From Minella Aleksi
Part One
-Kadare’s Albania: a starting-point laboratory for universal questions –
Memorie.al / In communist Albania, few events managed to stir public opinion. Usually they were Party plenums or the publication of a new novel by Kadare. While the former determined the official direction of the regime, the latter stirred in reader’s endless efforts to understand what was hidden behind the writer’s allegories, symbols and ambiguities. The regime and Ismail Kadare traveled in opposite directions: one sought submission, the other freedom. Their paths crossed continuously in a silent duel, in which neither managed to fully defeat the other. After publication in the West, for many Albanians the question arose: how could one be a great writer and at the same time publish in such a repressive system?
Some considered his works conformist or brainwashing, in the service of the regime, while a minority saw them as sophisticated forms of opposition to the regime. Two different viewpoints. The reputation abroad stemmed from special literary and aesthetic values and from the treatment of themes such as totalitarianism, history and identity. The reputation and dilemma within the country stemmed from the judgment of the writer’s role in the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To Western readers it showed that absolute power could be analyzed, demystified and turned into an object of literature.
For a dictatorship like that of E. Hoxha this was unpleasant. It was not a direct political attack, but the ability of literature that, through metaphors and allegories, raised questions about the nature of power, fear and freedom. It was called ideological diversion then or intellectual dissidence today. The army, police and prisons could ensure the external obedience of society, but could not fully control thought. In people’s consciousness the erosion began gradually, the de-mythologizing of power, and the myth that it was infallible, historically just and uncontestable was crumbling. In the West scholars remained astonished.
Kadare spoke of freedom, power and human destiny with an original artistic force, which French critics considered fully European and universal. Not only did it have no connection with the model of socialist realism, but it stood out for stylistic originality. For example, in many novels of Western and Russian culture, history serves as a backdrop for the event. In Hemingway, in the novels “A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls” history is usually the great backdrop against which the individual is tested.
The author is less interested in the movements of history and more in the way man reacts to them. Nikolai Gogol is the master of merging Russian historical reality with surreal and absurd elements. He used ordinary backdrops (the offices of St. Petersburg, the villages of Ukraine) as a canvas to strike at bureaucracy, corruption and social hypocrisy through black humor and magic. In “War and Peace,” the invasion of Russia by Napoleon is a major historical event, but the novel focuses mainly on the Rostov, Bolkonsky and Bezukhov families.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” the character seeks to realize a dream; the center is the individual and his illusion. In García Márquez, history appears as collective memory and as a cyclical process, where the past continues to act upon the present, while generations repeat fates, mistakes and experiences that seem to defy the linear flow of time. In James Joyce, history is usually not at the center, but neither is it simply a passive backdrop.
It is present indirectly, through language, memory, identity and everyday life. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” is a famous expression in “Ulysses.” Not as a rejection of history in itself, but as an expression of the feeling that the individual is burdened by the weight of the past, the political, religious, national and cultural conflicts that he inherits, without having chosen them himself.
It was different in the novel “The General of the Dead Army.” In Kadare history was something alive, often it became a character itself. The General and the priest not only travel through Albania. They travel within the shadow of a history that refuses to die. In this sense, history is not a decoration of the narrative, but an active force that drives events and determines the fate of the characters. History is not narrated as past, but as a power that continues to be present and to influence the present.
In Kadare’s “The Castle,” the Western reader was not only reading about 15th-century Albania, he was reading about the eternal relationship between center and periphery, the strong and the weak. The conflict between Albanians and the Ottoman Empire is not simply a military episode. It becomes a reflection on resistance, identity and the way small communities survive in the face of great powers.
In “Chronicle in Stone,” the Second World War is not presented only as the environment in which a child grows up; history penetrates every aspect of the city’s life and becomes part of the very way collective memory is formed. In “The Winter of Great Solitude” we have the fusion of history with literature. History is not presented simply as political chronicle, but as a force that directly affects the life, psychology and fate of the characters.
Realism (historical facts, the political atmosphere, the daily life of the characters linked to the time) is combined with the metaphorical dimension (winter is not only a season, but symbolizes the difficulties, isolation, tension and challenges the country goes through). In the novel “The Palace of Dreams,” even though the event is set in an environment similar to the Ottoman Empire, history is used as a mechanism to examine the nature of absolute power and control over society. What is special about Kadare is that the center is man in the face of time, history and power.
Kadare’s stylistic originality was a mixture of the tragic, the grotesque, the mythical, bureaucratic absurdities and black humor, which reminded scholars of authors like Franz Kafka, George Orwell or Milan Kundera. As contemporaries who emerged from the communist bloc and became world figures, Kundera and Kadare constitute a very natural pair for comparison. It is more natural than, for example, the comparison of Kadare with Gabriel García Márquez or of Kundera with Franz Kafka, even though each of them has certain affinities with these authors.
Scholars agree on the argument that if we speak only of formal innovations of the novel, Kundera was more innovative in the structure of the modern novel. But if we speak of a unique stylistic voice, many critics would give preference to Kadare. The reason is that the imaginative language, the symbolic universe and the way he transformed the Albanian experience into universal literature are extraordinarily special. For scholars there are many writers who recall Kundera in the method of thinking; it is much more difficult to find someone who recalls Kadare.
