Rome, 1 July 2024 – The great Albanian writer ismail Kadare he died at the age of 88 years oldpassing away this morning in his home in Tirana. Several times nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, member of the French Academy, he gave voice to the ancient soul of his country and was able to tell the dictatorship and the dark moments of his country experienced first-hand. His last book, “When a dictator calls” (Theseus’ Ship, translated by Cettina Caliò) will be released in Italia a October 2024 – recounts a three-minute telephone conversation in June 1934 between Stalin and Pasternak, to discuss the arrest of the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam.
Kadare was born on January 28, 1936 in Argirocastrothe same hometown of the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, and in 1990 he had asked for political asylum in France. A painful decision that he recounted in “From one December to the next” (1991). During the communist regime, he was a member of the People’s Assembly from 1970 to 1982 and vice-president of the Democratic Front of Albania. Many of his books were censored in his homeland, including “The Winter of Great Solitude” , in which he paints a portrait of Enver Hoxha and whose manuscript he asked for in 2012 to be returned to the former dictator’s widow, Nexhmije Hoxha. The book, published in 1972 with the revised title “The Great Winter”, is a metaphor about Albania which, after the break in the 1960s with the then Soviet Union, was isolating itself from the rest of the world. Among the banned volumes also “The Palace of Dreams” (1981), “Concert at the end of winter” (1988) e “The monster” (1990). “Because of my positions, many consider me an enemy of communism, others an enemy of the West,” he said in 2008 when receiving the Nonino Prize.
A poet before being a narrator and screenwriter, Kadare made his debut in 1963 with the novel “The general of the dead army”, released in Italy almost twenty years later, in 1982 by Longanesi, and became a film with Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Sergio Castellitto. The book told of an Italian general and a priest who want to bring back to their homeland the bodies of their compatriots who died in Albania during the Second World War. For Longanesi it was also released in 1970 “The Drums of Rain”, but now it is La Nave di Teso that is re-editing his work – among the works published so far, “Doll” in 2017 and “The palace of dreams” in 2023.
Graduated in History and Philology, the Albanian writer had also studied literature at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. He returned to Albania in 1960 where he remained until 1990. He was a great Dante enthusiast and dedicated to Alighieri “Dante the Inevitable” (Fandango, 2008) in which he shows how the Supreme Poet was “inevitably present in every moment, even the darkest, of Albania’s history, offering with his art a source of inexhaustible beauty and refuge from the horrors of history” .
He has received many prizes, including the Grinzane Cavour in 1998, the Prix Méditerranée for foreigners, the Prince of Asturias in 2009 and the first edition of the international literary literature Man Booker in 2005. On that occasion the writer had hoped that the prize served to make people understand that the Balkans were not just war and ethnic cleansing. In 1999 he harshly criticized the Europeans, “politicians, scholars, journalists who hesitate to take a stand against the crimes perpetrated by the Serbs against the Albanians of Kosovo”. And in 2023 he underlined that “all the good that comes to Albania today comes from the rapprochement with Europe”. In the same year he was appointed Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor by French President Emmanuel Macron, one of the highest honors granted by France.
