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

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Koço, Eno

Ambiguities in Shostakovich's music, as in Kadaré's books, became a modus vivendi; it was in music, this abstract terrain, that the composer could express the sufferings of his artistic conscience, his humanity, and his protest through the deployment of drama, tragedy, mockery, grotesquery and tenderness. Thus did Kadaré write in the preface of his book The file on H that he created 'a panorama of Albanian history, from the most ancient times to the present, linked by recurrent dreams and superstitions, by national pride and its oppression, and above all by a constant meditation on the nature of the human consequences of dictatorship.'

Kadaré chose historic subjects and legends because by entering into an abstract world of the past he could make veiled comparisons with the present, usually with the real protagonists of the everyday political life in Albania. In his book Chronicle in stone, Kadaré viewed the world through the eyes of a child who has gathered pieces of coloured glass from broken bottles in the streets and looked through them at objects which became magnified and deformed, like the writer's perception of facts and events.

HOWEVER, the very special type of creator represented by Kadaré and Shostakovich had to weigh carefully the relationship between art and the ideology dictated by the political order of the day. The question arises about the extent to which their artistic expression may have been sacrificed for the sake of fulfilling their social-aesthetic obligations. Both composer and writer were seen either as heroes of the new Socialist Realism or, more commonly, as individuals whose ideological position was always ambiguous. Thus both had periodically to write works which could please, to a certain degree, the regime and make the apparatchiks think that the inspiration derived from 'socialist reality'.

Thus in 1964 Kadaré wrote a poem, Perse mendohen këto male ('What are these mountains thinking about?'), which clearly expresses Albania's 'pride' and 'the roots of the Party' under Hoxha. There is a striking similarity between the minds of Shostakovich and Kadaré: both contrived to make the authorities happy by intentionally creating some works that were easier to digest, before continuing with works encoding a message which, as Shostakovich states through Volkov in Testimony, One day would be heard for what it was'. These two creators were characterised by courage mingled with anxiety; they knew that censorship was based on fear, but they also knew and felt that music and literature should be a free expression of the ideas, traditions and emotions of individuals. So in writing works which often contained hints of 'divided loyalties', they were fully aware of the risk they incurred. After the performance or publication of such a work, they were prepared, in a way, to face their critics. It might sound strange, but they preferred to live at a much higher level of risk than others than to adopt a position of complete self-censorship. There were others who wrote ordinary pieces to meet the immediate needs of the regime. But even those composers and writers who were most loyal and devoted to the Party were aware that there could always be a measure of ambiguity in their works.