Prior to Dua Lipa, there were three Albanians a layperson might be expected to have heard of: the Catholic saint and Nobel Peace Prize winner Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresa), the dictator Enver Hoxha, and the writer and fifteen-time Nobel nominee Ismail Kadare. When the great writer died in Tirana last July at the age of 88, flags went to half-mast across Albania for two days of official mourning. At his state funeral, held in the National Opera Hall, politicians queued up to pay their respects to “Saint Kadare” (as one article in the local press deemed him), the “unwavering standard bearer of Albanianism.” On stage, a spectral erection of drapery and cartoonish gloved hands clasping an oversized rosary evoked the ghost of Mother Teresa blessing the wreath-covered coffin. The pomp was appropriate for a man who was the most significant Albanian cultural figure of all time, and who, through wiliness and ambition as much as talent, was the undisputed state poet of Albania for nearly six decades. Despite Kadare’s nearly royal status, Prime Minister Edi Rama, in the only speech given at the funeral, felt the need to shore up Kadare’s reputation. The author, Rama reminded the audience in an almost threatening tone, had “received all the possible praise and honors of the world” while receiving “all possible insults from the country that gave birth to him.” Rama was speaking quite literally. In his lifetime, Kadare was denounced by Communists for his bourgeois ideological errors, by anticommunists for his accommodation of the regime, and by both for his gargantuan ego and heroic self-image. These “insults” have been relitigated abroad, but the sharpest critiques of Kadare’s most discerning readers, long circulating in Tirana literary circles, have rarely escaped the country’s borders.
The Albania that cultivated Kadare’s rise was a grim and isolated place, ruled up until the 1990s by a cabal of backbiting Stalinists. One of the only ways for outsiders to pull back the curtain on the “North Korea on the Adriatic” was to read the novels of Ismail Kadare, translations of which began appearing in France in 1970. An immediate hit in Paris, his international literary fame grew steadily until it exploded after the fall of Communism. The winner of top literary prizes everywhere from Spain to Israel to South Korea to Oklahoma, his works have been translated into over forty languages. With a new English translation of his work coming out every couple years for the last three decades, practically every book review has speculated on when exactly Kadare would win the Nobel.
When Kadare won the somewhat less prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2005, beating out heavyweight nominees like Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the judges praised him as a universal writer in the tradition of Homer. For someone who cultivated an air of being indifferent to his contemporaries, it was an apposite description. Not only was Kadare obsessed with Greek antiquity (out of a lifelong goal to claim its glory for his ethnic forebears), the pantheon of writers he claimed as his peers were Cervantes and Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer.
He was not a modest man. In The Doll, a slight but revealing late work, Kadare addresses the early roots of his conceitedness. When he was 17 his first book of poetry (praising Stalin) was published. The modest fame went straight to his head. Though others quickly exhausted of young Ismail’s self-importance, his friend Bardhyl was understanding:
Being big-headed makes you happy. Other people envy you, but you don’t envy anybody. What business is it of other people if you think you’re like Shakespeare? In the end, that’s a matter between the two of you, Shakespeare and yourself. I stared at him fixedly, and wondered how it was possible for this person to have exactly the same thoughts in his head as I did.
Kadare would continue to compare himself to Shakespeare and other fathers of national literatures throughout his life. But to be fair, if anyone has a claim to being the Cervantes or Dante of Albania, it is Ismail Kadare, who is universally praised among Albanians for wrangling their language into a stylish and modern form fit for prose fiction (even his detractors acknowledge him as one of the only Hoxha-era writers who had the stubbornness and nerve to flout the stale dictates of the Party’s socialist realist conventions). Of course, before his time there wasn’t much competition for the title; an Albanian prose tradition only came into existence after World War II with the Communists’ universal literacy campaign and their privileging of bourgeois cultural forms like the novel.
Kadare’s successes were products of the Communist system in more ways than one. Though he’s long been sold as a fierce antiregime writer who, in his own words, was “maintaining the moral torch” in the face of Hoxhaist repression, Kadare’s status as a Party member, a parliament member, a leader in the state-controlled Writer’s Union, the beneficiary of rare material privilege, and the personal favorite of Hoxha himself casts doubt on this puffery. It’s true that he bucked against Party culture his whole career and frequently slid subtly antiregime elements into his work, but it’s also true that this same work frequently valorized, legitimated, and garnered significant acclaim from the regime itself. As Albanian intellectual Fatos Lubonja wrote, Kadare was a “pilot fish” who latched onto the sharks of the regime in a mutualistic, if sometimes dangerous, relationship.
Kadare responded to this criticism with haughty petulance, but as a distraction from more troubling aspects of his work it likely saved his reputation. That’s because the connecting thread of Kadare’s oeuvre is neither an opposition to totalitarianism nor, as his less generous critics have claimed, pro-regime toadyism, but rather a monomaniacal mission to rewrite Albanian history by erasing the legacy of five centuries of Ottoman rule and fabricating cultural continuity with Greek antiquity. Praised for providing insight into a closed society, Kadare’s works are more often stultifying and hateful tracts filled with simple-minded fetishization of Europe and absurd ideas about race and religion more suitable to a YouTube comment thread than the work of a globally venerated intellectual.
Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 to a downwardly mobile Muslim family in Gjirokaster, a southern Albanian city seemingly hewed directly from the rocky hillside. He was only 3 years old when Mussolini occupied Albania. In the subsequent years his hometown would be passed back and forth between the Greeks, Italians, Germans, and partisans, while being occasionally rocked by Allied bombers. The Gjirokaster of Kadare’s youth was a colorful backwater, dominated by fears of the evil eye and the strict conservative social mores of black-clad crones who ruled over family life. The Ottoman legacy was close—Kadare’s grandfather trained as a lawyer in fin de siècle Istanbul—while the promises of Western modernity and progress reached the ancient provincial city in refracted glimmers.
