Shostakovich, Kadaré and the nature of dissidence: an Albanian view

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Koço, Eno

Some reflections on the criticism about Kadaré In recent times, probably the most bitter criticism towards Kadaré has come from Stephen Schwartz, more specifically in an article, 'Ismail Kadaré's prize fight,' which appeared in The Weekly Standard for 24 March 1997. He tries hard to stress his impartiality and that by expressing his opinions as a journalist he is only doing his job. In a letter replying to Noel Malcolm published on 15 January 1998, he writes: 'My first reaction after reading the letters column in your issue of January 15, with its exchange between the despicable Ismail Kadaré and the estimable Noel Malcolm, and then rereading Mr. Malcolm's article on Kadaré ('In the Palace of Nightmares') in your issue of November 6, 1997, was "How very Balkan!"' Then he continues: 'This concatenation of personalities points to the Balkans, but what gives the whole matter the true flavour of a Balkan stew requires more elucidation.'

No doubt Mr Schwartz has mixed feelings about a person and a peninsula, more specifically, about Kadaré and the Balkans. Mr Schwartz is also concerned that in Mr Malcolm's article

none of these several references was seen by your editors as requiring that my name be mentioned or that my article be cited by its actual title or with its date of publication [...] The publication of a long polemical article in which one's opponent is targeted by allusion and never mentioned by name is extremely Balkan, but it is also extremely Stalinist [...] This was a detail even more Balkan than the exercise in semi-anonymous polemics that preceded it.

These comments and others in his article seem to me to be misjudged. It is, in fact, Kadaré, who by representing some of the best of Balkan ethics, brings to European and world culture a Balkan and Mediterranean flavour, enriched with expressions of national identity and elaborated by his artistry.

IN Albania it was common to label writers and artists with some praising epithets and literary expressions and to line up them according to their 'values'. This was done not only by literary critics and journalists but also by ordinary people. During the communist regime the classification of writers and artists carried a kind of credibility status. Nowadays it does not have any ideological context, but the old principles cannot be easily forgotten. Although this way of thinking has considerably changed towards a more westernised democratic concept, the methodology which has been learned in the Eastern universities is still clearly different from the western, and it reminds me sometimes the former doctrine.

The majority of Kadaré's supporters in Albania regard him as 'Albania's greatest novelist of all times', others as a 'genius', as 'the symbol of hope' or 'the guardian of memory', and so on. His opponents, again in Albania, regard him as 'Hoxha's rhapsody singer' or accuse him of being a collaborator. Foreign critics have viewed him both ways, and he has been a perpetual nominee for the Nobel Prize. As far as his supporters in Albania are concerned, I don't think they need to use this kind of labelling to put him in his rightful glorious place. Of course, Albania is proud to have writers of that magnitude of Kadaré and several others, but the superlative phrases only reflect a lack of competence in the literary and journalist field. It is more professional to justify one's merits and it is not enough to crown him or her with laurel leafs.