The leading contemporary Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has again become a holder of the French Legion of Honor. The highest state award for civilian or military services to the nation was awarded to him by French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to Tirana this Monday, AFP reported. Kadare already held the lower rank of commander, but now Macron has promoted him to grand officer.
According to the AP agency, in a long speech the president summarized what the author had to deal with during his life and how, according to Macron, he resisted the former communist regime. He receives the award “for his works, for the courage to defy the dictatorship and for the defense of freedom”, said the statesman. “You lived and created as a free man in a country that was not free, in post-war Albania, which was more Soviet than the Soviet Union and more Stalinist than Stalin,” the president told him.
The ceremony was followed by a state dinner hosted by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama on the occasion of Macron’s two-day visit to Tirana.
Eighty-seven-year-old Kadare is the most translated Albanian writer and poet. He wrote dozens of novels, plays, screenplays and poetry collections. He received the Jerusalem Prize, the International Man Booker Prize and most recently the Neustadt International Literary Prize three years ago. He is regularly mentioned as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Among his most famous works is the novel The General of the Dead Army from 1964, later filmed with Marcello Mastroianni and translated into Czech by Hana Tomková in 1990. It tells the story of an Italian general who, twenty years after the Second World War, comes to Albania to pick up the remains of Italian soldiers and have them buried in his homeland. While passing through the country, he gradually abandons his prejudices and begins to understand why the Albanians went to war.
Ismail Kadare became famous in the first half of the 1960s, when Enver Hodža led the communist country from the position of first secretary of the Stalinist Albanian Labor Party. Although the writer spoke allegorically about the present and his works were often removed from libraries or bookstores, he enjoyed the favor of the regime for a long time.
Ismail Kadare is criticized by some for not standing up to the dictatorship sooner. | Photo: AFP / Profimedia.cz
Between 1970 and 1982 he sat in the Albanian parliament, for a time chaired the Union of Writers there, and after Hoxha’s death in 1985, he even became the vice-chairman of the Democratic Front, led by the dictator’s widow, Nedzmija Hoxha.
It was not until the late 1980s that the author became the head of a group of intellectuals who condemned the actions of the secret police and the ruling party. Just a few months before the protests that triggered the fall of the communist regime in 1990, Kadare fled to France and applied for political asylum, causing an international sensation. At home, meanwhile, the authorities had all his works removed from libraries and bookstores.
When the man of letters returned from French exile in 1992, over a hundred leading Albanian intellectuals were waiting for him upon arrival in Tirana.
Today, Kadare is criticized by some for not standing up to the dictatorship sooner. The author, who still lives alternately in Tirana and France, always objected to this, that dissent was punishable by death in Albania.
The French president has now also supported him in this regard. “You could have left the burning ship. But you refused to leave it to the arsonists of freedom,” Emmanuel Macron told the writer.