Kadare’s most sparkling and enduring novel, 1971’s Chronicle in Stone, takes place during these tumultuous years. The novel is the tale of the city—its stone streets and houses as much as its oddballs, deviants, and gossipmongers—seen through the eyes of a child who resembles young Ismail. The narrator hasn’t yet learned to distinguish the inanimate world from the animate and he finds as much human drama in the droplets of rain filling the cavernous cistern beneath his house as he does in the lurid tales of war all around him.
Partway through the book, the young narrator drops in on a neighbor to borrow a book, whereupon he has a life-changing encounter with Shakespeare:
Finally I found [a book] that had on its opening page the words “ghost,” “witches,” “first murderer” and even “second murderer.”
“OK, I’ll take this one,” I said, without even looking at the title.
“Really? Macbeth?”
Once home he reads through repeatedly, hardly understanding anything. But as meaning slowly settles upon him, the Bard’s words heighten the boy’s senses and remake the world into a stage coursing with narrative possibility. Kadare has told this story elsewhere. At 11, he read Macbeth and became so entranced that he copied it out word for word and came to feel, as he wrote in The Doll, that he “was not just close to Shakespeare, but almost a cousin.” His future as a writer was set. In one literary false start:
Three-quarters of the notebook was filled with advertisements along the lines of: “The century’s most demonic novel, hurry to the Gutenberg bookshop, buy I. H. de Kadare’s magnificent posthumous novel,” . . . the text of the novel took up no more than five or six pages, because, apparently worn out after the advertisements, I had abandoned the project.
But he kept at it and after university secured a prestigious spot at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Soviet Moscow. An account of his time there appears in fictionalized form in the 1976 novel Twilight of the Eastern Gods. In it, the narrator lives in a dorm with writers from all over the Second World, visits Soviet writers’ resorts housed in expropriated estates in Yalta and Latvia, and drinks prodigiously. Spiritually adrift, the young writers take solace in drunken “plot-spews” where they “tell each other the plots of books they’ll never write” and then vomit. The book is a venomous and often hilarious send-up of Soviet literary culture. Cloistered away from real life, the narrator grows to despise his colleagues, giving the following description of his fellow dormitory “inmates”:
First floor: that’s where the first-year students stay; they’ve not yet committed many literary sins. Second floor: critics, conformist playwrights, whitewashers. Third circle: dogmatics, arse-lickers and Russian nationalists. Fourth circle: women, liberals, and people disenchanted with socialism. Fifth circle: slanderers and snitches. Sixth circle: denaturalised writers who have abandoned their own language to write in Russian.
The plot loosely follows the Pasternak affair, when Soviet society rose up against the author of Doctor Zhivago after he was awarded the Nobel. Kadare’s time in Moscow coincided with the frenzied mass denunciation of this “agent of the international bourgeoisie,” but the novel’s portrayal of these demented fusillades also unsubtly reflects the literary scene back in Tirana. Kadare has said that what he learned at the Gorky Institute (“a factory for fabricating dogmatic hacks”) was the conviction to do the opposite of what he was taught. Twilight is a kunstlerroman about a young man figuring out how to put this lesson into action. Disdainful of his peers who’ve acquiesced to socialist realism or abandoned their ethnolinguistic identity, the narrator begins to opt out of the whole endeavor in favor of pursuing affairs with the young women of Moscow. To impress his dates, he trots out the folk tales of his homeland in which dead men rise from the grave to fulfill solemn vows. But as his life eerily begins to take on features of the dark epics, he starts to see them as antidotes to Soviet dogma and as a wellspring for his renewed literary dreams. For the narrator, and for Kadare, submission to the party line and deracination come to mean the same thing. As translator David Bellos writes in the introduction, the novel is a “declaration of fidelity to Albania and its ancient folk culture,” one that argues that authenticity is found only in the Volk.
Kadare returned to Tirana in 1960 and quickly established himself as a promising young literary figure. His first major break came with the 1963 publication of The General of the Dead Army. The opening line (“Rain and flakes of snow were falling . . .”) sets the scene for the rest of both this drizzly gray novel and his oeuvre, in which he would repeatedly portray balmy Ionian Albania as cold and soggy—a stubborn little rejection of the sunny optimism of socialist realism. The book, set in the 1960s, follows an Italian general on an official mission to Albania to disinter his fallen comrades who becomes increasingly unhinged as he treks back and forth across the country. Much space is devoted to paeans to the fortitude and inscrutability of the Albanian people and the solemnity of their supposedly Homeric wedding rites. Hardliners criticized the book for its pessimism, cosmopolitanism, and insufficient hatred toward Italians, but it was a hit nonetheless and would be twice adapted for film by the regime. Outside of General, however, a significant amount of what Kadare published throughout the sixties was propagandistic slop. Representative of this work is the poem “What are these mountains thinking about?” (1964). The mountains of Albania, apparently, were thinking about the people’s martial resistance to foreigners and their suffering at the hands of the clergy. Though the mountains remained, of course, ever hopeful about the leading role of the Communist Party.
A series of publications around 1970 cemented Kadare’s position as the national writer of Albania. The most life-changing was the publication of General in France. Though its publication and success was a surprise, it wasn’t an accident. The state energetically disseminated Albanian propaganda abroad, and when the regime’s French translation of General fell into the hands of a Parisian publisher Kadare’s career was transformed forever. As the only Albanian writer to find acclaim in the West, Kadare gained cache back home, as well as a stylish new apartment on Tirana’s main square. More importantly, Hoxha’s obsession with French culture meant Kadare’s Parisian celebrity status would serve as a protective shield for the rest of the dictator’s life. Nevertheless, hardliners were now more suspicious than ever of the haughty young litterateur.
