ISMAIL KADARE’S PRIZE FIGHT

With Albania beset by riots and on the verge of a society-wide breakdown, the Swedish Academy may find it an irresistible temptation to award the Nobel to Albania’s only famous novelist. But it would be a grievous mistake to give it to Ismail Kadare, and not just on literary grounds.

The Three-Arched Bridge, written 1976-78 and published in France in 1981, is in many ways a typical Kadare work: less a novel than a parable, superficially undemanding but rich in subtextual meaning, exotic, and set far in the Albanian past. Narrated by a 14th-century monk on the eve of the Turkish conquest of the Balkans, it rehashes a motif from Balkan folklore: the walling up of an innocent victim inside a building under construction, as a human sacrifice to assure the structure’s completion and long survival.

One day, an unknown traveler has an epileptic fit next to a raging stretch of river served by a ferry crossing. A wandering fortune-teller claims the seizure is “a sign from the Almighty that a bridge should be built here, over these waters.” As we soon find out, it is most likely a hoax, staged by a devious builder of roads. A bridge-builder arrives to design and erect a three-arched bridge, which is mysteriously damaged on several nights.

Soon a “collector of folktales” arrives to research a local ballad, which tells of three brothers who worked as masons, building a fortress in northern Albania. Each night the work they had done by day was destroyed by mysterious forces, until they decided to immure one of their wives.

After hearing several versions of this ballad, the “collector of folktales” disappears forever. Almost immediately, traveling minstrels are performing in local inns a version of the ballad that has been slightly altered. The new version proclaims that a human sacrifice will allow a bridge to withstand the onslaught of the river. The road-builders begin promising money to anyone who will be a willing victim. But these balladeers, too, are frauds. As becomes clear by the end of the book, it is the ferry company — and nothing supernatural — that has been sabotaging the bridge. The ballad merely provides a pretext for the road-builders to murder one of the ferrymen’s saboteurs in order to establish control over the profitable river crossing.

The tale is authentic, simple, and alluring, and its pagan and brutal underpinnings seem to offer a way to understand the recent Balkan wars. What’s more, it is easy to see how such a tale appeals to current politico- literary obsessions. There is a nice deconstructionist point to the way hegemonic commercial interests in the early days of capitalism hijack a people’s folklore, and put it to the service of monopolistic consolidation. Kadare, then, can be seen as a capable writer lucky enough to appeal to the literary obsessions of the Western academy in a way he never intended.

But, less innocently, Kadare was also highly thought of by the political and intellectual establishment of his native land for three decades. For almost all of that time, Albania was ruled by the brutal ultranationalist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, fabled for his last-stand Stalinist orthodoxy. During the Hoxha regime, official favor did not come without assiduous courting — or, to put it less kindly, conscious collaboration.

Kadare’s first novel, The General of the Dead Army (1963), was translated into French in 1971 and later turned into an Italian feature film. It is the tale of an Italian army officer sent to Communist Albania to repatriate the corpses of Italian soldiers dead in World War II, and it offers a comparison — too obvious to be called subtextual — of the morbidity and decadence of fascist-capitalist Italy with the socialist vitality of Albania under Hoxha. It is merely a deft execution of the Stalinist genre of socialist realism, but it charmed the leftist youth of Italy and France, thrilled to find a product of the proletarian “Tibet of Europe” that could be called a literary work of any kind.

Many of Kadare’s novels follow a heavy-handed political agenda. His Chronicle in Stone is an homage to Argyrocastrum, the southern Albanian town that was the birthplace of Kadare, as well as of Hoxha; the compliment to the dictator was obvious to Albanians. The Great Winter (1978) attacked Nikita Khrushchev, but only to exalt the unreconstructed Hoxha by comparison. While that book was one of Kadare’s failures, more and more of Kadare came out in French. At one point, Hoxha, a Francophile who had been a French instructor before coming to power, shared his own translator with Kadare.

By the time Albanian communism collapsed in 1990-91, Kadare was a genuine hit in France. Almost as soon as the cracks appeared in the regime of Hoxha’s anointed successor, Ramiz Alia, Kadare decamped from Albania to France, and publicly took his distance from the Communist dictatorship. Albanians offered differing explanations for this action: Some gave him the benefit of the doubt and hailed him as a born-again anti-Communist; others thought Kadare merely feared reprisals when the regime collapsed. Kadare, meanwhile, has presented himself as a longtime dissident who had walked a tightrope under communism.

It is a deceitful claim, for Kadare was in fact an approved author of the Albanian dictatorship. At the moment of his “defection,” he was vice-chairman of its official political structure, the so-called Democratic Front. Kadare had originally become known in Albania as a journalist directly serving the Hoxha regime, and as a poet. His poetry is, of course, unknown to most of his foreign cheerleaders, a blessing for him, since his most famous work in verse is his cycle What Are These Mountaim Thinking? (1962-64):

 

The long mountain caravans were waiting,

Waiting for a leader,

Albania was waiting

For the Communist Party.

