House of Albanian writer Kadare becomes a museum

Tirana (AFP) – Ismail Kadare raises the curtain to illuminate the Tirana apartment where he wrote harshly during the dark days of communism – space visitors can now explore closely the fact that his former home has been transformed into a museum.

"I was working here near the fireplace," a well-known 83-year-old Albanian novelist told AFP, sitting where he wrote his drafts in his hand.

"I wrote on my knees" and "I worked only in the morning," added Kadare, who wrote some of his most famous works, including "The Palace of Dreams", while living in the third floor apartment of the concrete building with his family, from 1973 to 1990.

Meanwhile, the windows were covered with heavy curtains to protect their home from the paranoid eye of the communist regime led by former dictator Enver Hoxha, who had painfully isolated Albania during his reign 40 years old.

The museum, called "Kadare House Studio", opened in May.

With wooden floors and pale white and green walls, the space is dotted with personal memorabilia: a set of hoses arranged on a table, a typewriter, a bookshelf full of books and a card. identity presenting a young Kadare as "reserve officer".

There is also a photo of the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni in the film adaptation of Kadare 's first novel, which wins an international success, in the international honor, "The general of the. dead army ".

The slice of life frame pays homage to the author's wish that the place be a museum and not a "mausoleum".

Along with his wife Elena, also a writer, Kadare divides his time between Tirana and the Latin Quarter in Paris, where he went into exile in 1990 shortly before the fall of the Albanian communist regime.

– cubist crime –

The intense crackdown on the Hoxha regime is captured by the fate of the apartment architect, Maks Velo, sentenced to eight years in prison for Cubist design of the building – considered a deviation from the socialist aesthetic.

However, Kadare says that he did not let the dictatorship crush his own creativity.

His novels, essays and poems rejected the socialist realism dictated by the authorities and used allegory, history and myth to denounce life under totalitarianism.

"The dark times offer unpleasant but beautiful surprises," Kadare told AFP, speaking slowly.

"Literature has often produced magnificent works in the dark ages as if it sought to remedy the misery inflicted upon men."

While some poets and creatives were imprisoned – or even killed – by the regime, Kadare was spared.

In his memoirs, Hoxha's widow, Nexhmije, said that the Albanian leader, who boasted of a penchant for literature, saved the internationally renowned author on several occasions.

The archives of the Hoxha era show that Kadare was often about to be arrested and his poem "Red Pachas", published in 1975, saw him temporarily banished to a remote village.

Kadare, for its part, denies any privileged relationship with the dictator.

"My work only obeyed the laws of literature, he did not obey any other law," he insists.

The writer finally fled to Paris to seek asylum a few months before the overthrow of the regime in the early 90s.

This departure was "an act of healing" and a form of protest, said Kadare, who had left at the time several manuscripts seized by the authorities in Tirana's apartment, and then recovered in a cellar of the police.

– & # 39; Against modesty & # 39; –

Kadare's writing has been translated into more than 40 languages, making it the best-known modern novelist in the Balkans and winner of numerous awards.

He won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2004 and has been nominated several times for a Nobel Prize.

Although the subject "embarrbaded", Kadare said that he liked to see his name "cited among the candidates" of the Nobel.

"I am not modest because, in principle, I am against modesty," he said.

"During the totalitarian regime, modesty was a call to submission.writers do not have to bend their heads."

As for knowing he was happy during the days spent scribbling in Tirana under the influence of communism, Kadare believes that the question is unimportant.

"The people who lived through this period were unhappy, but the art is before all that.The art is neither unhappy nor happy under a diet."