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Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly wrote his isolated Balkan homeland onto the map of world literature, creating often dark, allegorical works that obliquely criticized the country\u2019s totalitarian state, died on Monday in Tirana, the Albanian capital. He was 88.<\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, the head of Onufri Publishing House, who was his editor and publisher in Albania. He said that Mr. Kadare went into cardiac arrest at his home and died at a hospital.<\/p>\n
In a literary career that spanned half a century, Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) wrote scores of books, including novels and collections of poems, short stories and essays. He shot to international fame in 1970 when his first novel, \u201cThe General of the Dead Army,\u201d was translated into French. European critics hailed it as a masterpiece.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kadare\u2019s name was floated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the honor eluded him. In 2005, he received the inaugural Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), awarded to a living writer of any nationality for overall achievement in fiction. The finalists included such literary titans as Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and Philip Roth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In awarding the prize, the British critic John Carey, the panel\u2019s chairman, called Mr. Kadare \u201ca universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Critics often compared Mr. Kadare to Kafka, Kundera and Orwell, among others. During the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, which at the time was under the grip of one of the Eastern bloc\u2019s most brutal and idiosyncratic dictators, Enver Hoxha<\/a>.<\/p>\n To escape persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents were executed and some 168,000 Albanians were sent to prison or labor camps, Mr. Kadare walked a political tightrope. He served for 12 years as a deputy in Albania\u2019s People\u2019s Assembly, and he was a member of the regime\u2019s Writers Union. One of Mr. Kadare\u2019s novels, \u201cThe Great Winter,\u201d was a favorable portrayal of the dictator. Mr. Kadare later said he had written it to curry favor.<\/p>\n In contrast, several of his most brilliant works, including \u201cThe Palace of Dreams\u201d (1981), subversively attacked the dictatorship, skirting censorship through allegory, satire, myth and legend.<\/p>\n Mr. Kadare \u201cis a supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of oppression,\u201d Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times<\/a> in 2002.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ismail Kadare was born on Jan. 28, 1936, in the southern Albanian town of Gjirokaster. His father, Halit Kadare, was a civil servant; his mother, Hatixhe Dobi, who ran the home, was from a wealthy family.<\/p>\n When Hoxha\u2019s communists seized control of Albania in 1944, Ismail was 8 years old and already immersing himself in world literature. \u201cAt the age of 11 I had read \u2018Macbeth,\u2019 which had hit me like lightning, and the Greek classics, after which nothing had any power over my spirit,\u201d he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Paris Review.<\/p>\n Yet, as an adolescent, he was attracted to communism. \u201cThere was an idealistic side to it,\u201d he said. \u201cYou thought that perhaps certain aspects of communism were good in theory, but you could see that the practice was terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n After studying at Tirana University, Mr. Kadare was sent for postgraduate study to the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow, which he later described as \u201ca factory for fabricating dogmatic hacks of the socialist-realism school.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1963, about two years after his return from Moscow, \u201cThe General of the Dead Army\u201d was published in Albania. The novel is about an Italian general who returns to the mountains of Albania 20 years after World War II to disinter and repatriate the bodies of his soldiers. It is a tale of the advanced West intruding into a strange land, ruled by an ancient code of blood feuds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Pro-government critics condemned the novel for being too cosmopolitan and for not expressing sufficient hatred for the Italian general, but it made Mr. Kadare a national celebrity. In 1965, the authorities banned his second novel, \u201cThe Monster,\u201d immediately after its publication in a magazine.<\/p>\n In 1970, when \u201cThe General of the Dead Army\u201d was published in a French translation, it took \u201cliterary Paris by storm,\u201d The Paris Review wrote.<\/p>\n Mr. Kadare\u2019s sudden prominence drew the surveillance of the dictator himself. To placate the regime, Mr. Kadare wrote \u201cThe Great Winter\u201d (1977), a novel celebrating Hoxha\u2019s break with the Soviet Union in 1961. Mr. Kadare said he had three choices: \u201cTo conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; or to pay a tribute, a bribe.\u201d He chose the third solution, he said, by writing \u201cThe Great Winter.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1975, after he wrote \u201cThe Red Pashas,\u201d a poem criticizing members of the Politburo, Mr. Kadare was banished to a remote village and barred from publishing for a time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His response came in 1981, when he published \u201cThe Palace of Dreams,\u201d a damning critique of the regime. Set during the Ottoman Empire, it portrays a vast bureaucracy devoted to collecting the dreams of its citizens, searching for signs of dissidence. In The Times, Mr. Eder described it as a \u201cmoonlit parable about the insanity of power \u2014 murderous and suicidal at the same time.\u201d The novel was banned in Albania, but not before it sold out.<\/p>\n Mr. Kadare\u2019s success abroad afforded him some security at home. Still, he said, he lived with the fear that the regime might \u201ckill me and say that it was a suicide.\u201d<\/p>\n To protect his work from manipulation in the event of his death, Mr. Kadare smuggled manuscripts out of Albania in 1986 and delivered them to his French publisher, Claude Durand. The publisher in turn used his own trips to Tirana to smuggle out additional writings.<\/p>\n The cat-and-mouse game in which the regime by turns published and banned Mr. Kadare\u2019s works continued past Hoxha\u2019s death in 1985, until Mr. Kadare fled to Paris in 1990. After the regime\u2019s collapse, Mr. Kadare came under attack from anticommunist critics, both in Albania and in the West, who portrayed him as a beneficiary and even an active supporter of the Stalinist state. In 1997, when his name was being mentioned for the Nobel, an article in the conservative Weekly Standard urged the committee not to award him the prize because of his \u201cconscious collaboration\u201d with the Hoxha regime.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Apparently to inoculate himself against such criticism, Mr. Kadare published several autobiographical books in the 1990s in which he suggested that he had resisted the regime, both spiritually and artistically, through his literature.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time I wrote a book,\u201d he said in the 1998 interview, \u201cI had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n Writing in 1997 in The New York Review of Books, Noel Malcolm, an Oxford historian, praised the \u201catmospheric density\u201d and \u201cpoetic tautness\u201d of Mr. Kadare\u2019s writing, but chastised his defensiveness with critics.<\/p>\n \u201cThe author doth protest too much,\u201d Mr. Malcolm wrote, warning that Mr. Kadare\u2019s \u201celisions and omissions\u201d of his \u201cself-promoting volumes\u201d could damage his reputation more than his critics\u2019 attacks. Mr. Kadare\u2019s most vital works \u201ctook place on a different plane, at once more human and more mythic, from that of any type of ideological art,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n In a thin-skinned response<\/a>, Mr. Kadare accused Mr. Malcolm of exhibiting cultural arrogance against an author from a small country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTo take such a liberty with a writer just because he happens to come from a small country is to reveal a colonialist mentality,\u201d he wrote in a letter to The New York Review of Books.<\/p>\n Mr. Kadare\u2019s survivors include his wife, Elena Kadare, also an author, and two daughters: Besiana Kadare, a former Albanian ambassador to the United Nations, and Gresa Kadare.<\/p>\n After the collapse of communism, Mr. Kadare continued to set his novels amid the suspicion and terror of the Hoxha regime. A few, however, portrayed Albanians living in 21st-century Europe but still haunted by their nation\u2019s blood feuds, legends and myths. His best-known works include \u201cChronicle in Stone\u201d (1971); \u201cThe Three-Arched Bridge\u201d (1978); \u201cAgamemnon\u2019s Daughter\u201d (1985); its sequel, \u201cThe Successor\u201d (2003); and \u201cThe Accident\u201d (2010).<\/p>\n