The President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, commemorated Kadare as a free spirit who participated in this great awakening of the people that raised the iron curtain.
“Today a writer died who embodied, with his life, work and personality, the enrichment of dialogue, the strength of the European spirit and the welcoming vocation of France. The Franco-Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré left us”, the message of the presidency reads.
Full message to the French presidency:
“He was one of those for whom writing is a struggle; those whose every word breaks from the silence, those whose every line risks adding minutes, those whose every novel threatens to be the epitaph of their career.
Because he lived and created as a free man, in a country that was not: post-war Soviet Albania, under the iron yoke of Enver Hoxha. But the discovery of literature opened the shores of a new world to the teenager. By reading Cervantes, Homer and Gogol, he built up his intellectual resistance. So much so that the indoctrination of his literature professors slipped over him, at the University of Tirana as well as at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, the temple of official literature. Instead of joining the ranks of the “elite corps of socialist realism,” as it was called, he joined the freedom-style resistance fighters. His magnum opus of 1963, The Dead Army General, was tolerated because its subject matter was disturbing, its dream thwarted by communist labels: the exhumation of World War II soldiers in front of a priest and an Italian soldier, under the Albanian government. The rain which continues to fall. On the other hand, “Monster”, in 1965 and “Winter of great loneliness”, in 1973, were criticized, because they denounced the intellectual oppression of Tirana at the time. Twice accused of inciting rebellion, he underwent a period of manual labor in a remote village.
After the “Palace of Dreams”, in 1981, the ax fell: “enemy of the people”. Banned from publication, he decided to seek political asylum. So he turned to the country that had been the first to translate his books, the first to become passionate about his work beyond its borders. With his publisher, Claude Durand, head of Éditions Fayard, he planned a great escape to France in 1990, it was another blow to the wall of the dictatorship: in Tirana, his departure led to the first student protests in more than forty years.
Since then, from the capital of France to that of an Albania turned into a democracy and finally back to itself, he divided his existence between words and things, people and places. From his walks in the rediscovered Tirana, from this table in the Rostand cafe where he put his notebook and pen every morning, eternal texts were born, at the crossroads of myths and worlds, from the imagination of the pyramid of Cheops to that of Tirana. between the gates of Luxembourg, the shores of Cornwall, and the walls of Troy. They constantly remind us how Europe is the continent of the common, how its history is a common history.
The President of the Republic salutes a free spirit who participated in this great awakening of the people who raised the iron curtain and honored France by choosing it as the asylum of his creation. He sends his heartfelt condolences to his loved ones, his readers and the Albanian people”.
