Ismail Kadare, one of the most important writers of European literature, died in Tirana at the age of 88. Kadare had lived in one of the most oppressive and closed totalitarian regimes on the continent, the Albania of the dictator Enver Hoxha, with whom he shared his hometown, Gjirokastra. Born in 1936, he graduated in History and Philology, and then devoted himself to poetry. For two years he studied at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, before the split between the USSR and Albania when Hoxha sided with China, claiming adherence to the Stalinist vision and rejecting Khrushchev’s new course. After the publication of his first works The general of the dead army (1963) e The rain drums (1970), was confronted by the dictator himself who ordered him to write about the party’s successes, and not just “sad things”, as the Corriere della Sera. The writer was also forced into a humiliating public self-criticism, to loosen the yoke of the authorities on his figure, but this did not prevent his The Palace of Dreams (1981) was censored. Hoxha died in 1985 and Kadare waited for a few years to see if his successor Ramiz Alia was willing to reform the regime. Convinced that not much would change, he moved to Paris, a country that had shown appreciation for his works from the beginning. He continued to publish novels and essays, and was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2005, the Prince of Asturias Award in 2009, and the Nonino Award in 2018, being shortlisted several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
