Ismail Kadare dies at the age of 88; novels made the world aware of Albania’s plight

Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly put his isolated Balkan homeland on the map of world literature and often created dark, allegorical works that indirectly criticized the country’s totalitarian state, died on Monday in Tirana, Albania. He was 88 years old.

His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, the head of Onufri Publishing House, his editor and publisher in Albania, who said he suffered a cardiac arrest at home and died in a hospital in Tirana, the capital of Albania.

In a literary career that spanned half a century, Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) wrote numerous books, including novels and collections of poetry, short stories and essays. He rose to international fame in 1970 when his first novel, “The General of the Dead Army,” was translated into French. European critics hailed it as a masterpiece.

Kadare’s name was put forward for the Nobel Prize several times, but the honor was denied to him. In 2005, he was awarded the first Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), which is given to a living writer of any nationality for his or her body of work in fiction. Finalists included literary titans such as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.

At the awards ceremony, British critic and chairman of the jury, John Carey, described Mr Kadare as a “universal writer in a narrative tradition that goes back to Homer”.

Critics have often compared Kadare to Kafka, Kundera and Orwell, to name a few. For the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, which was then in the grip of one of the most brutal and idiosyncratic dictators of the Eastern bloc: Enver Hoxha.

To avoid persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents were executed and some 168,000 Albanians were sent to prison or labor camps, Kadare walked a political tightrope. He served for 12 years as a deputy in the Albanian People’s Assembly and was a member of the regime’s writers’ association. One of Kadare’s novels, The Great Winter, was a positive portrayal of the dictator. Kadare later said he wrote it to curry favor.

In contrast, some of his most brilliant works, including The Palace of Dreams (1981), attacked the dictatorship in a subversive way, circumventing censorship through allegory, satire, myths and legends.

Mr. Kadare “is a superb fictional interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of oppression,” Richard Eder wrote in the New York Times in 2002.

Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokaster. His father, Halit Kadare, was a civil servant; his mother, Hatixhe Dobi, was a housewife and came from a wealthy family.

When Hoxha’s communists seized power in Albania in 1944, Ismail was eight years old and already immersed in world literature. “By the age of eleven, I had read Macbeth, which had struck me like lightning, and the Greek classics, after which nothing had power over my mind,” he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Paris Review.

Still, as a young man, he was attracted to communism. “It had an idealistic side,” he said. “You thought that certain aspects of communism might be good in theory, but you saw that the practice was terrible.”

After studying at the University of Tirana in the Albanian capital, Mr Kadare was sent for postgraduate studies at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, which he later described as “a factory for producing dogmatic scribblers of the school of Socialist Realism”.

In 1963, about two years after his return from Moscow, The General of the Dead Army was published in Albania. In the novel, an Italian general returns to the mountains of Albania twenty years after World War II to dig up and repatriate the bodies of his soldiers. It is the story of the progressive West invading a foreign land where an ancient code of blood feud reigns.

Pro-government critics condemned the novel as too cosmopolitan and for not expressing enough hatred for the Italian general, but it made Kadare a national celebrity. In 1965, the authorities banned his second novel, The Monster, immediately after it appeared in a magazine. When The General of the Dead Army appeared in French translation in 1970, it “took literary Paris by storm,” wrote The Paris Review.

Kadare’s sudden notoriety brought with it the scrutiny of the dictator himself. To appease the regime, Kadare wrote The Great Winter (1977), a novel celebrating Hoxha’s break with the Soviet Union in 1961. Kadare said he had three options: “To conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; total silence, which meant a different kind of death; or to pay a tribute, a bribe.” He chose the third solution, he said, by writing The Great Winter.

In 1975, Kadare was exiled to a remote village and banned from publishing his poem “The Red Pashas,” which criticized members of the Politburo.

His answer came in 1981 when he published The Palace of Dreams, a scathing critique of the regime. Set in the Ottoman Empire, the novel depicts a vast bureaucracy dedicated to collecting the dreams of its citizens and searching for signs of dissidence. In his review for The Times, Mr Eder described the novel as a “moonlit parable about the madness of power – at once murderous and suicidal.” The novel was banned in Albania, but not before it sold out.

Kadare’s success abroad gave him a certain security at home. Still, he said, he lived in fear that the regime could “kill him and say it was suicide.”

In order to protect his work from tampering in the event of his death, Mr. Kadare smuggled manuscripts out of Albania in 1986 and handed them over to his French publisher, Claude Durand. The publisher, in turn, used his own trips to Tirana to smuggle out more writings.

The cat-and-mouse game, in which the regime alternately published and banned Mr. Kadare’s works, continued even after Hoxha’s death in 1985, until Mr. Kadare fled to Paris in 1990. After the regime collapsed, Mr. Kadare was attacked both in Albania and in the West by anti-communist critics who portrayed him as a beneficiary and even active supporter of the Stalinist state. When his name was put forward for the Nobel Prize in 1997, an article in the conservative Weekly Standard urged the committee not to award him the prize because of his “conscious collaboration” with the Hoxha regime.

Apparently in order to immunise himself against such criticism, Mr Kadare published several autobiographical books in the 1990s in which he suggested that he had resisted the regime both intellectually and artistically through his literature.

“Every time I wrote a book,” he said in the 1998 interview, “I had the impression that I was stabbing the dictatorship in the face.”

Writing in the New York Review of Books in 1997, Oxford historian Noel Malcolm praised the “atmospheric density” and “poetic tension” of Kadare’s writings, but criticized him for his defensive attitude toward critics.

“The author protests too much,” Malcolm wrote, warning that Kadare’s “omissions and omissions” in his “self-promotional volumes” could damage his reputation more than the attacks of his critics. Kadare’s most important works “occurred on another plane, at once more human and more mythical than that of any kind of ideological art,” he wrote.

In a thin-skinned response, Mr Kadare accused Mr Malcolm of displaying cultural arrogance towards an author from a small country.

“To take such liberties with an author simply because he happens to come from a small country is a testament to a colonialist mentality,” Kadare wrote in a letter to the New York Review of Books.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

After the collapse of communism, Kadare continued to set his novels in the era of distrust and terror of the Hoxha regime, but some of them portrayed Albanians living in 21st century Europe, still haunted by their country’s blood feuds, legends and myths. His best known works include Chronicle in Stone (1971); The Three-Arched Bridge (1978); Agamemnon’s Daughter (1985); its sequel The Successor (2003); and The Accident (2010).

All of his works have one common strength, wrote Charles McGrath in the Times in 2010. Mr. Kadare is “seemingly incapable of writing a book that is not interesting.”

In 2005, after winning the Booker International Prize, Mr Kadare said: “The only act of resistance possible in a classic Stalinist regime was writing.”

Amelia Nierenberg contributed to the reporting.