Around the same timeGeneral came out in France and the delightful Chronicle in Stone was published, Kadare took his first step into historical allegory, the genre in which he would eventually make his name. Told from the perspective of 15th century Ottoman invaders attacking an Albanian castle, The Siege is a sidelong telling of the myth of Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero who led a twenty-year rebellion against the Ottomans. It is a portrait of an Albania besieged by its enemies and betrayed by its allies but holding strong thanks to a nearly divine national leader.
Mostly though, The Siege is a lengthy screed about Albania’s racial enemies and the first of many books where Kadare skewers racialized others from the east as a way to sublimate his critiques of Hoxha’s Albania. Before battle, the besiegers are convulsed in an animalistic orgy of drunkenness as squabbling camp followers get ready to chop up slain Albanians for sale in the burgeoning market for human ears in Istanbul. Dervishes “scream without respite” about teaching “the Sacred Koran to these accursed rebels . . . the voices of our muezzins will fall on their untutored heads and take hold of their minds like hashish.” Looking down over the ramparts, the tall, blonde, blue-eyed Albanian defenders are revolted by “what we saw spread out beneath us . . . Asia in all its mysticism and barbarity.” As the Ottoman soldiers discuss their plans to gang-rape Albanian women, one Turk is revealed to have prostituted himself to his fellow Muslims in order to save up money to purchase sex slaves. The one Turk who’s actually seen an Albanian woman tells a jocular crowd that he was so aroused by the “clear black outline of [her] swallows’ nest” that he ejaculated prematurely and failed to rape her.
In an afterword otherwise praising the novel, translator David Bellos allows that the book expresses Kadare’s “horror at [the Ottomans’] ‘oriental’ inhumanity.” Part of this “‘oriental’ inhumanity” is the Ottomans’ purported goal of deracinating the Albanians. In a lengthy disquisition an Ottoman quartermaster clued in to the dastardly aims of the Turks tells an interlocutor that only “Numbskulls . . . think that a war and a massacre suffice to eradicate a nation.” Luckily, “the great Padishah has . . . men working for him on problems of this kind. They’re all specialists in denationalization . . . craftsmen in the rotting and corroding of nations.” The aim, the quartermaster explains, is to erode first the Albanians’ language and epic ballads, and then their Heavens and God.
This hyperbolic and paranoid Islamophobia animates another, less-remembered Kadare novel from the late ’60s, contemporaneous with the height of Hoxha’s antireligious campaign which saw the demolition of centuries-old churches and mosques and the torture and execution of the few religious clerics remaining in the country. The Wedding, published in 1968, mostly follows a village girl who joins a socialist roadbuilding project and learns about the benefits of modern marriage-making practices, but it also features a vicious subplot about drunken Muslim clerics systematically raping young girls. Kadare later described The Wedding as the worst book he ever wrote. It was presumably the novel’s toady didacticism he regretted, since its borderline blood libel against Muslims foreshadowed a lifetime of ever more scurrilous claims.
Kadare’s propagandistic writing can be explained, and perhaps excused, by the fact that there was zero tolerance of dissidence in Hoxha’s Albania. Less forgivable is Kadare’s enthusiastic affirmation of the regime’s nationalism and Islamophobia. With works like The Siege and The Wedding, Kadare played a key role in helping the Party legitimize itself through the synthesis of Communist and nationalist tropes, even if he only believed in the latter. Later in life Kadare became a promoter of cultural Catholicism and would lament Hoxha’s “anti-European” attacks on Christianity. But he unequivocally celebrated one result of the antireligious campaigns: Albanian Islam—the religion of the Kadare family going back untold generations, and of roughly 70% of the population before Hoxha—had been dealt a deathly blow.
In 1969, Kadare turned to more recent history and began a work that would become The Winter of Great Solitude. The five-hundred-page novel is a Tolstoyan retelling of Hoxha’s dramatic break with the USSR at the 1960 International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Moscow, depicting the leader as an epic figure freeing the nation from the clutches of the revisionist Soviets. Seen largely through the eyes of Hoxha’s Russian-language interpreter, the novel closely tracks not just the eventful meeting, but the alarming social and economic effects back home.
When the dictator’s wife Nexhmije heard about Kadare’s project she invited him to the leader’s compound to offer her support. In 1973 the book was published with Nexhmije’s approval (Kadare sent her a draft). An inscription found in Hoxha’s copy reads: “To Comrade Hoxha with boundless love from the author, in memory of the unforgettable days in Moscow in 1960, which further raised the honor of the country and the Party, whose epic will last forever.” The 25,000-copy print run sold out immediately.
Just as quickly the knives came out. Alongside bloodthirsty invective in newspapers, the Minister of the Interior, in charge of the feared security forces and aligned with Nexhmije, reportedly said, “I read 40 pages of it and I spat 40 times.” Critics were disturbed by the ambivalence of the novel and its portrayal of a darkly isolated Albania. The partisan generation, said critics claimed, was shown as in decay, while younger cadres came across as manipulative. A state committee soon censured the book, citing the inclusion of existentialist anguish, social ills, generational conflict, and the “contemporary bourgeoisie theory of sexual revolution.”
Plenty of Albanians were executed for much less. Kadare got off lightly, presumably through the intervention of Hoxha, who would have been gratified that a writer now famous in France had portrayed him in such a flattering light. Though the book was withdrawn from publication (a moot point since the book had already sold out), Kadare would be allowed to revise and resubmit. Before it came out again in 1978, Nexhmije went through the revised draft and left line-by-line edits. By 1980 the book, now simply titled The Great Winter, had been fully incorporated into Party-approved culture and was praised in an official history of Albanian literature as a prime archetype of socialist realist art.
