Death Of Ismail Kadaré, Preserving The Memory Of Dictatorship

-Analysis-

PARIS — Let’s leave the noise and fury of the news behind for a moment to pay tribute to a great writer: Ismail Kadaré, who died Monday in Tirana, the Albanian capital, at the age of 88. Kadaré had fled his country’s Communist dictatorship in 1990, and settled in Paris, where he could be seen every morning in a café near the Luxembourg Gardens where he liked to write.

France had offered him political asylum, and helped him throughout his career as a writer in a totalitarian world. It’s an exceptional and largely unknown story, which gives full meaning to the French values of freedom and solidarity that we sometimes boast about so cheaply.

Communism, nationalism

Ismail Kadaré had established a relationship of friendship and trust with a major French publisher, Claude Durand, head of Fayard, through his translator, Yusuf Vrioni, a former prisoner of the Albanian gulag.

The regime forced him to rewrite 100 pages

Durand took enormous risks to get the writer’s manuscripts published, having deposited them safely in a Paris bank, with instructions to publish them only if something happened to the author, or when he died, as he believed the Communist regime would outlive him.

In the end, the regime died first, so the masterpieces saw the light of the day.

We must remember what the Albanian regime was like. Nicolas Enver Hoxha, its leader, imposed one of the worst post-War dictatorships in Europe. But he was also fiercely nationalist, breaking ties with all those who tried to impose their will on him – Tito’s Yugoslavs, the Soviets, or later China.

First a journalist, then a writer, and for a time a student at Moscow’s prestigious Gorky University, Kadaré was one of the great names of this impoverished and isolated country. He navigated between censorship and tolerance, protected by his prestige as a writer.

There were times, though, when he needed to do some editing: when he wrote “The Winter of Great Solitude”, the Shakespearean account of the break-up between Enver Hoxha and Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1962, he recounted the Albanians’ hope that their country would move closer to the West. The regime forced him to rewrite 100 pages to erase this idea, replacing it with the people’s confidence in their great leader.

Duty to remember

What remains of Kadaré today? There’s certainly a universal lesson to be learned about life in a totalitarian regime.

Even when he compromised with the regime — and he will be reproached for this — Kadaré meticulously described daily life, social relations and intellectual life under dictatorship. His stories stand alongside those of the great writers of the communist and fascist regimes of the 20th century, making his an indispensable public memory.

Unfortunately, this memory ended up fading and blurring in places. One important place was in Albania, where he does not have the status he deserves, in a country that is trying to forget this painful page of history. A visit to his hometown of Gjirokastër, now a museum, is a must to recapture the atmosphere of his “Chronicle of the Stone Town”, the story of his childhood. Gjirokastër is also the birthplace of Enver Hoxha.

Like other literary giants, Kadaré should be read and reread to escape one of the evils that threatens us most: historical amnesia.