Kundera, more original in the way of building the novel as a philosophical instrument. Kadare: more original in creating a literary universe and an unrepeatable voice. In Kundera, characters are first of all individuals. They do not necessarily represent a nation, an epoch or a myth. They are unique beings, with desires, obsessions, erotic, moral and existential dilemmas. Kundera is interested in what makes a person unique, and his inner contradictions. Many of Kadare’s characters are not only individuals of a particular time, but bearers of historical and cultural layers.
Kadare places the individual in a temporal depth, as if behind a single man the history of a people is hidden. Kadare’s characters are often living “archaeologies,” where in a single person the ancient myth, the ancient world, the medieval, the Ottoman Empire, custom, historical fear and modern man can coexist. For this reason, the characters do not represent only a particular time or society, but the very continuity of human experience across centuries. This is why in Kadare one more often finds the epic and archetypal dimension, while in Milan Kundera the philosophical and existential dimension. His characters are less “children of all epochs” and more “children of modernity.”
Kundera asks what happens to individual consciousness. He turns the experience of Eastern Europe into a novel of the individual. Kadare asks what happens to man when he passes through history, and turns that experience of Eastern Europe into a novel of history and myth. At this point Kadare differs greatly from Kundera. This is also the reason why some scholars consider Kundera a great master of the European novel, while Kadare a more special and less classifiable phenomenon within world literature.
In “The Palace of Dreams,” the state does not try to control only the actions of citizens, but also their inner world, even dreams themselves. Thus, the idea of power passed from a concrete political reality to a symbolic and existential level. For the Western reader, the interesting thing was that Kadare raised universal questions: Can thought be controlled? Can inner freedom exist? How far does the will of institutions go to know everything?
These questions do not become and do not belong only to dictatorships; they remain important whenever societies face new forms of control and surveillance. Today Americans face the Trump phenomenon! Even the most consolidated democracies, like the American one, remain fragile; they are continuously exposed to the risk of abuse of power and autocratic tendencies within the state itself. In classical political literature, power is often presented through visible structures of control: the police, the army, the administration or the party.
Kadare’s originality lies in the core that he takes the analysis of power to the interior of man. Power in Kadare’s works is not presented as a cold and abstract mechanism. It carries “the smell of history.” Which implies that power comes wrapped in memory, traditions, history, customs and concrete experiences of a society? In Kadare power has an origin and an inheritance. This means that Kadare’s characters do not face only an order of today; they also carry a historical force built over centuries.
A modern Western power can be imagined as administration, law, bureaucracy, but, “ah,” in the writer’s people it was a little different, because power is said to have a “cultural face,” since it created beliefs and meanings that make rule seem natural, just or necessary. Why was this interesting for the Western reader? Because Kadare showed something much more complex. That oppression is not born only from a dictator or an institution.
It is not only a political structure. It is also a historical and psychological force, which enters people’s lives and which is nourished by tradition. Tradition as something that binds a community can become a limitation when the individual no longer has space to choose. In “Broken April,” the “Kanun” is not simply a written law. It is a moral authority that lives in people’s minds. That is, tradition, as an invisible form of power, becomes stronger than man’s freedom.
The character “Gjorg” may not desire revenge, but feels that the family expects it of him, honor demands it, the community will judge him. Refusal, as a black sheep, will put him outside society. The essential question is: can an individual be called free who is not compelled by the force of the state, but by the fear of social judgment? In this case, power is exercised not through police or law, but through norms and customs that are accepted without being questioned. Almost all the main characters in Kadare’s work pass through this kind of “stress test” or “test under the pressure of customary control.”
The problem appears when the question “Is it right?” is replaced by the conviction that “this is how it has always been done.” Then tradition no longer acts only as cultural inheritance, but also as an invisible mechanism of control. So the main idea is: The most powerful oppression is not always the one that compels you with violence; sometimes it is the one that makes you feel the boundaries set within the prison of yourself. Kadare’s characters live not only with what is happening, but also with the memory of what has happened.
It is felt in people’s silence, in their fears, in the way they control their words, in the strong compulsory customs, in the doubling of inside-outside the home, in the two-facedness of behavior. It is the origin of the idea of how a powerful political system can inherit and develop the human desire for control. This is a fear that people do not learn from a single event, but “inherit” from history. That means parents have experienced fear, naturally transmit it to children; society has experienced violence, as a result people learn to be silent.
Even when there is no longer real punishment, people continue to be afraid to speak, because “it has always been like this.” Oppression in these cases is felt as psychological pressure, not direct. A rule inherited from the past determines the fate of the individual. In Kadare, power is often present even when it does not appear. This is why Kadare’s characters are interesting: they are not only victims of power.
They are people who live in a world where power has become part of history, customs, fears and their way of thinking. For the Western reader this created an interesting question: How many of our choices are truly free and how many are determined by the traditions we inherit? Various scholars have shown comparative attention between Dostoevsky’s and Kadare’s literature. Dostoevsky seeks and discovers the “demons” (the inner forces and ideas that possess man) in the psychological depths of man and the dramas of the human soul.
In Kadare, they are often found as the phantoms of history, the hidden faces of modern power and collective fears that penetrate human life. Both stand in literature that does not only tell events, but investigates what fear, power and conscience do to man. In Dostoevsky conscience is a battlefield of the soul, where man faces guilt, freedom, sin, religion, reason and faith, their consequences and inner clashes. In Kadare, conscience is linked more to the position of the individual before history and power: how dignity, memory and truth are preserved when man is placed “under the test of pressure.” / Memorie.al
Continues in the next issue
