Ismail Kadere’s Idea of Europe

Abstract

The aim of this article is to reconstruct and pinpoint the peculiarities of Ismail Kadare’s idea of Europe. Kadare’s idea of Europe, it is argued, differs from the ideas of Europe embraced or presumed by intellectuals like Paul Valéry, Georg Simmel, Danilo Kiš, Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, or Milan Kundera, or from that of the European Union. For Kadare it is literature rather than the polis or its particular ideology that is the guardian of European values. Thus the European legacy, in his view, is primarily Homeric rather than Socratic. I suggest first that the persecution of writers and the repression of literature in totalitarian regimes underlies Kadare’s idea of Europe. I then further characterize Kadare’s theme of persecution as a dialectic between regime and culture. Finally, I reconstruct Kadare’s narrative of Albania’s “return to Europe” as the struggle for recognizing Albania as the birthplace of European culture.

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Notes

1. Arshi Pipa, “Subversion vs Conformism: The Kadare Phenomenon,” Telos 73 (1987): 73. Pipa adds that “Kadare is, no doubt, a very talented writer, the only Albanian to stand comparison with contemporary representatives of the narrative genre. One only wishes him a decent attitude” (77).

2. Piet de Moor, Een Masker voor de Macht: Ismail Kadare, Schrijver in de Dictatuur, 2d ed. (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2005).

3. Peter Morgan, “Ancient Names… Marked by Fate: Ethnicity and the ‘Man Without Qualities’ in Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams,” The European Legacy 7.1 (2002): 45–60; “Ismail Kadare: Modern Homer or Albanian Dissident?” World Literature Today 80.5 (2006): 7–11; “Ismail Kadare’s The Shadow: Literature, Dissidence, and Albanian Identity,” East European Politics and Societies 22.2 (2008): 402–24; “The Wrong Side of History: Albania’s Greco-Illyrian Heritage in Ismail Kadare’s Aeschylus or the Great Loser,” Modern Greek Studies 14 (2010): 92–111; and Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship, 1957–1990 (London: Legenda, 2010).

4. Ani Kokobobo, “Bureaucracy of Dreams: Surrealist Socialism and Surrealist Awakening in Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams,” Slavic Review 70.3 (2011): 524–44.

5. Rebecca Gould, “Allegory and the Critique of Sovereignty: Ismail Kadare’s Political Theologies,” Studies in the Novel 44.2 (2012): 208–30.

6. Morgan, “The Wrong Side of History,” 94.

7. Ani Kokobobo, “The Curse of Eastern Blood in Ismail Kadare’s Elegy for Kosovo,” Ulbandus: The Slavic Review of Columbia University 13 (2010): 79–93; Morgan, “The Wrong Side of History”; Gould, “Allegory and the Critique of Sovereignty.”

8. Enis Sulstrarova, “Rilindja’s Place in the Orientalism of Intellectuals in Post-Communist Albania,” Annales 22.2 (2012): 391–400.

9. Paul Valéry, Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), vol. 1, 1013.

10. Marinus Ossewaarde, Theorizing European Societies (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 14–15, 24, 31.

11. Arshi Pipa, Contemporary Albanian Literature (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1991), 85.

12. De Moor, Een Masker voor de Macht. In Ismail Kadare, Morgan points out that the relationship between the writer and the regime is like the relationship between Prometheus and Zeus. Zeus has power over life and death, but Prometheus, the alter ego of the writer, has knowledge that renders him both dangerous and a potential ally (119).

13. Morgan stresses that the Hoxha regime was a Stalinist regime, including the Stalinist cult of personality and the central role of the security police and the nomenklatora. Yet, whereas Stalin created and controlled the nomenklatura (and kept them in a state of fear), Hoxha’s nomenklatura included twenty clans, primarily of Southern Albanian origin. Intermarriage among these clans strengthened the power structure (Ismail Kadare, 19).

14. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Octagon Books, 1981), 161.