How did Kadare later account for his hagiography of the dictator? For years his explanation was that it was in fact merely another daring, high-wire chess move in his battle with the dictatorship. By portraying Hoxha in the best possible light, Kadare would lead the dictator away from his worst impulses and toward rapprochement with the West. The novel was planned, Kadare claimed, as a “corrective mask” which the dictator would don and then be deformed by, a ring through the nose of a bear with which Kadare would make Hoxha dance.
Kadare was incapable of ever acknowledging the self-abasement the regime squeezed out of him. Even after abandoning his “mask” justification, he couldn’t help but twist his own bibliography to wriggle out of self-reflection. In a 2005 New Yorker interview, he said “No one ever forced me to write anything political, even during the most ruthless years of dictatorship. The only obligation, the only ‘tax’ that was due from me, applied to everyone. To have the right to work on universal subjects or on myths, you had to write one or two works about contemporary life.” It’s an odd claim for someone who wrote scores of works affirming and accommodating the regime and who wrote lines like this in his most famous poem:
The long mountain caravans were waiting,
Waiting for a leader,
Albania was waiting
For the Communist Party.
Perhaps it was too humiliating (or too damaging to his Nobel prospects) to be open about the fact that, like with a ring through the nose of a bear, Hoxha made Kadare dance. The storm around The Winter of Great Solitude had hardly settled down before Kadare began work on “The Red Pashas,” a 1975 long poem that portrayed Politburo members descending on the graves of prewar class enemies, plunging their hands into coffins, and emerging with blood up to their elbows as they donned the robes of the oppressors of the people. The message was clear; the poem was part of Kadare’s (as he put it later) “struggle against the state.” But before it went to press the poem was banned, all known copies disappeared, and Kadare was accused of inciting armed rebellion.
Media coverage in the 1990s brought the events back up to portray Kadare, with the author’s encouragement, as a persecuted writer long at war with the regime. Kadare himself wrote that at closed proceedings during the affair he faced what “must certainly have been the most excoriating accusation ever leveled at an individual in my country” and that he contemplated suicide. In the end he got off relatively lightly, as ever. He was exiled to the provinces and, he said, banned from publishing for years.
Holes in the author’s self-mythologizing narrative were immediately apparent. As noted in a 1997 New York Review of Books essay, the second half of the 1970s were the most prolific years of Kadare’s career and he published four books between 1976 and 1977. The exile, which Kadare suggested as his own punishment in his self-criticism, lasted only a few months, during which he remained a parliament member and was allowed to visit Tirana. He even refused to do the hard labor he’d been assigned, arguing that pouring concrete was not suitable for an intellectual of his status.
When the poem was found in state archives in 2002, the extent of Kadare’s obfuscations came into focus. Though the poem did indeed attack bureaucrats, it also featured a Zeus-like Hoxha smiting the “Red Pashas” and renewing true communism in Albania. The poem, written in the aftermath of major purges, can be read as a shiv in the ribs of out-of-favor cadres, some of whom had until recently been Kadare’s friends and supporters. Even after the poem reemerged from the archives, Kadare continued to speak about it as an attack on the regime. Like The Winter of Great Solitude, it would be just as accurate to describe it as overly zealous Party propaganda that missed the mark.
Between 1975 and the dictator’s death in 1985, Kadare published 10 short novels, a book of poetry, and the revised version of The Great Winter, in addition to completing three novels that would be published later. Most of the work from this period is part of Kadare’s Ottoman cycle, an interconnected set of fantastical historical allegories that he said allowed him to create an “eternal Albania” beyond the ugly day-to-day realities of Hoxha’s realm. The books range in setting from the Byzantine era to the 1930s, though most take place in an imaginary 19th century that oddly resembles mid-twentieth-century Tirana. While only The Palace of Dreams is in open opposition to the regime, the Ottoman works tend to center around gruesome and arbitrary state repression. It is a world of decapitations, blindings, and men rising from the dead (metaphorically or otherwise). The characters, largely thin ciphers or galumphingly cartoonish, must navigate a world where gossip, rumor, and paranoia rule.
Because the books deal with secretive bureaucracies and clueless saps executing the bloody will of the state, they’ve often been called Orwellian or Kafkaesque. It’s a lazy claim. Kadare’s Ottoman cycle lacks any of the humor, subtlety, or psychological depth of Kafka. The storytelling alternates between impossible haziness and grating transparence while Greek-chorus-like narrative devices hurry plots along and fill narrative gaps. Like in a dime-store thriller, characters are constantly going “cold with fright” or feeling “cold shudders,” “cold sweat,” and “cold perspiration” as scary rumors circulate that “made your blood run cold.”
The real connecting thread in his Ottoman cycle isn’t an Orwellian opposition to totalitarianism, as Kadare’s promoters claim, but the spinning of pseudohistorical myths meant to establish Albania’s cultural and racial continuity with antiquity, for the purpose of building a modern national identity. Though these myths have their roots in turn-of-the-century Albanian national renaissance thought, they also happen to be the approved historical narratives of the regime (pre-Communist, Communist, and post-Communist). Kadare follows a well-trodden path relying on epic poetry and folk song as the basis of a national identity and culture, but he could get outright loony too: he was convinced that Albanian wedding and funeral practices were the inspiration for (or the only surviving remnant of) ancient Greek theater, making Albanians not just indisputably European, but the Europeans par excellence.
