SOURCE: Kadare, Ismail, and Shusha Guppy. “Poet of Freedom: A Profile of Ismail Kadare.” World and I 14, no. 9 (September 1999): 287.

[In the following interview, Kadare discusses Albania politics, his writing career, and his future aspirations.]

One day during the negotiations in Cheteau de Rambouillet, the leaders of the Kosovan delegation paid a visit to Ismail Kadare, Albania's greatest living writer, in Paris. They were seeking his advice about the final proposals. Over a drink they talked, laughed, took some photographs, and left. The next day they duly signed the accords, which the Serbs finally rejected. We know the tragedy that ensued: “It says something about the civilized Kosovars, that their representatives choose to consult a writer, instead of a politician or a general, and follow his advice,” comments Kadare, showing me the pictures—four men surrounding the writer, smiling happily for the camera.

I told them to sign, that otherwise they would share the responsibility for this war. Having signed in good faith, they have shown the world that it is [Slobodan] Milosevic who has caused it, who instigated this genocide.

In his Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson claimed that poets are “the legislators of mankind,” to which Shelley later responded with “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It is encouraging that in some parts of the world, great writers can still command authority and influence events.

Kadare's latest book, Three Elegies for Kosovo, has recently been published in France to great acclaim. It recounts the famous Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which several balkanic kingdoms joined forces against the Turks and lost. The battle lasted only one day, but Sultan Murad I was killed and the Turks left. Too busy with Tamerlane and other invaders from the East, they returned 150 years later, took the whole of the Balkans including Greece, and stayed for 400 years. In Kadare's book, the battle is described by three narrators—Turkish, Serbian, Albanian—in three short sections.

Ever since then, for six centuries, the Serbs and Albanians have been fighting over Kosovo: “Who owns this accursed plain, the Blackbirds' Plain as they call it, for which the quarrel started?” asks one narrator. “On the six hundredth anniversary of the battle in 1989, Milosevic launched the first massacre of Kosovars, and started the explosion of Yugoslavia,” Kadare points out.

Kadare once said that a writer has two ages: his natural age and his reputation, which lives on another timescale. His own reputation arrived in the West in 1970, when his novel The General of the Dead Army was published in France, taking literary Paris by storm. It tells of an Italian general who goes to Albania after World War II to recover the bodies of Italian soldiers and bring them back for burial. It was hailed as a masterpiece, and its author was invited to France, where he was received by French intellectuals as a new, powerful voice from behind the Iron Curtain. Not since Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had a book created such a stir. It was made into a film starring the late Marcello Mastroianni and later inspired Bertrand Tavernier's masterpiece La Vie et Rien d'Autre (Life and Nothing Else).

Since then Kadare's vast oeuvre—some fifteen volumes of fiction, several collections of poetry and essays—has been translated into most major languages, and he has been suggested for the Nobel Prize numerous times. He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka, and Orwell, but his is an original voice, at once universal and deeply rooted in his own soil. He is profoundly involved with his country—“the antique Illyrium, the third region of southern Europe beside Rome and Greece”—and its language, a unique branch of the Indo-European family. He speaks in prophetic accents of “La Grande Literature Universelle,” which is his spiritual home: “Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round.” That a small, faraway country should have produced a writer and poet of his stature adds weight to his belief that Albania belongs to the mainstream of European culture: “I said to the Kosovan delegates: ‘Forget ethnicity; forget religion. You are part of this European civilization, of the European tradition of freedom. That is what you are fighting for.’”

Kadare was born and grew up in Gjirokast'r, a beautiful, ancient city, which is ironically also the birthplace of Albania's communist dictator Enver Hoxha: “At the end of the war, foreign armies passed through the town—Italian, Greek. The town was bombarded by the Germans, the English, passed from one hand to another. It was a continuous spectacle and exciting for a child.” He studied literature at the University of Tirana and spent three years doing postgraduate work at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. The General of the Dead Army was his first novel, published on his return to Albania in 1962, when he was twenty-six: “I read Macbeth when I was eleven,” Kadare remembers. “It hit me like a lightning, and I copied every word of it. Later I discovered the Greek classics, and after that nothing could have power over my spirit. I realized that there was a great universal literature that nothing can destroy. So when I went to the Gorky Institute, which was a factory for fabricating party hacks, I was already immunized—what was happening in Elsinore or by the ramparts of Troy was more real to me than the wretched banalities of socialist-realist novels. I read Gogol and Pushkin, Dostoevsky's House of the Dead, and later Orwell and Kafka. These writers were forbidden in Albania, but I managed to find their books when I traveled abroad. But what happened in totalitarian countries was far worse than anything that literature has ever invented.