15. Totalitarianism is an ambivalent notion that derives its particular meaning from the history of the twentieth century: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were the totalitarian regimes. In George Orwell’s 1984, as well as in Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, totalitarian regimes are characterized by the denial of the right to think, to speak and to live, which is enforced by the rule of terror, total domination and concentration camps or ghettos.

16. Cf., Morgan, “Ismail Kadare’s The Shadow,” 421; and Ismail Kadare, 22–23, 279.

17. In Albania, such was the fate of writers like Arshi Pipa, Fatos Lubonja, Gjin Jaku, Ndue Jako, Vilson Blloshmi, Genc Leka, Trifon Xhaghika, Vilson Blloshmi, Preç Zogaj, Bashkim Shehu, Visar Zhiti, and Kapllan Resuli. Kosovar Albanian writers like Ibrahim Rugova, Azem Shkreli, Rexhep Qosja, and Flora Brovina were brutally persecuted in Yugoslavia. Adem Demaçi, a Sakharov Prize winning dissident writer, spent twenty-nine years in a Serbian prison. In his afterword to the Dutch translation of Qosja’s masterpiece Death Comes to Me from Such Eyes, Kadare explicitly refers to the cruel persecution of the Kosovar Albanian writers in the Serbian Republic of Yugoslavia. See Ismail Kadare, “Afterword,” in Rexhep Qosja, Die Ogen en de Dood (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1997), 334.

18. Milosz, The Captive Mind, 115.

19. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 25.

20. In the Soviet Union, Pasternak and Achmatova received numerous letters from soldiers quoting from both published and unpublished poems; there was a stream of requests for autographs, for the confirmation of the authenticity of texts, for the author’s opinion on this or that problem. See Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 55. Kadare enjoyed a similar status in Albania. Some of his novels sold more than 25,000 copies within an hour in Albania. See Pipa, “Subversion vs Conformism: The Kadare Phenomenon,” 47–77; De Moor, Een Masker voor de Macht; Morgan, Ismail Kadare.

21. Ismail Kadare, “Ismail Kadaré, The Art of Fiction No. 153: Interview with Shusha Guppy,” The Paris Review 147 (1998).

22. Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 67.

23. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 162–63. Bourdieu’s concept is derived from Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? (1947), in which, among other things, Sartre states that the politics of Stalinism is incompatible with the honest practice of the literary craft.

24. An example of such a fictional account of history, an artistic liberty, is Kadare’s account of dream interpretation in The Palace of Dreams, in which the regime, like an Orwellian Thought Police, treats dreams as if they were the products of rational thought and subject to the laws of the regime, whereas in reality dream interpretation was a private affair in the Ottoman Empire, for the benefit of the individual. See Ani Kokobovo, “Bureaucracy of Dreams,” 525.

25. See also John K. Cox, “Pannonia Imperilled: Why Danilo Kiš Still Matters,” History 97 (2012): 593.

26. In the Soviet Union, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) was set up under the auspices of the secret police, before it was dissolved into the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932, with Maxim Gorky becoming its first president. See Harry T. Moore and Albert Parry, Twentieth Century Russian Literature (London: Heinemann, 1974), 26–27.

27. In The Captive Mind, Milosz, writing as an exile in the early 1950s, has most clearly narrated the workings of socialist realism under Stalinism. Milosz observes that with socialist realism comes “the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yesmen,” to the point that the republic of letters is reduced to a “literary ghetto” in which writers exist in a “tense atmosphere of propaganda” (63, 109, 131).

28. Kadare’s style and content are also defined by his literary strategy to cope with the Hoxha regime. Morgan points out that “Kadare’s texts are Aesopian in the extreme, having had to operate with the logic of contradiction rather than of irony in order to exist at all” (Ismail Kadare, 210).

29. Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 159.

30. De Moor, Een Masker voor de Macht, 53–65; Morgan, “Ismail Kadare: Modern Homer or Albanian Dissident?”

31. Pipa, “Subversion vs Conformism,” 77.

32. Agolli was Head of the Writer’s Union. Kadare had studied with him at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow during the years of the Pasternak Affair. See Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 56.

33. Kadare typified the Soviet Union as “the steppes of Central Asia.” See Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 90.

34. Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 154.

35. According to Pipa, Kadare manifests himself as “a major mouthpiece of Albanian Stalinism” in The Great Winter. See Pipa, Contemporary Albanian Literature, 107. Morgan, on the other hand, stresses that The Great Winter represents Albania as having been led into a winter of discontent, isolated and impoverished and abandoned. See Morgan, “Ismail Kadare: Modern Homer or Albanian Dissident?”.

36. Morgan, “The Wrong Side of History,” 97, 100; Gould, “Allegory and the Critique of Sovereignty,” 210.

37. Morgan, “Ancient Names,” 58; “Ismail Kadare’s The Shadow,” 404; De Moor, Een Masker voor de Macht.

38. De Moor, Een Masker voor de Macht, 40–41.

39. Morgan, “Ancient Names;” 54, 57; Anne White, “Kosovo, Ethnic Identity and Border Crossings in the The File on H and Other Novels by Ismail Kadare,” in Border Crossings: Mapping Identities in Modern Europe, ed. Peter Wagstaff (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 44.

40. Morgan, “Ancient Names,” 54.

41. Morgan, “Ismail Kadare’s The Shadow,” 417.

42. Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 28.

43. Galia Valtchinova, “Kadare’s The H-File and the Making of the Homeric Verse: Variations on the Works and Lives of Milman Perry and Lord,” in Albanian Identities: Myth and History, ed. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd J. Fischer (London: Hurst, 2002), 104–14. White, “Kosovo, Ethnic Identity and Border Crossings in the The File on H,” 29.

44. Fatos Tarifa, “Of Time, Honour, and Memory: Oral Law in Albania,” Oral Tradition 23.1 (2008): 3–14.

45. See, for instance, Kadare, “Afterword,” in Qosja, Die Ogen en de Dood, 340.

46. Morgan, “The Wrong Side of History.”

47. Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 84.

48. Morgan, “Ancient Names,” and Ismail Kadare, 244, 248, 250; Kokobobo, “Bureaucracy of Dreams.”

49. David Caute, Politics and the Novel during the Cold War (London: Transaction, 2010), 158, 173, 273.

50. De Moor, Een Masker voor de Macht, 37.

51. John Cox, “What’s Behind the Veil? The Ottoman Fiction of Ismail Kadare,” Cardinal Perspectives (2006), at http://www.wju.edu/faculty/cardinalperspectives/winners05_06.asp. (accessed 6 August 2013).

52. Ismail Kadare, Elegy for Kosovo (New York: Arcade, 2000), 19.

53. In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn alluded to Dante’s most privileged circle of hell, with Stalin bearing a close resemblance to Satan in Canto 34. See also Caute, Politics and the Novel during the Cold War, 267, 282.

54. De Moor, Een Masker voor de Macht, 23.

55. Valtchinova, “Kadare’s The H-File and the Making of the Homeric Verse,” 113.

56. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books 31.7 (1984): 33–38. See also Merje Kuus, “Intellectuals and Geopolitics: The ‘Cultural Politicians’ of Central Europe,” Geoforum 37.2 (2007): 241–51, and Charles Sabatos, “Criticism and Destiny: Kundera and Havel on the Legacy of 1968,” Europe-Asia Studies 60.10 (2008): 1827–45.

57. George Schöpflin, “Identities, Politics and Post-Communism in Central Europe,” Nations and Nationalism 9.4 (2003): 478.

58. Guido Franzinetti, “The Idea and the Reality of Eastern Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” History of European Ideas 34.4 (2008): 361–68; Ossewaarde, Theorizing European Societies, 20–23.

59. White, “Kosovo, Ethnic Identity and Border Crossings in the The File on H., 26.

60. In Ismail Kadare Morgan provides more background on the particular historical context of the Rilindja.

61. Sulstrarova, “Rilindja’s Place in the Orientalism of Intellectuals in Post-Communist Albania,” 393.

62. Cox, “Pannonia Imperilled: Why Danilo Kiš Still Matters.” In Stalinist regimes such as the Hoxha regime, however, as Milosz emphasizes, cosmopolitanism was defined “as admiration for the (bourgeois) culture of the West,” and hence was an open violation of the doctrine of socialist realism. See Milosz, The Captive Mind, 43. Kadare is not a cosmopolitan writer.