Like with all Balkan nationalisms, Kadare defined his nation in opposition to the Ottomans and the East. It’s a difficult argument to make for a people who largely converted to Islam and were relatively loyal subjects of the Sultan. In his attempt to erase these five centuries of history, Kadare is forced into paradoxes. In his nonfiction, he described Ottoman rule as “the apocalypse in the exact meaning of the world,” destructive of everything European and civilized, a period of unending slavery and cultural genocide—as if the quartermaster’s description in The Siege of the Padishah’s plans had come to fruition. At the same time, he asserts that Ottoman rule hardly scratched the surface of authentic Albanianness (self-evidently Christian), that “nations cannot be changed . . . from invasions or conversions,” and that “Albanians’ ancient resentment” toward the Sultan was total and eternal. Kadare’s texts return again and again to the ideas that the Ottomans aimed to erase Albanian national identity through “the reduction of the language into nonspeak,” desex Albanian women through the veil, and “unman and morally weaken” the Albanian man with homoerotic poetry, since “it needed no more than a few ‘boys’ and ‘fags’ of that sort for not freedom, but the very idea of freedom to disappear forever.” This, to be clear, is coming from a man who is the descendent of a locally prominent Islamic poet and bore the Islamic name Ismail.
1978’s The Three-Arched Bridge is one of the most highly acclaimed works from the Ottoman cycle. Written as a chronicle penned in 1377 by Gjon, an Albanian Catholic monk living through the final decades before the Ottoman conquest, the novel tells the story of a cursed bridgebuilding project led by suspicious foreigners, while in the background “the forest of minarets grows darker on all sides.” Every night the work done on the bridge that day is undone, an act locals ascribe to the fury of the river spirits. To calm the spirits the bridgebuilders turn to an old Balkan myth of immurement and a local man is sacrificed to the bridge under suspicious conditions. The spirits appeased and the bridge complete, the book ends with seven Turkish horsemen (yes, seven) descending on the bridge out of the fog and clashing with Albanian guards, before withdrawing after the bridge is consecrated with blood. “We had seen their Asiatic costume. We had heard their music,” Gjon writes with horror. “Now we were seeing their blood . . . the only thing they had in common with us.”
Though Kadare later made unconvincing arguments about the antiregime nature of The Three-Arched Bridge, the book is a mess of self-contradictory threads that can be interpreted as equally pro- or anticommunist. The only possible straight readings of the book are as fervently Islamophobic and hopelessly committed to nationalist fantasy. In a sophomoric and facile passage that is easy to imagine Kadare finding particularly witty, Gjon writes of Albanians who’d become Ottoman vassals:
Nothing had changed, except for something that seemed tiny and unimportant…. This was the matter of the date at the head of the letters. Instead of the year 1378, they had written “hijrah 757,” according to the Islamic calendar, the adoption of which was one of the Ottomans’ few demands.
How unlucky they were. They had turned time back six hundred years, and they laughed and joked. How terrible!
When Gjon takes a break from warning about “savage Asia” and the barbaric Turks (he appends “(what a terrible name!)” every time an Islamic name is mentioned), Kadare has him voicing all the greatest hits of the Albanian nationalist story: that Albanians are “older” than Greeks, that Albanian is the source of the names of the Greek gods, that Slavs are “embittered newcomers” to the Balkans (they’d been there almost eight centuries by 1377), and that Albanians are direct descendants of the ancient Illyrians (a potentially true yet essentially unprovable hypothesis first proposed by an 18th-century Swede).
The most famous book in the Ottoman cycle, and Kadare’s corpus writ large, is 1981’s The Palace of Dreams. Set in a sketchily drawn mid-nineteenth-century Istanbul, the book follows Mark-Alem, a scion of the Albanian Köprülü family, who have been part of the Ottoman ruling class for centuries. Through family connections, the listless young man gets a job at the center of a secretive state bureaucracy that spies on the dreams of every subject in the vast empire. The parallels to Hoxha’s totalitarian police state and its extensive informant network are undisguised. Though Mark-Alem is a hapless employee, a series of unexplained transfers and promotions lead him to encounter a portentous dream at multiple stages of the interpretation process, a dream that warns of the national awakening of the Albanian people.
The Köprülüs (whose name is derived from the Turkish word for “bridge”) were a real Ottoman ruling family of Albanian heritage that produced a number of the Sultan’s viziers. Kadare uses them to create the imagined past he desires for his national narrative. Laughably, and ahistorically, he portrays the famous Muslim Ottoman family as crypto-Christians and protonationalists who insist on Albanian orthography when spelling their name—Quprili instead of Köprülü. The Quprilis are proud of their descent from the monk Gjon Ura (“ura” means bridge in Albanian) but believe their connection to the three-arched bridge, as a symbol of the Ottoman conquest of Albanians, is a shameful taint on the family.
Though The Palace is widely praised as Kadare’s masterpiece, the writing is anemic and full of unearned gravity. An exchange between Mark-Alem and his uncle about the secrets of the Palace captures the clunky and melodramatic tone of the novel:
The Vizier leaned closer to his nephew. His eyes now shone with a fearsome yellow light, the color of sulfur. ‘They say the Master-Dream is sometimes a complete fabrication,’ he whispered. ‘Has that ever occurred to you?’ Mark-Alem went cold with fright. A fabrication? The Master-Dream? He could never have imagined a human mind daring to think such a thing, let alone say it in so many words.
