Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly put his isolated Balkan homeland on the map of world literature with dark, allegorical works that indirectly criticized the country’s totalitarian regime, died on Monday in Tirana, Albania. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, an Albanian editor and publisher who heads Onufri Publishing House, who said he suffered a cardiac arrest at home and died in a hospital in the Albanian capital, Tirana.
Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) had a literary career that spanned half a century, and he wrote dozens of books, including novels, poetry collections, short stories and essays. He shot to fame in 1970 when his first novel, “General of the Army of the Dead,” was translated into French. European critics hailed it as a masterpiece.
Mr. Kadare was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times, but never won. In 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), which is awarded to a living writer of any nationality for his or her all-around achievement in fiction. Finalists included literary giants such as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.
In presenting the prize, British critic and jury chairman John Carey called Mr. Kadare “a world-class writer who carries on the storytelling tradition of the Homeric era.”
Kadare, who critics often compare to the likes of Kafka, Kundera and Orwell, spent the first three decades of his career living and writing in Albania, which was under the control of one of the Eastern Bloc’s most brutal and eccentric dictators. Enver Hoxha.
In a country where more than 6,000 dissidents have been executed and some 168,000 Albanians have been sent to prison or labor camps, Kadare walked a political tightrope to escape persecution. He served as a deputy to the Albanian People’s Assembly for 12 years and was a member of the regime’s writers’ union. One of Kadare’s novels, “The Great Winter,” portrayed the dictator in a positive light. Kadare later said he wrote the book to curry favor with the people.
In contrast, several of his best works, including The Palace of Dreams (1981), were subversive attacks on authoritarian rule, circumventing censorship through allegory, satire, myth, and legend.
Mr. Kadare “is the ultimate interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of oppression in fiction,” Richard Eid New York Times year 2002.
Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in the southern Albanian town of Gjirokaster. His father, Halit Kadare, was a civil servant; his mother, Hatiks Dobi, was a housewife from a wealthy family.
Ismail was only eight when Hoxha’s communists seized power in Albania in 1944, and he was already immersed in world literature. “At 11, I read Macbeth, which made a profound impression on me, and I read the Greek classics, but after that, nothing moved me,” he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Paris Review.
As a teenager, however, he was drawn to communism. “It had an idealistic side,” he said. “You thought certain aspects of communism were good in theory, but you found out that in practice it was horrible.”
After studying at the University of Tirana, the Albanian capital, Mr. Kadare was sent for graduate studies at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, which he later described as a “factory for the dogmatic vulgarity of the school of socialist realism.”
The General of the Dead Army was published in Albania in 1963, about two years after his return from Moscow. The novel tells the story of an Italian general who returns to the Albanian mountains 20 years after the end of World War II to dig up and bring back the bodies of his soldiers; it tells the story of the advanced West invading a strange land ruled by the ancient law of blood feud.
Pro-government critics denounced the novel as too cosmopolitan and not expressing enough hatred for the Italian general, but it made Mr. Kadare a national celebrity. In 1965, authorities banned his second novel, “Monster,” as soon as it was published in a magazine. When the French edition of “General of the Army of the Dead” was published in 1970, the Paris Review wrote that it “took the Paris literary world by storm.”
Kadare’s sudden rise to fame brought him under the watchful eye 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 choices: “either to follow one’s beliefs, which meant death; to remain completely silent, which meant another kind of death; or to pay homage, a bribe.” He said he chose the third solution, writing The Great Winter.
In 1975, Kadare wrote a poem, “Red Pasha,” criticizing members of the Politburo, after which he was exiled to a remote village and was banned from publishing his works for a time.
In 1981, he responded by publishing “The Palace of Dreams,” a scathing critique of the regime. Set in the Ottoman Empire, the novel depicts a vast bureaucracy dedicated to collecting citizens’ dreams for signs of dissent. In a review in The Times, Mr. Ede described it as “a moonlight allegory of the madness of power — murderous and suicidal.” The novel was banned in Albania but quickly sold out.
Mr. Kadare’s success abroad has given him some sense of security at home, but he said he still lives in fear that the regime might “kill me and say it was suicide.”
To protect his work from posthumous tampering, Mr. Kadare smuggled the manuscript out of Albania in 1986 and gave it to his French publisher, Claude Durand, who used his trip to Tirana to smuggle out more works.
This cat-and-mouse game continued after Mr. Hoxha’s death in 1985, with the regime sometimes publishing and sometimes banning Mr. Kadare’s work until he fled to Paris in 1990. After the regime fell, Mr. Kadare came under attack from anti-communist critics in Albania and the West, who portrayed him as a beneficiary, or even an active supporter, of the Stalinist state. When his name was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1997, an article in the conservative Weekly Standard urged the committee not to award him the prize because he had “consciously collaborated with the Hoxha regime.”
Apparently in an effort to insulate himself from such criticism, Mr. Kadare published several autobiographies in the 1990s in which he said he was rebelling against the regime spiritually and artistically through his literary works.
“Every time I write a book, I feel as if I’m stabbing a dagger into a dictatorship,” he said in a 1998 interview.
Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1997, Oxford historian Noel Malcolm praised Kadare’s work for its “atmospheric density” and “poetic compactness,” but also criticized his defensiveness in the face of criticism.
“The author protests too much,” Malcolm wrote, warning that “ellipses and omissions” in Mr. Kadare’s “self-promotional works” could do more harm to his reputation than the attacks of his critics. Mr. Kadare’s most important works, he wrote, “occur on a different plane, at once more human and more mysterious, and different from any kind of ideological art.”
Sensitive responseIn a statement, Mr Kadare accused Mr Malcolm of showing cultural arrogance toward a writer from a small country.
“To treat a writer with such disrespect simply because he happens to be from a small country betrays a colonialist mentality,” Mr. Kadare wrote in a letter to The New York Review of Books.
Mr. Kadare is survived by his wife, Elena Kadare, also a writer, and two daughters: Beciana Kadare, now Albania’s ambassador to the United Nations, and Gerisa Kadare.
After the fall of communism, Mr. Kadare continued to set his novels in the suspicion and terror of the Hoxha regime. However, several of his works depict Albanians living in 21st-century Europe, still haunted by their ethnic blood feuds, legends and myths. His best-known works include “The Stone” (1971); “The Three Arched Bridge” (1978); “Agamemnon’s Daughter” (1985); its sequel “The Inheritors” (2003); and “The Accident” (2010).
All his works have one advantage, Charles McGrath writes in The Times in 2010. Mr. Kadare “can’t seem to write a book that isn’t interesting.”
“Under a typical Stalinist regime, the only possible act of resistance was writing,” Mr. Kadare said in 2005 after winning the Booker International Prize.
Amelia Nirenberg Contributed reporting.
