For Ismail Kadaré, writing was a window of freedom from tyranny

Tirana. Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré, who died yesterday at the age of 88, built a monumental work using literature as an instrument of freedom under the communist tyranny of Enver Hoxha, one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century.

Kadaré succumbed to a heart attack, the hospital in the Albanian capital said. He arrived no signs of life and the doctors gave him a cardiac massage, but He died at around 6:40 a.m.accurate.

An ethnographer and sarcastic novelist who alternated between the grotesque and the epic, Kadaré explored the myths and history of his country to dissect the mechanisms of totalitarianism, a universal evil. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages.

Albania lived for decades under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, one of the most closed in the world.

The communist hell, like any other hell, is suffocatingthe writer declared in one of his last interviews, in October.

But in literature, that becomes a vital force, a force that helps you survive, to overcome the dictatorship with your head held high.held.

To literature It gave me everything I have, it was the meaning of my life, it gave me the courage to resist, the happiness, the hope to overcome everythinghe explained, already weakened, from his home in Tirana, the Albanian capital.

Disappointment

Following the break with the communist regime in Tirana, Kadaré left Albania in October 1990 and obtained political asylum in France.

At the time of his departure from Albania, his dissent and disappointment of communism had sounded like thunder, coming from a writer considered a national glory, the only one who had managed to put the literature of that small country closed to the rest of the world on the map.

He recounted the breakup in Albanian Spring and in his disenchanted autobiography Invitation to the writer’s workshop (1991).

The truth is not in the acts, but in my books, which are a true literary testament.once said the most famous novelist of the Balkans, frequently cited among the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born on January 28, 1936 in Gjirokaster, in the south of the country, Ismail Kadare studied in Tirana and then at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. He recalled those years of learning in The twilight of the steppe gods (1978).

One of the novels that made him famous was The general of the dead army (1965), a tragicomic episode of the Second World War, which tells the story of an Italian general who comes to search for the remains of his soldiers.

He then evokes the Ottoman occupation in The drums of the rain-via (1970), and The niche of shame (1974) and in The three-arch bridge (1978). The Italian occupation is addressed in Chronicle of stone (1970). Other works are inspired by Albanian traditions and legends.

History, the flattener of the individual

Author of poems, he also wrote several essays, including one on Greek tragedy: Aeschylus, the great loser (1985). After The Great Winter (1973), which recounted the break between Tirana and Moscow, The concert (1992) is a polyphonic work, at once epic, heroic and grotesque, about the divorce of China and Albania, also addressed in The palace of dreams (1976).

They follow The piramid (1988), a parable about a pharaonic project, The big Wall (1993), The shadow (1994) y The Eagle (1995). In 1998, Kadaré published Three funeral songs for Kosovo, short prose elegy that reads like a moral tale.

Sarcastic, The wrong dinner (2011) is presented as a fable in which tragedy and farce are mixed to expose the absurd mechanisms of a History that flattens individual destinies based on the whims of a paranoid tyrant.

Faithful to his idea of ​​the role of the writer, Kadaré published in 2013 The discord, reflection of the universal scope based on the Albanian case. If we were to look for similarities between peoples, we would find them above all on the side of errors.he said at the time.

Kadaré was elected a foreign associate member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1996. Among other awards, he received the Prince of Asturias Award in 2009 and the Jerusalem Award in 2015.