The internationally renowned Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare, died in the early hours of this morning, at the age of 88.
Born in Gjirokastër on January 28, 1936, Kadare would cross the borders of isolated Albania. He would do this in the 70s, when his works translated by Jusuf Vrioni would become part of elite literature in France and the world.
Thanks to Kadare's prose translated into more than 40 languages of the world, Albanian literature reached the top.
He is the most famous Albanian writer in the world, he is the laureate of many national and international literary awards.
Kadare graduated in Albanian language and literature at the University of Tirana and subsequently studied at the Institute of World Literature "Maksim Gorki" in Moscow.
In addition to other prizes, in 2019 he won the American "Nobel", as the "Neustadt" international literature prize is called. During the distribution of this award, Kadareja was praised as "one of the greatest writers in the world and a champion of democracy and free speech".
Several times he was considered as the favorite for "Nobel".
In his biography published on the website of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, it is said that Kadare's literary beginnings are mainly in poetry ("Boyish Inspirations", 1954; "Dreams", 1957; "My Century", 1961; "Why do they think these mountains", 1964; "Motive with the sun", 1968; "Time", 1976). His name is associated with the arrival of the "generation of the 1960s" in literature, which brought a spirit of general emancipation to the national culture.
Kadare's first important work is the novel "The General of the Dead Army" (1963), which is a turning point in modern Albanian prose. In his prose, Kadare looks at the past not only as a story of heroic resistance, but as a story of survival of the Albanian identity. The novels follow: "Broken April", "The Chamber of Shame", "The Great Beasts", "Twilight of the Steppe Gods", "The Wicked Year", "The Vulture", "Spiritus", "The Shadow", "The Descendant". , where the values of life and the price of death are confronted.
The novel "Who brought Doruntina" (1979) reminded the compatriots of the revival, the rebirth, that value that was found in their early ballads and that bore the sign of the humanism of the European Renaissance.
Meanwhile, "Chronicle in stone" (1971) is Kadare's second novel that deals with the theme of the anti-fascist war, seen through the eyes of a child, it is told as a game, where the parties appear as if in a theater.
Meanwhile, the novel "Castle" has been called a "historical novel", but also a "novel of the absent hero". The author succeeds in raising the cult of the community instead of the cult of the individual hero in this novel. Kadare's novels with the theme of history have the past mainly as a trigger for the present. The notion of the castle is also present in "Prilli i ražen" (the tower of the temple); to "Krushks are frozen", to "Building the pyramid of Cheops", to "Pyramid". On the contrary, the notion of bridge is found in "Bridge with three arches", "Who brought Doruntina", "Life, play and death of Lul Mazrek", "Cousin of the angels". The novel "The Great Winter" (1977) is a reworked version of the work "The Winter of Great Solitude", which was published in 1973, in which the theme of the conflict with the Soviets is dealt with.
Another novel, "Concert at the End of Winter" (1987), deals with the theme of the conflict with the Chinese.
The novel "The Clerk of the Palace of Dreams" (1979) represents Kadare's most problematic and inconsistent work with socialist realism. The core of the novel is the anti-totalitarian political allegory, taking its cue from the way the former Ottoman Empire operated.
It is further said that Kadare's literature after 1990 carries the same essential features of the previous one: the ethnographic spirit and the manifestation of the Albanian identity.