I realized that I had three choices: to become a conformist, to stop writing, or to write as if I were free. I chose the latter. I wrote The Town without Publicity, the story of two literary crooks who try to falsify a text to make it compatible with Marxism, thereby advancing their careers. It touched the fundamental problem at the core of communism: falsification. It was published as a short story in Tirana and immediately banned, and the head of the Communist Youth who had recommended it went to prison for fifteen years.

The success of The General abroad made Kadare's life difficult at home. The official critics savaged him—where were the cheerful peasants, the Stakhanovite workers, the optimism about the glorious future? His book was gloomy, full of mud and rain, rotten bodies and the false heroism of war. Thereafter Kadare used a variety of literary devices—allegory, satire, mythology, historical narrative—to escape Hoxha's ruthless censors: “Hoxha fancied himself a poet and intellectual who had been to the Sorbonne, and he didn't want to be seen as an enemy of writers. Of course he could have killed me in a ‘car crash,’ or by ‘suicide,’ as he did many others.”

There followed three decades of deadly cat-and-mouse play with the dictator, during which Kadare's books were in turn published and banned, and he himself was made a member of Parliament one day and exiled to a remote region the next. He narrowly escaped being shot in 1975 when his satirical poem “The Red Pashas” was discovered by a government employee who denounced him. “The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam perished in the Gulag for a similar offense against Stalin,” he remarks. Yet Kadare did not want to uproot himself by defecting to the West. Instead he chronicled the dark years of dictatorship in masterpieces such as The Pyramid, The Concert, The Palace of Dreams, and Chronicle in Stone, an enchanting account of his childhood.

Every time I wrote a book, I had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship. Everyone knew that I was an antiregime writer, and the fact that the government could not condemn me gave courage to others. That is the fundamental function of literature: maintaining the moral torch.

He finally left Albania in 1990 and was welcomed in France as an honored guest: “One day I received a letter from Ramiz Alia, Hoxha's successor, in which the party was mentioned twenty-three times. I knew it was time for me to leave. There was a struggle between democracy and dictatorship, and I thought that my departure would help the cause of democracy. I was in France for the publication of The Palace of Dreams, and I made a public statement that was widely reported and played a decisive role in favor of democracy.”

After the fall of communism, the Albanian people wanted Kadare to become their first democratically elected president, just as Vaclav Havel was in Czechoslovakia, but he refused: “I did not hesitate one second. My case was different from Havel's; I wanted to remain a writer and free.”

Ismail Kadare is slim and shy. His dark, dapper suit and large horn-rimmed glasses emphasize his serious expression, while his deep voice and strong accent are mitigated by his courtesy and ready smile. When he relaxes, he reveals a robust sense of humor and laughs heartily at human absurdities. He lives in Paris with his wife and younger daughter in a spacious, bright apartment. Overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, it belongs to the French Academy. In 1988 he was made a member of the prestigious Institut de France; eight years later he was elected to the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, replacing the British philosopher Karl Popper, and last year he was presented with the Legion d'Honneur, the first Albanian ever to receive the honor. Now, in an unprecedented act of homage, Kadare's French publishers are bringing out his complete works in six volumes, in both French and the original Albanian. The first three have already appeared.

Since the collapse of communism some Eastern European writers have stopped writing, as if they had lost their subject matter and their raison d'etre. Not so Kadare, who has since produced Spiritus, a novel about two ghosts who return to a postcommunist world; a book of poetry; volumes of essays and memoirs; and Three Elegies for Kosovo.

Has freedom of expression helped him? “For a writer, personal freedom is not so important,” says Kadare. “It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others, which is not always the case. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship—Shakespeare, Cervantes, even Dante. The great universal literature has always had a difficult, tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on their chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. On the other hand, nobody forced Maxim Gorky to write Mother, in New York in 1905. Gorky's slavery was in his own head, and his piece of rubbish murdered half the writers of Eastern Europe, as it became a model everybody had to copy. In the West the problem is not absence of freedom. There are other servitudes—lack of talent, thousands of mediocre books published every year choking some good ones out …”

I suggest that writing having become a profession, writers have to keep producing for a living. What would he do if he didn't write any more? “In Albania, solidarity takes the place of social security,” says Kadare. “Family, friends, neighbors, everybody helps when there is a need. Without this support, survival during the decades of dictatorship would have been even more difficult. In the West, family structure seems to be weakened.”

