Ismail Kadare

Biography

Ismail Kadare was born on 28 January 1936 in Gjirokastër in Albania, to Halit Kadare, a civil servant, and Hatixhe Dobi, a homemaker. He attended primary and secondary schools in Gjirokastër and studied Languages and Literature at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana. In 1956 Kadare received a teacher's diploma. He later studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow from 1958 to 1960. While studying literature in Moscow he managed to get a collection of his poems published in Russian, and there he also wrote his first novel The City with no Advertisements in 1959, intentionally defying the rules of socialist realism.

After returning home in 1960 because of the Soviet-Albanian split, he tried to publish a fragment of his first novel camouflaged as a short story titled "Coffeehouse Days". Upon being published in the literary magazine Zëri i Rinisë in 1962, it was immediately banned by the authorities. He was advised by his close friends not to tell anybody about the actual novel, so it stayed in his drawers for decades until the communist regime fell in 1990.

In 1963, he published his first novel titled The General of the Dead Army whose French translation published by Albin Michel in 1970 led to Kadare's international breakthrough, having been translated into 30 languages to date. The novel wasn't received well by the critics in Albania at the time. His next novel, The Monster, published in the magazine Nëntori in 1965, was banned immediately.

After offending the authorities with a politically satirical poem in 1975, he was forbidden to publish for three years.

In March 1982 The Palace of Dreams was harshly condemned in a Writer's Plenum. The writer was accused of making allusions to Communist Albania in it, citing several ambiguous passages. As a result the work was banned. Kadare was also accused by the president of the League of Albanian Writers and Artists of deliberately evading politics by cloaking much of his fiction in history and folklore.

Around the time of Hoxha's death in 1985, his novel A Moonlit Night was banned by the authorities. The same year he wrote Agamemnon's Daughter—a direct critique of the oppressive regime in Albania, which was smuggled out of the country with the help of Kadare's French editor Claude Durand.

In 1990, Kadare claimed political asylum in France, issuing statements in favor of democratization. At that time, he stated that "dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship".

During the 1990s and 2000s he was offered multiple times to become President of Albania, but declined.

Critical opinion is divided as to whether Kadare should be considered to have been a dissident or a conformist during the Communist period. For his part, Kadare has stated that he had never claimed to be an "Albanian Solzhenitsyn" or a dissident, and that "dissidence was a position no one could occupy [in Enver Hoxha's Albania], even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance". Henri Amouroux, a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques of France, pointed out that Soviet dissidents including Solzhenitsyn had published their works during the era of de-Stalinization, whereas Kadare lived and published his works in a country which remained Stalinist until 1990.

Personal life

He is married to an Albanian author, Helena Kadare (née Gushi), and has two daughters.

Literary themes

The central theme of his works is totalitarianism and its mechanisms. Kadare's novels draw on legends surrounding the historical experiences of Albanian people, the representation of classical myths in modern contexts, and the totalitarian regime in Albania. They are obliquely ironic as a result of trying to withstand political scrutiny. Among his best-known books are The General of the Dead Army (1963), The Siege (1970), The Ghost Rider (1980), Broken April (1980), The Palace of Dreams (1981), The Pyramid,The Successor (2003).

The Pyramid (1992), was set in Egypt in the 26th century BC and after. In it, Kadare mocked Hoxha's fondness for elaborate statues, the pyramid form also reflecting any dictator's love for hierarchy and useless monuments. In some of Kadare's novels, comprising the so called "Ottoman Cycle", the Ottoman Empire is used as the archetype of a totalitarian state. The Fall of The Stone City (2008) was awarded the Rexhai Surroi Prize in Kosovo, and was shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2013.

Recognition

Kadare's works have been published in over 40 countries and translated into over 30 languages. In English, his works have been translated by David Bellos.

In 1996 Kadare became a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France, where he replaced the philosopher Karl Popper. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, and in 2005 he received the inaugural Man Booker International Prize. In 2009, Kadare was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. In the same year he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Science in Social and Institutional Communication by the University of Palermo in Sicily. In 2015, he was awarded the bi-annual Jerusalem Prize.

The London newspaper The Independent said of Kadare: "He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil".

Works

Kadare's original Albanian language works have been published exclusively by Onufri Publishing House since 1996, as single works or entire sets. The following Kadare novels have been translated into English:

English translations

Works published in Albanian

The complete works (except for the essays) of Ismail Kadare were published by Fayard, simultaneously in French and Albanian, between 1993 and 2004. Omitted from the list are the poetry and the short stories.

In 2009, Kadare's complete works in 20 volumes were published in Albanian by Onufri.

The dates of publication given here are those of the first publication in Albanian, unless stated otherwise.

Novels and novellas

Essays

Story collections

Plays

Quotes