Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly put his isolated Balkan homeland on the map of world literature, creating often dark and allegorical works that obliquely criticized the country’s totalitarian state, died Monday in the Albanian capital Tirana. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, director of the Onufri publishing house, who was its editor-in-chief and publisher in Albania. He said Mr Kadare suffered a cardiac arrest at his home and died in hospital.
In a literary career that spanned half a century, Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) wrote numerous works, including novels, collections of poetry, short stories and essays. He gained 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.
Mr. Kadare’s name has been mentioned several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the honor has eluded him. In 2005, he received the first Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), awarded to a living writer of any nationality for overall achievement in fiction. Finalists included literary titans such as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.
In awarding the prize, British critic John Carey, chairman of the jury, called Mr Kadare “a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer”.
Critics have often compared Mr. Kadare to Kafka, Kundera and Orwell, among others. For the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, which was at the time under the rule of one of the Eastern bloc’s most brutal and idiosyncratic dictators, Enver Hoxha.
To escape persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents were executed and some 168,000 Albanians were sent to prison or labor camps, Mr. Kadare had to walk a tightrope. He was a member of the Albanian People’s Assembly for 12 years and a member of the regime’s Writers’ Union. One of Mr. Kadare’s novels, “The Great Winter,” painted a favorable portrait of the dictator. Mr. Kadare later said he wrote it to curry favor with the regime.
On the other hand, several of his most brilliant works, including “The Palace of Dreams” (1981), subversively attacked the dictatorship, circumventing censorship through allegory, satire, myth and legend.
Mr. Kadare “is a supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and physicality of oppression,” Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times in 2002.
Ismail Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in Gjirokaster, a town in southern Albania. His father, Halit Kadare, was a civil servant; his mother, Hatixhe Dobi, who ran the household, came from a wealthy family.
When Hoxha’s communists took control of Albania in 1944, Ismail was eight years old and already immersed in world literature. “By the time I was 11, I had read Macbeth, which struck me like a bolt of lightning, and the Greek classics, after which nothing had any power over my mind,” he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Paris Review.
Yet as a teenager he was drawn to communism. “There was an idealistic side to it,” he says. “You thought that some aspects of communism might be good in theory, but you saw that the practice was terrible.”
After studying at the University of Tirana, Mr. Kadare was sent to do his postgraduate studies at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, which he later described as “a factory for churning out dogmatic charlatans 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. The novel tells the story of an Italian general who returns to the mountains of Albania 20 years after World War II to exhume and repatriate the bodies of his soldiers. It is the story of the invasion of a foreign country by the West, governed by an ancient code of bloody quarrels.
Pro-government critics condemned the novel for being too cosmopolitan and for not expressing enough hatred for the Italian general, but it made Mr. Kadare a national celebrity. In 1965, the authorities banned his second novel, “The Monster,” immediately after it was published in a magazine.
In 1970, when “The General of the Dead Army” was published in a French translation, it took “literary Paris by storm,” wrote The Paris Review.
Mr. Kadare’s sudden prominence attracted scrutiny from the dictator himself. To appease the regime, Mr. Kadare wrote “The Great Winter” (1977), a novel celebrating Hoxha’s break from the Soviet Union in 1961. Mr. Kadare said he had three choices: “Comply with my own beliefs, which meant death. ; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; or to pay tribute, a bribe. He chose the third solution, he says, by writing “The Great Winter”.
In 1975, after writing “The Red Pashas,” a poem criticizing members of the Politburo, Mr. Kadare was banished to a remote village and banned from publication for a time.
His answer came in 1981, when he published “The Palace of Dreams,” a damning critique of the regime. Set in the Ottoman Empire, it depicts a vast bureaucracy devoted to collecting the dreams of its citizens, searching for signs of dissent. In The Times, Mr. Eder described it as “a moonlit parable about the madness of power — murderous and suicidal at once.” The novel was banned in Albania, but not before it went out of print.
Mr. Kadare’s success abroad has given him some security at home. However, he said he lived in fear that the regime would “kill him and say it was suicide.”
To protect his work from manipulation in the event of his death, Mr. Kadare smuggled manuscripts out of Albania in 1986 and delivered them to his French publisher, Claude Durand. The publisher in turn took advantage of his own trips to Tirana to smuggle out additional writings.
The cat-and-mouse game in which the regime alternately published and banned Mr. Kadare’s works continued after Hoxha’s death in 1985, until Mr. Kadare fled to Paris in 1990. After the regime collapsed, Mr. Kadare came under attack from anti-communist critics, both in Albania and in the West, who portrayed him as a beneficiary and even an active supporter of the Stalinist state. In 1997, when his name was being considered for the Nobel, 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 to protect himself against such criticism, Mr. Kadare published several autobiographical books in the 1990s, in which he suggested he had resisted the regime, both spiritually and artistically, through his literature.
“Every time I wrote a book,” he said in the 1998 interview, “I felt like I was sticking a dagger into the dictatorship.”
Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1997, Noel Malcolm, an Oxford historian, praised the “atmospheric density” and “poetic tension” of Mr. Kadare’s writing but castigated his defensiveness in the face of criticism.
“The author protests too much,” Mr. Malcolm wrote, warning that Mr. Kadare’s “elisions and omissions” in his “self-promotional volumes” could damage his reputation more than attacks from his critics. Mr. Kadare’s most vital works “occurred on a different plane, both more human and more mythic, than any kind of ideological art,” he writes.
In a thin-skinned response, Mr Kadare accused Mr Malcolm of showing cultural arrogance towards an author from a small country.
“To take such liberty with a writer simply because he comes from a small country reveals a colonialist mentality,” he wrote in a letter to the New York Review of Books.
Mr. Kadare’s survivors include his wife, Elena Kadare, also an author, and his two daughters: Besiana Kadare, former Albanian ambassador to the United Nations, and Gresa Kadare.
After the collapse of communism, Mr. Kadare continued to set his novels in the climate of suspicion and terror of the Hoxha regime. A few, however, depicted Albanians living in 21st-century Europe but still haunted by their nation’s bloody 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 his works shared a strength, Charles McGrath wrote in the Times in 2010: Mr. Kadare is “apparently incapable of writing a book that is not interesting.”
In 2005, after winning the Booker International Prize, Mr Kadare said: “The only possible act of resistance in a classic Stalinist regime was to write.”
Amelia Nierenberg reports contributed.