4 minutes agoIsmail Kadare points to call with former dictator Enver Hoxha
Periskopi(8 years ago)
(8 years ago)Enver Hoxha's phone call had indeed occurred some time earlier. It was noon, I was as usual in the Writers' League when the deputy editor of the newspaper “Drita” told me that someone was looking for me. FROM BIBLE “K U n R GRINDEN SUNDAY- ABOUT MISTERIA TELEFATION STALIN-PASTERNAK” I SMAIL KADARY Hagi Kroi, the voice said. Your friend [...] will speak to you.
FROM Book “K U n R GRINDEN SUNDAY- ABOUT MISTERIA TELEFATION STALIN-PASTERNAK”
ISMAIL KADAR jam Hagi Kroi, the voice said. Comrade Enver will talk to you.
I couldn't say anything except the word “He commended me for a poem just published in the newspaper. I said again “Thank you”. He said he had loved it very much, and as I signaled to others not to make noise without being able to pronounce anything else, I repeated a third “ “ ”.
What are these four consecutive thanks, one of the editors said. When did you get so kind?
I didn't know how to warn them, but I did another hand sign that could hardly understand what he meant.
It was Enver Hoxha. It was the only word I could say when the phone closed.
Really? How? He himself?
Yes, I did.
But how? What did he say? What about you? How could you not say anything?
I answered, I don't know. Apparently, I got distracted.
I told them about his praise, and they still expressed regret that I didn't speak a little bit more, except one who gave me the right, explaining that, on such occasions, the mouth was tied up...
Shit.
All the countries that made up the socialist camp after World War II suffered painfully the transition of prominent writers from the bourgeois to the Communist era. Terror and prisons were the most accessible part of the picture. The rest, of the internal dramas, of fractures, of concessions - still unbroken - have been even more unintelligible. Communists feared art. Their superior chiefs' instructions, including Lenin and Marks, were so shallow that thousands of cultural workers tortured their brains day and night to understand what Lenin meant, in his only literature book: the party's “body and party literature”.
As incredible as it may have seemed, no one dared say that this misunderstanding was because in this simple, boring book, the author himself would not have known what portfolio was all about: the party's pamphlets and tradition or the literature we know. In his dozens of books, there was no difficulty in implying that the man who had dedicated his life to the violent overthrow of world order had no half a page for the shock and repentance caused by the shedding of human blood.
Not to remember that, it meant not only that you understood nothing about Homer and Dante but much worse. It could be said that Karl Marx proposed to humanity the great slaughter, but without escorting, at least, the simple human order - however, beware of killing the conscience!
To end with that would probably be half the worst. But the other half, the next half, was far from me. Watch out for the killing of conscience! Baptismd as “the failure of class war”, mercy, in thousands of studies, and slogans of the day, was mentioned as a nightmare that caused only mourning for the world's proletariat. All the camp sites, from self-installed small Albania to endless China, offered their approach to this calamity. In Albania, two of the most prominent writers, Fan Noley and Lasgush Poradeci, would have relations, still unexplained today, with the communist regime.
Both came from the kingdom, equally famous, but in different ways. The first, Fan Noley, poet and Shakespeare, former co-ordinator, Albania's former prime minister, had finished its bishop, but living in the USA. As it has often been said, it was, apparently, the only poet in Europe who had a long quarrel with the country's king, Zogu, who had managed to overthrow him and sentence him to death in absentia, to be overthrown and sentenced to death in absence, but by him.
And so, after Albanian-Balkan impatience to put each other on their knees, they had ended up hired in 1960, when both had already lost Albania.
The next poet, Lasgush Poradeci, his everything, including his aureola, had different -- Erotico-heavenly. Love, women, all of a world that was more than it was.
In fact, he had named himself this way: “Zog of the heavens”, of which the evil mouth would not fail to say that by taking advantage of the name of King Zog, which in Albanian meant bird, openly challenged the king: you are the bird on earth, I in heaven!
However, the Albanian king, rarely this, apparently, was envious of poets. Perhaps this or perhaps still terrified of what he had taken away from the other poet, Noley, had stayed away, which meant that the poet and prince pretended to notice each other.
And so, after the chaos of war, Lasgush Poradeci found himself in the communist era, amid cheers interrupted by gunfire from firing squads. Unsuitable for anything, including the latter, was so out of time that any punishment against him would seem unconvincing. However, as if not to miss it at all, come on, waiting for the most serious shocks, they gave word that he was a maniac and completely insane.
The communist ruler Hoxha, how to feel bad about what might be called the “lack of the experience of royal envy”, imitated the former king in his attitude towards the two great art: made a half-communication with Nolin and followed the same ignorance of Poradeci.
The latter was mutual - too convenient for the poet but not harmless.
What really protected Lasgush Poradecin was Hamlet's mask. Still today, on the eve of opening secret files, there is no evidence to prove that he was acting crazy. Rather, the opposite was believed.
His speech looked like no part of this world. The most surprising was that talking to others began to change as well. The first change was the use of the word “zotine”, already missing. It was, it seemed, this very vague beginning of the idea that he was perhaps no longer alive. It spread at inexplicable speed everywhere. Whenever it came down to him, there would be someone to ask whether he is alive or not and after him, someone who would answer that she knew. After that, no one could be certain whether she was the living creature or the death of the poet.
Such reactions as those related to whether poets felt more strongly with their ignorance than with presence never came to the press. Just as readers ' scars against writers from Hungary and the Baltic countries did not emerge to Mongolia. When they could not write fascinating books because of their ability or the failure of the socialist realism, as they complained, they could do at least some scandals, such as those of old, if not drowned, with a spectacular separation of women.
What was that? How it started, how it ended. Did it end?
That in literature there was a disaster, everyone felt it. The search for the causes of the disaster, just as their ignorance would continue to date, in the days being written, and when secret archives will finally be opened.
According to Josif Brodski, between two ways of ruining literature, one, the front kick, was avoided for a more subtle choice, the destruction of the construction material, otherwise said, the bricks (what it meant in this case, the writers), that would then bring about the self - ruining of the cobble.
Other decays and beds would occur between life itself, the characters who populated it, the language they used. Each people in the large Communist family brought their own special experience in all spheres. The flow of environments typical of old order, such as casinos, bars, public homes, and so forth, would be associated with the rareness of maniacs, Tyryfyl, mentalists, the narrators, etc. Of all of this, the tongue would have its share, she wrote, of course, but especially the spoken. /Panorama