The climax of the novel occurs when Mark-Alem’s uncle brings Albanian bards to the family’s Istanbul residence to recite an epic poem featuring the Quprili family. The Sultan—jealous of the family for their appearance in a European epic (a clear reference to the jealousy that Hoxha, himself a prolific writer with literary pretensions, had for Kadare’s fame among the Parisian beau monde)—interprets the recital as the onset of the national awakening the portentous dream foretold. Partway through the evening the police crash in, murder the bards, and arrest the uncle, but not before Mark-Alem has a chance to hear the epic poem and the music played on the bards’ lahuta, the simple two-stringed instrument whose wailing screech accompanies folksong in the Albanian highlands. It’s his conversion moment: “Suddenly it was revealed to Mark-Alem that this hollow cage [the lahuta] was the breast containing the soul of the nation to which he belonged.” Bathed in the squeals of the lahuta, he’s hit with the “irresistible desire to discard ‘Alem,’ the Asian half of his first name, and appear with a new one, one used by the people of his native land.” It’s later implied that he begins to think of himself as Mark-Gjon Ura, symbolically erasing centuries of Ottoman rule and “reverting” to the religion, language, and even the name of his famous ancestor.
Through a series of events unexplained to Mark-Alem (or the reader), our main character becomes the director of the Palace of Dreams in the aftermath of the bloodbath. But such power holds no appeal for Mark-Alem now that he is committed to a national rebirth which he knows will be his own damnation. The book ends with Mark-Gjon Ura preparing for his martyrdom by having a gravestone carved for himself featuring a coded Albanian symbol. Though the ending is overwrought pap, it manages to carry some weight nonetheless through its unambiguous parallels to Kadare’s own choice to write and publish a book so blatantly critical of the state terror of Hoxha’s government.
The Palace came out in late 1981 and immediately sold out. As Kadare must have expected, it soon provoked the most dangerous response he would ever face. An emergency two-day Party meeting to address the writer’s sins was convened in March 1982 by Ramiz Alia, Hoxha’s number two, in the Palace of Culture’s concert hall (the site of Kadare’s funeral 42 years later). Kadare’s enemies in the Writers’ Union gathered in a nearby restaurant to celebrate his impending downfall. As the meeting closed and the Party elite withdrew to decide Kadare’s fate, Alia left the author with a threat: “the people and the Party raised you to the heights of Olympus, but if you do not remain true to them, they will hurl you into the abyss.”
Not long after the Party meeting concluded, a message arrived at the Writers’ Union. Any further discussion of the novel was prohibited and the book was to be forgotten. The matter was closed. Kadare, eternally lucky, escaped with a warning. It can only be assumed that Hoxha again intervened to save the writer.
Though Kadare avoided the abyss, The Palace had made a mockery of the Party and some of the most powerful people in the country now openly called for his ruination. He spent much of the 1980s fearful that his enemies in the security services would bump him off in an “accident.” To protect his posthumous reputation and prevent the regime from exploiting his legacy, Kadare secreted a number of starkly antiregime short stories, novellas, and poems out of the country. Held by Kadare’s French publisher in a Parisian bank vault, the texts were to be published only in the event of his death. Despite this tension, Kadare continued to steadily write and publish and there was little disruption to his domination of Tirana’s cultural life.
When Hoxha died in 1985, Alia took control. Though there were few reforms, the new leader’s lack of a taste for blood slightly mellowed the regime. A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Party remained in power but it looked like increasing restiveness might turn violent. In October 1990, just months before the fall of the regime in the face of mass uprisings, Kadare, fearing what his enemies might feel emboldened to do amid civil unrest, fled to France where he was granted asylum.
Kadare’s primary concern when he arrived in France was reputation management. He quickly published five self-justifying books in as many years—three works of memoiristic commentary and two volumes of adulatory interviews. The heroic narrative of the dissident Eastern European writer was irresistible after the fall of the Berlin Wall and it seemed like everyone wanted Kadare to fill that role, himself included. Throughout the 1990s he brazenly claimed that his escape to France was the catalyst that brought down the regime and said things like “Every time I wrote a book I had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship, while at the same time giving courage to the people.”
“They wanted to know,” Kadare wrote in Albanian Spring, the only one of these five books to be translated into English, “if I would ever become another Pasternak, a Havel, a Sakharov.” He continued, “no one ever thought to turn the question around: Could those men ever get to be like me?” After explaining that he had it worse than these famous literary dissidents, the text pontificates on the “enigma” of how he singlehandedly birthed a world-class literary culture in Albania “comparable to that enjoyed by the most advanced nations of the world.” This overeager pablum soon drew mockery, and by the 2000s he was pretending he’d never said much of it. In a 2006 interview on Albanian television, he was asked if he had ever presented himself as a dissident in the 1990s. “Absolutely not,” he responded. “Others have said this, and I could not do anything when foreign journalists wrote ‘the dissident author Ismail Kadare.’”
It pays to be skeptical of Kadare’s hyperbole about the antiregime nature of his fiction, yet there are countless instances in his work where it’s fair to marvel—How did he get away with publishing this during the dictatorship? How was he brave enough? In many cases, the answer is that he didn’t and he wasn’t: he rewrote much of his fiction during the 1990s in preparation for the reissue of official editions of his entire oeuvre in French and Albanian. There hasn’t been a comprehensive study of these revisions, but scholars have shown how The Siege was completely reconceived in its post-1990 edition, with a surfeit of references to Christian resistance and resilience that never would have flown in atheist Communist Albania. In David Bellos’s 2010 introduction to The Ghost Rider (1980), a Byzantine-era dramatization of an old Albanian folk tale, he writes that the revisions of the 1990s included “historical and political references it would have been unwise to include during the Hoxha regime, notably to religious practices and . . . to discussions that imply the possibility of disagreement with state authority”—changes that, for less careful readers, conveniently reinforce Kadare’s image as a brave antiregime truth teller.