63. Sascha Talmor, “Europe Ends at Travnik: Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle,” The European Legacy 3.1 (1998): 84–99.

64. See, for instance, Morgan, “The Wrong Side of History.”

65. Morgan, “The Wrong Side of History,” 96, and Ismail Kadare, 5.

66. Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 8, 197.

67. Ismail Kadare, “The Balkans: Truths and Untruths,” in The Southern Balkans: Perspectives from the Region, ed. Dimitrios Triantaphyllou, Chaillot Papers 46 (Paris: Institute for Security Studies, 2001): 6.

68. Sulstrarova, “Rilindja’s Place in the Orientalism of Intellectuals in Post-Communist Albania,” 394.

69. Kadare repeatedly mentions that, once conquered, many Albanians came to occupy high posts in the Ottoman Empire and participated, often as generals, in the Ottoman conquests. See, for instance, Kadare, “Afterword,” in Qosja, Die Ogen en de Dood, 344.

70. Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 140.

71. Hana Tomková, “Ismail Kadare: Portrait of an Albanian Writer,” The New Presence (Autumn 2005): 43; Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 40.

72. Shusha Guppy, “The Books Interview: Ismail Kadare – Enver’s Never-Never Land;” The Independent, 27 February 1999; Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 16, 17, 39.

73. Robert Elsie, “Subtle Dissent of a Balkan Bard: The Life and Works of Ismail Kadare,” The Times Literary Supplement 24 June 2005; Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 96.

74. As documented by Morgan, Kadare visited China in 1967, attending a banquet in the presence of Mao and Lin Biao. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao disbanded the union of writers and literature was denounced as unnecessary. Western literature was condemned and Chinese literature disappeared. See Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 97. Milosz explains that under Stalinism tragic literature, including Shakespeare, was forbidden because it would lead to thoughts about the mystery of human destiny, which most obviously contradicted the “official optimism” of socialist realism. Milosz, The Captive Mind, 73–74, 168.

75. Alexandar Ranković was Yugoslavia’s head of the secret police and Tito’s would-be successor until the 1960s. Labeling Kosovar Albanians as “Turks,” as Slobodan Milošević would do in the 1980s, he had some 300,000 of them expatriated to Turkey.

76. In Pipa’s view, Kadare manifests “anti-Yugoslav hysteria dating from Albania’s break with Yugoslavia” in such novels. See Pipa, Contemporary Albanian Literature, 94. A similar view is expressed by Fatos Lubonja, who finds Kadare at times racist and xenophobic vis-à-vis the Slavs and Islam.

77. Gould, “Allegory and the Critique of Sovereignty,” 209.

78. Guppy, “The Books Interview: Ismail Kadare – Enver’s Never-Never Land.” The persecuted writer Adem Demaçi, who spent almost three decades in a Serbian prison, has often been compared with Nelson Mandela.

79. Ismael Kadare, “Interview with Ismail Kadare, Albanian Writer,” Euronews, 20 October 2009, at http://www.euronews.net/2009/10/20/interview-with-ismail-kadare-albanian-writer (accessed 8 August 2013).

80. White, “Kosovo, Ethnic Identity and Border Crossings in the The File on H.,” 23, 33.

81. Sulstrarova, “Rilindja’s Place in the Orientalism of Intellectuals in Post-Communist Albania,” 397.

82. Ismail Kadare, “Sequi-Kadare Dialogue on the European Perspective of Albania,” 5 October 2012, at http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/albania/press_corner/all_news/news/2012/20121005_en.htm (accessed 10 August 2013).

83. Fatos Lubonja, “Re-Inventing Skanderbeg,” Eurozine, 10 October 2001.

84. Ossewaarde, Theorizing European Societies, 211–13.

85. Konrad Adenauer, cited in Ossewaarde, Theorizing European Societies, 213.

86. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and The Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

87. Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).