Röster om Kadare idag:

 

Kadare rejected the accusation that he had traded on false credentials, suggesting that his detractors should focus on his work instead.

 

“I have never claimed to be a ‘dissident’ in the proper meaning of the term,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “Open opposition to Hoxha’s regime, like open opposition to Stalin during Stalin’s reign in Russia, was simply impossible. Dissidence was a position no one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance to the regime.”

 

As Kadare continued publishing his subtle fiction, the controversy began to fade. When his novel of an Albanian fortress resisting the Ottoman Turkish army in the 15th century appeared in English in 2008, the LA Times suggested the author was “among the most problematic of major writers in contemporary western letters. But that shouldn’t prevent readers from savouring The Siege for what it is, a significant work by an important, fascinating author.” A year later, Kadare insisted that he was “not a political writer, and, moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there actually are no political writers. I think that my writing is no more political than ancient Greek theatre. I would have become the writer I am in any political regime.”

 

Returning to Tirana to mark the opening of a museum on the site of his former apartment in 2019, Kadare told France 24 that his work “obeyed only the laws of literature, it obeyed no other law”.

“The people who lived through this period were unhappy,” he said, “but art is above all that. Art is neither unhappy nor happy under a regime.”

 

The Guardian

 

His sophisticated storytelling – often likened to that of George Orwell or Franz Kafka – used metaphor and irony to reveal the nature of tyranny under Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania from 1946 until his death in 1985.

 

"Dark times bring unpleasant but beautiful surprises," Kadare told AFP. "Literature has often produced magnificent works in the dark ages as if it were seeking to remedy the misfortune inflicted on people."

 

Le Monde

 

Kadare delade hemstad med Hoxha, som föddes i Gjirokastër 28 år tidigare än landets nationalförfattare, år 1908. I förteckningen över diktatorns 30 000 volymer stora bibliotek saknas lustigt nog Kadares böcker, fast vi vet att Hoxha läste honom med största uppmärksamhet. ”Den hårda vintern” från 1977 (en kortare version publicerades 1973) var boken som blev Kadares livförsäkring. Skildringen av Albaniens brytning med Sovjet 1960–61 var ett vågspel, Hoxha var lika lynnig och långsint som litterärt intresserad, men diktatorns fåfänga lät sig smickras av romanens porträtt och Kadare kunde andas ut.

Decennier efter Hoxhas död beskrev Kadare spelet mellan dem med följande ord: ”Relationen mellan en stor författare och en diktator är komplex och svår att komma underfund med eller förklara. Orsaken är att båda är tyranner, var och en på sitt sätt, men i denna kraftmätning är det diktatorn som är den falske tyrannen.”

 

Det är skarpsynt: diktatorn är på bortaplan i fantasins och fiktionens rike, han kan aldrig få sista ordet, och det vet han om.

 

Svenska Dagbladet, Kristoffer Leandoer

 

His life was inevitably marked by life in Albania’s totalitarian society. He portrayed this period in a later interview as a struggle to produce normal literature under abnormal situations but he often faced allegations of having served up pro-regime propaganda.

 

Answering these allegations, Kadare rejected the oft-repeated description of him as a “dissident writer”, emphasising that under Albanian communism there was no place for dissidence.

The debate, he felt, missed the context, as dissidence was a phenomenon developed in Soviet bloc during the so-called “Khrushchev thaw”, a period when many political prisoners were freed and when writers and artists were no longer at risk of being killed for their views, as was the case under Stalin. No such dissidence was possible in Albania, where communism never experienced a period of liberalization and where political prisoners were only freed after the regime fell in 1991.

 

Kadare’s relations with Albania’s communist regime were not always smooth. The element of allegory in the Palace of Dreams didn’t go unnoticed, as it contained phrases known to the bureaucratic language of the era.

 

Balkan Insight