Just as Kadare’s big-headedness got worse after 1990, so too did his writing. His first post-Communist novel, 1992’s The Pyramid, described by the New York Review of Books as “positively preachy” and a “thinly didactic parable of antitotalitarianism,” was universally pilloried. None of his other novels of the decade have been translated into English. Never a convincing writer of female characters, his earlier writing included occasional puerile sexual musings that come to suffocate the reader in his later books. There’s hardly a single work that doesn’t feature a man with a pubic hair fetish, and Kadare completionists must wade through endless descriptions of “troubling black triangle[s],” “black bushes,” “dark abysses,” “crazily talkative dribbling” vulvas, “baroque” vaginas that are “like a pleasure factory,” and anatomically confounding descriptions of ballooning and shrinking breasts. What one critic generously refers to as Kadare’s interest in the “libidinous erotics of resistance” results in characters saying things like “apart from her black pubic area I’d never had a decent look at her sexual organ, the true source of the raging storm,” and “a woman’s sex was without any doubt the most inexplicable and enigmatic thing in the world.
Both Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2000) and A Girl in Exile: Requiem for Linda B. (2009) are novels about mid-career artists—transparent authorial stand-ins—having affairs with high school girls whose main appeal seems to be their pubic hair. Mark, the painter in Spring Flowers, is racked with anger at the idea of his girlfriend shaving her bush and at one point gets turned on when he sees a shrub in the mountains. When Rudian, the antiregime playwright in Girl in Exile, lays his head on the “lovely breasts” of his teen lover Migena (whose name, the author helpfully informs us, is an anagram for “enigma”), he ruminates on “that dark abyss where he might still find out things about her he was yet to discover.” These two novels have little to recommend them, but even Kadare’s most powerful works published in the post-Communist period—the novella Agamemnon’s Daughter and the novel The Successor, both published in 2003—are marred by groan-inducing sexual musings.
Agamemnon’s Daughter was one of the texts smuggled to Paris in the 1980s, only to be published two decades later. The claustrophobic novella, set in a contemporaneous Tirana, follows a single day in the life of a privately antiregime journalist who’s been invited to sit in the elite section of the grandstand during the May Day Parade. As he makes his way to the parade grounds he encounters various Inferno-like grotesques damned by the regime: a man “reputed to have laughed out loud on the day Stalin died, which brought his career as a brilliant young scientist to a shuddering halt,” a theater director exiled to the provinces after putting on “a play that contained no less than thirty-two ideological errors.” Why has the young journalist been spared this fate? His hardline Communist uncle smugly assumes that his pesky liberal nephew has finally turned informant. In fact, the journalist is being rewarded for acquiescing to the end of his affair with Suzana, whose father is being tapped to succeed the country’s leader and must clean house.
The title references the sacrifice Agamemnon made of his daughter Iphigenia in order to reach Troy, and the journalist reflects at length on how the successor too is “sacrificing” his daughter. It’s a turgid and tedious aspect of the book, equating the end of an affair with the Kadare-like narrator to death. The novella sets up this supposed tragedy to criticize the spiritually barren nature of the regime and the shallow revolutionary ideas that suffused public discourse (“Revolutionize life ever more!”), but it counters these with even shallower pseudointellectual bloviating. “How the hell can you revolutionize a woman’s sex?” the narrator asks. “You would have to correct its appearance, the black triangle above it, and the glistening line of the labia.” The novella concludes despondently with the narrator’s determination to testify to the country’s suffocating conditions, declaring that “Nothing now stands in the way of the final shriveling of our lives.” This line, amazingly, refers most immediately to a metaphor on the previous page, describing a woman’s shaved pubic area as a “parched desiccated estuary dotted about with puny blades of yellowing desert grass.” Imagine, Hoxha’s Albania is as barren and horrifying as the shaved crotch of a woman.
The Successor takes place soon after, set in motion by the unexpected death of Suzana’s father. A fictionalization of the mysterious 1981 death of Mehmet Shehu, Hoxha’s heir apparent, the novel is a dizzying exploration of the nature of guilt in a totalitarian system and the calcification of rumor into myth. The book is an investigation, a confession, and a cover-up where cafe gossip and spy reports are given equal weight. The novel is Kadare’s most rewarding post-Communist work, showcasing a late career interest in taking the reader through hallucinatory metaphysical spirals. But like Agamemnon, its conviction that women’s social role is to passively hold secrets deep in their vaginas makes it difficult to recommend. Though for the reader who left Agamemnon wanting to hear more about Suzana’s pubic hair, The Successor provides.
Kadare received significant acclaim for The Successor and tried to repeat this feat with 2009’s The Accident. Written in a similarly recursive, investigatory manner, the book expands a tabloid car-crash story of two lovers (an older diplomat and his young intern) into mythic proportions. An attempt to address the challenge of freedom in the post-Communist era, this self-serious and hackneyed work of softcore fluff (“Her breasts were small, like a teenager’s, and strategically important in the battle. After them came her belly, the next snare. Below this, dark, threatening, marked by the dark triangle, lurked the final hurdle. And here he was defeated.”) is so bad one wishes it had been banned.
Kadare had always seen himself as Prometheus to Hoxha’s Zeus. The end of Communism saw him lean accordingly into his lifelong twin missions of bringing the light of European civilization to benighted Albania after “five centuries of night” and convincing that same Europe of Albania’s own Christian, European identity. The biggest hurdle for such a mission was the West’s Islamophobic suspicion of a people who—when including Kosovo and Macedonia, where roughly half of ethnic Albanians come from—are upwards of 80% Muslim by heritage. Kadare’s solution was to side with the chauvinists. Albanians, he argued in a series of polemical pamphlets and essays published in the late ’90s and early 2000s, weren’t actually Muslims, and the few who claimed to be were the dregs of society, and also probably perverts. Islam was, according to Kadare, a force of “unparalleled cultural barbarism, obscurantism, and oriental ignorance that plagued our country like a scourge.” He proposed that Albanians, à la Mark-Gjon Ura, abandon Islam en masse and embrace Catholicism as a return to the religion of their ancestors.
