He served for 12 years in the Assembly of Albania and was a member of the Writers' Union. His novel "Dimri i Madh" is considered one of the most favorable portrayals of dictator Hoxha, and later Kadare said that he wrote it to soften him so that he could see him more favorably.

While in other novels such as "Palace of Dreams" (1981), the writer subversively attacked the dictatorship by means of allegory, satire, legend and mythology.

Kadare "is a great interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of state oppression," wrote Richard Eder in The New York Times in 2002.

After studying at the University of Tirana, Kadare won a scholarship to Gorky University in Moscow, which he later described as "a factory of dogmas in the school of socialist realization". His novel The General of the Dead Army made him world famous, and in 1965, the authorities banned his second story, "The Monster," shortly after publication in a magazine.

Kadare's sudden fame attracted the dictator's attention, and to soften the regime's surveillance, Kadare says he wrote "The Great Winter" (1977), which praised Hoxha's "brave break" with the Soviet Union in 1961.

Kadare says he had three choices: "To defend his beliefs, which meant death, total silence, or to pay tribute to the regime in the form of a bribe to leave him alone."

To protect his work from manipulation by the regime in the event of his death, Kadare is said to have secretly taken his manuscripts out of Albania, sending them to the French publisher Claude Durand, who has traveled to Tirana several times.
Writing about it in 1997 in articles for the New York Review of Books, Oxford historian Noel Malcolm praised the intensity of Kadare's atmosphere but criticized the rejection of criticism.

Malcolm warned Kadare that "the author protests too much, and the editing of his self-promoting volumes may damage his reputation with critics." He added that Kadare's best works were written "in another context, more human and more mythical than any type of ideological art".

While in a rude response Kadare accused Malcolm of 'cultural arrogance' towards the author of a small country.
"talking like that to a writer from a small country is a colonialist mentality", Kadare replied in the 'New York Review of Books'.

After the fall of communism, Kadare continued to write about communist terror, describing the Albanians living in Europe in the 21st century, as haunted by nightmares of blood feuds, legends and mythology.

Commentator Charles McGrath wrote in The Times in 2010 that Kadare cannot write "anything that is not interesting."


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