Have success and fame affected his work? I wonder. “Not at all,” he replies. “What the French call les mondanites (glitzy social life) is sometimes interesting. There is a literary hierarchy in France; everyone knows his place, but I'm outside all that. I know my work is a gift from God, and I have neither false modesty nor idiotic pride.” Yet surely exile is harder for a writer, especially a poet, than for anyone, because of his constant engagement with the language and its dynamics? “To some extent a writer is always in exile,” he replies, “because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is a distance. But I don't feel cut off. I travel to Albania frequently, and in three, four years I'll go back for good, perhaps keeping a pied-a-terre in Paris. At the moment I prefer working in Paris; it is quieter. There is too much politics back home; everyone wants me to be involved, and it is hard not to be.” He writes in a cafe near his home, as French writers—Sartre, Nathalie Sarraute, Camus—did in the postwar era.

Although brought up in a Muslim family, Kadare believes that Albania's Christian heritage is deeper and more dominant in his country: “Half the population converted to Islam under the Ottomans. But Catholicism was more deeply rooted. Close to Rome, Albania was considered the citadel of Catholicism in the Balkans. Christianity was also dominant in literature; Catholic monks were active in towns and villages. It was a village priest who wrote the Code of Daily Life in the seventeenth century. A remarkable document, it has been compared to the Magna Carta and deals with civil rights and moral obligations of citizens in detail. For example, it says, ‘A house belongs to God and to the guest, you are the third owner’; or that murder means killing another with one's own hand, and that as soon as a murderer has killed someone, he must inform the family of the victim. By contrast, the Ottoman influence was superficial—in the administration, the cuisine, commerce.”

Kadare feels deeply the misfortunes of his country—the poorest in Europe—and blames the West for Hoxha's entrenchment: “The West forgave Tito and helped Yugoslavia, but it did not forgive Hoxha. When Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union in 1962, he was ready to turn to Europe, but they rejected him. So he made an absurd short-lived alliance with China, and when that went awry he built thousands of antinuclear pillar-boxes, which he knew were useless, but he wanted to create a fear-psychosis. As a result, Albania suffered longer than any other Eastern European country. Ours is a tragic history.”

Since the beginning of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, Kadare has been active in giving moral and practical support to the Kosovars, with articles in the press, radio and television interviews, even leading marches and demonstration in Paris. “Why was Kosovo given to Serbia as a present after the war?” he asks. “No one dares ask that question. Yet 40 percent of all Albanians live in Kosovo. It was a tragic error, and Kosovo became a classic example of colonialism, worse than South Africa under apartheid—over 90 percent of the population bullied by less than 10 percent. When the Serbs evoke the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, it is as if Britain claimed Belgium because of the Battle of Waterloo.”

I point out the danger of disintegration of the whole Balkans if every bit became independent. Just as Kosovo followed Bosnia, others—Macedonia, Montenegro, and so forth—would come after Kosovo. “But you can't keep a people in slavery by that sort of reasoning,” says Kadare. “It is immoral. As I said, the Kosovars wanted only what they had before 1990, autonomy. Now the situation has changed, and perhaps a new formula has to be found. I agree that there is a danger, and for that reason the European Community should negotiate for serious compromises, even sacrifices, from all concerned. For example, that Kosovo would not join Albania for ten, twenty years, that Macedonia and Albania would not rock the boat by making demands. A lot can happen during that interim period, but at present we cannot leave it to the political class in these countries to sort things out; they have no democratic tradition; a Milosevic can't conceive of democracy.”

We watch the evening news on television—heart-wrenching scenes of refugees fleeing, villages burning, children dying. His anger and grief overflow: “This humanitarian catastrophe is happening in the heart of Europe! Whatever your point of view, you can't condone the massacre of unarmed innocent civilians by a ruthless army. The whole of Serbia bears a collective responsibility for Kosovo, just as Germany did for the Holocaust.”

Kadare believes that the joint effort of Americans and Europeans to stop ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia once and for all is the only solution: “I agreed with their decision to use force with great sadness, but what else could be done? And now they must go on until the conflict is resolved and the refugees can go back in safety.”

What of the future? “I will be working on my complete works. It is a long and arduous job … cutting, cutting. My French editor insists that the slightest change be entered into the French translation. I don't think I will write very much in future. Now it is a question of eliminating, of resisting the compulsion, and writing only when it is necessary. You recognize great literature immediately, instinctively, even in one short text. And that is enough to keep up the flame.”