Kadare’s Christian nationalism not only defined his understanding of the Ottoman legacy, it distorted his view of the Communist period. In a characteristic display of his phenomenally incurious mind, he explained away the brutality of the Communist era as the people’s failure to overcome the “oriental heritage” and stated that “Albanians are among those people who have suffered equally from Communism and from Islam.” The Hoxha regime—understood as a continuation of the “eastern terror” of the Ottoman period—conveniently becomes in Kadare’s worldview another sin of the hated Muslim.
To further distance Albanians from the taint of Communism, Kadare also tried to pin blame on the country’s ethnic minorities. In an argument structurally and morally indistinguishable from interwar antisemitic propaganda accusing “Judeo-Bolsheviks” of undermining the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, Kadare’s early ’90s nonfiction spreads hateful conspiracies about ethnic Macedonians (for whom he uses the ethnic slur “shule”) and Vlachs (an ethnic group of Romance speakers who live across the southern Balkans). “The Shule and the [Vlachs] suited the communist regime perfectly,” Kadare writes. “You could tell them ‘strike without mercy!’ And their arm never trembled, they struck down everything—the nation’s history, her people, her very foundations. With great fervor they crippled the proud Albanian race.”
Kadare didn’t reserve his racism for his neighbors. Discussing the Italian occupation of Albania, he writes about the “racial insult” of the King of Italy proclaiming himself the ruler of both Albania and Abyssinia as a “grotesque coupling, where for the first time in their history Albanians were led to constitute a state on an equal footing with Africans.” With his suspicion of ethnic minorities, disgust with Muslims, and disdain for Africans, it’s no surprise that he wrote an editorial for Le Monde in 2015 where he declared, that, “We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past three thousand years have come from Europe.” Though Euro-chauvinism and Islamophobia are hardly disqualifying in the eyes of the Nobel committee, one would hope that the depth of Kadare’s hateful racism, discernible as early as the 1960s, is what spiked his chances of ever claiming the ultimate prize.
Splitting his time between Paris and Tirana for the last three decades of his life, Kadare could reliably be found scribbling away each morning at Café Le Rostand, around the corner from his Parisian apartment, or at Juvenilja Restaurant near the shores of the artificial Lake Tirana. So consistent was he that on an October morning in 2022, a news crew camped out near Juvenilja to thrust a camera in his face after Annie Ernaux’s Nobel was announced. In a 1996 interview with the New York Times, he interpreted his lack of a Nobel as a national insult: “Some people [in Albania think] I already received the Nobel, but I tell them, ‘No, Albania is always forgotten, unknown.’” In 2022 he was more placid: “As you can see, I have no thoughts.” However, his wife Helena—Kadare’s lifelong typist and id—spoke up: “We don’t know the writer who won the Nobel, even though we live in France, I’ve never heard of her, to be sure, but I haven’t even heard her name before. As long as the Nobel jury is the same and has been saying no [to Kadare] for 40 years, you don’t have to change your opinion about them.”
Le Rostand and Juvenilja were sites of pilgrimage not just for intrusive journalists, but also for Kadare’s admirers, who came in scores over the years to get an autograph or take a selfie. One such encounter provided a shameful yet revealing coda to his career. In 2022 the Albanian writer and former politician Ben Blushi, notable for his own bestselling virulently Islamophobic and homophobic historical novels, joined Kadare and a friend at the Juvenilja for an interview. In the published text Kadare comes across as senile, repeatedly badgering his friend, a prominent woman in the Tirana literary scene, for not being married. The friend volunteers that Kadare keeps nude photographs of his Moscow girlfriends on hand, and then proceeds to show them to a bemused Blushi, who notes that the women are in fact clothed.
At one point Kadare offers, unprompted, how much he hates his first name, which he calls “very ugly” and (to the befuddlement of every Albanian I showed the interview to) “wet.” Blushi says the name makes him think of an Arab trader while the friend pipes up and suggests that Kadare would have liked to be named Rudian, “the name that Ismail gave himself in literature.” “They worship me as Kadare,” the old writer laments, “but I am Ismail.”
Kadare’s hatred for his Islamic name was always with him. In The Doll he writes of a youthful anxiety that his name was unsuited to a famous writer, and in his private life he always preferred nicknames: Ism, Smajl, Is. A recurring feature of his fiction are pathetic losers or cuckolds who change their Albanian name to accommodate a conquering power. In Chronicle in Stone it’s played to comedic effect, when Gjirokaster resident Gjergj Pula changes his name each time a new occupier rolls into town: Giorgio Pulo for the Italians, Yiorgos Poulos for the Greeks, Jürgen Pulen for the Germans, and “the rumor was that . . . he had lined up the name Yogura in case of a Japanese invasion.” The townspeople murder him for his cowardice. This is counterposed to the heroic act of reclaiming one’s Albanianness, like the Muslim, Asian Ottoman Mark-Alem Köprülü becoming the Christian, European Albanian Mark-Gjon Ura.
Kadare’s forefathers held the Islamic names Avdo, Seit, Shahin, and Ismail. With his desperate desire to cement himself and Albanians at the center of a Christian European story, he rejected these names, his own name, and the richly complicated cultural heritage they imply. The inferiority complexes he long ascribed to his literary, ideological, or ethnic enemies were none other than those of the author himself. Kadare, carrying the flag of Albanianism, was at war with his own name and his own history. Just as he was unable to consider Albania’s history without shame and so fabricated nationalist fantasies in its place, he was unable when the time came to confront his checkered past and so fabricated a narrative of brave resistance to totalitarianism. Kadare has long been sold as the key to understanding Albania, when in fact his work teaches us only about his own complexes: the perversions and obfuscations of an arrogant mind poisoned by nationalism.
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