In other poems, widely quoted in Hoxha’s Albania, Kadare wrote:

 

With you, the Party,

Even terrible pain

Is finer than any joy . . . .

 

And,

 

There will be light.

No, the Bible is not speaking,

But the Party. Its roaring voice

Resounds through people’s hearts like loudspeakers . . .

We, the poets of socialist realism,

Are also there,

With notebooks of verse in our pockets

Turning, there where molten steel is poured.

Kadare also issued a number of extraordinary attacks on non-Communist Albanian and foreign culture. In his 1977 speech “The Literature of Socialist Realism Is Developing in Struggle Against Bourgeois and Revisionist Pressure,” he declared,

In their spirit, in their content, even in their style and intonation, many of the works of the presentday decadent bourgeois literature are reminiscent of the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, the Talmud, and other tattered remnants of the Dark Ages.

 

This from a man who has since become famous ransacking medieval Albanian tradition for the raw material of his stories.

In the same discourse, Kadare denounced the “decadent modernism” of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Why Apollinaire, of all people? Because Apollinaire. was deeply influenced by his friend the Albanian writer and patriot Faik Konica — Apollinaire even wrote his great love poem La Chanson du malaime in Konica’s house in London — and Hoxha had judged Konica to be a “reactionary.”

In 1988 Kadare penned a tribute to Hoxha praising the dictator as “an outstanding intellectual, and an erudite humanist.” As late as 1990, he described the Albanian-American poet Arshi Pipa, an opponent of the Hoxha regime, as “diabolical . . . an absolute spy . . . an old hyena.”

Many Albanian intellectuals are dismayed that a man who served communism as Kadare did might be awarded a Nobel as “Albania’s greatest writer.” In 1993, the Albanian dissident writer Amik Kasoruho published a survey of Kadare’s work in a small Albanian-language periodical issued in Italy. Kasoruho, the son of an executed anti-Communist, himself served 10 years in Hoxha’s prisons. After his release he was barred from literary activity because of his ” negative family background.” What Kasoruho found worst about Kadare was that he opted for such conduct when it was not “absolutely necessary.” Kadare chose to join the chorus of Hoxha’s hacks, Kasoruho emphasized.

After years of assailing the “archaic” quality of Albanian culture, Kasoruho alleged, Kadare has come to embrace it — unsurprisingly, since it lends itself so well to the entertainment of Western readers. But Kasoruho also charged that Kadare had done something far worse than merely change his literary style. He had constructed his later fictions by looting the works of non-Communist writers whose achievements and reputations he helped suppress. Kadare’s Doruntine, for example, published in the United States in 1988, was based on a tale recorded by the outstanding Albanian folklorist Donat Kurti, who disappeared into Hoxha’s prisons. Broken April, a novel about North Albanian blood feuds, drew on the work of Shtjefen Gjecovi, the ” reactionary” Albanian scholar who died before communism came, but whose work was also attacked by the Hoxha regime and treated with contempt by Kadare.

Kadare attacked many of the great creators of Albanian literature, even though they had recorded the materials from which he has drawn such writings as The Three-Arched Bridge. Their names, unknown abroad, include Konica, Gjecovi, Kurti, Lazer Shantoja, and Bernardin Palaj — the last two executed by the Communists. Other Albanian authors, such as Gjergj Fishta (the national poet, who died in 1940 but whose bones were dug up by the Communists and thrown into a river) and the great emigre poet Martin Camaj, remain beloved among Albanians, but are also unknown to the mass of foreign readers today, in large part because all interest in Albanian writing was and remains absorbed by publicity for Kadare.

Kadare has attempted to make up for these offenses in various ways. In 1991, after arriving in Paris, he published a set of reflections, Albanian Spring, which reproduces his correspondence with Hoxha’s successor Ramiz Alia, along with various selfserving jottings. In it, he mentioned “attempts to make people disappear from Albanian literature,” including Konica and Fishta, as if he himself had not been one of the main individuals responsible for such “disappearances.”

Nobody should underestimate the pressures Kadare faced as a writer under the Hoxha regime, or deny him the right to reinvent himself in the aftermath of communism’s fall. But to leap from understanding to wholesale absolution for his past — and even strident calls that he be crowned with the world’s greatest literary honor — involves something other than the rights of the author.

Kadare’s appeal comes largely from his exoticism. To call him exotic is only to say that Albania’s other great writers remain a closed book to readers in the West. And if that’s the case, it’s at least partly due to the help that Kadare gave the Hoxha government in suppressing them.

Someone in Sweden ought to know that.

Stephen Schwartz, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chroncle, is a board member of the Albanian Catholic Institute.