– Gjon Bruçi –
Without a doubt, in all societal transformations, intellectuals have a unique role and merit, as they lead the masses toward progress with their knowledge. However, it must be acknowledged that many of them also become obstacles to these revolutionary transformations. The Anti-Fascist National Liberation War of the Albanian people was carried out by the broad masses of patriotic workers and peasants, led by the Communist Party and Enver Hoxha, but the role of genuine intellectuals of the people in leading this struggle was extremely important. Just as detrimental was the stance of others who served the occupiers. The same scenario occurred after the country’s liberation. The overwhelming majority of the genuine people’s intelligentsia committed themselves to building socialism, but there were also those who opposed the revolutionary and transformative momentum of the masses.
Today, the role of the intelligentsia is even more evident, where unfortunately, a part of it serves the bourgeoisie and acts against the people’s interests, causing incalculable damage and disasters to the latter. It is precisely these arguments that led me to write in the title that “Intellectuals are the fortune and misfortune of the people.”
The impetus for this response in the press came from the well-known journalist Bedri Islami’s article, titled “The Writer Versus the Dictator,” published in the newspaper Dita on June 15, 2024. This article was a review of the book “When Rulers Clash” by the writer Ismail Kadare. The subject of the book, which Bedri Islami analyses, is the story of two dissident writers of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, led by Joseph Stalin: Mandelstam and Pasternak, two Russian poets and writers who were initially enthusiastic about the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 but later “disillusioned” by the brutal behaviour of the “dictator” Stalin. It was this disillusionment that turned these poets’ creative pens into poisonous arrows against the “dictator,” whom Mandelstam called “the Kremlin Mountaineer” among friends and beyond.
What early 20th century leader would accept such an accusation from an individual, even a famous poet, when this “Kremlin Mountaineer” was Lenin’s comrade-in-arms, the genius of the October Revolution of 1917, which changed the course of the world?! The two dissident Russian poet-writers, Mandelstam and Pasternak, whose history Ismail Kadare places at the centre of his book, lived through the time of this revolution and the aggression of over 16 capitalist states, which allied with one another to crush the new Soviet Republic in its cradle. Our writer Ismail Kadare knows this period well, having had access to volumes of authentic documents about those events.
Given this, the legitimate question arises: Why does our writer, who has surpassed 80 years of age, delve into this past history, which occurred 90 years ago? The answer is clear. Kadare has always been a writer torn in his attitudes towards life, literature, his people and his country. This duality, with which he still coexists 35 years after his political conversion, has not aligned in harmony with himself, with history, and most importantly, with his people. More than half his life, our writer was part of the superstructure of the socialist system, which he served with devotion. The literary works he produced during socialism have not been surpassed by any created in the cradle of European bourgeoisie where he began his political exile in 1990. This happened because the “soil” of his creative field is not the soil of his Homeland, but borrowed from other countries.
Ismail Kadare, using the history of the aforementioned Russian dissidents, tells us contemporaries, and more so the generation that will follow, that he too was a “dissident” of Albanian socialism and the “dictator” Enver Hoxha. But since he did not succeed in being an open dissident, now in his old age, he weaves legends about others, hoping that the reader will believe that Kadare, at heart, was a true dissident in his “dual” literary works in subject and message.
To refute this claim, I will bring an episode from his literary works, published half a century ago when Albania was successfully building socialism. It is about the historical novel “The Great Winter,” whose character is precisely the great leader of the Albanian people, Enver Hoxha, whom Kadare today tries to tarnish with the epithet “dictator,” as his old Russian colleagues did for Stalin. The episode in the novel “The Great Winter” speaks of a moment when Enver Hoxha, after his famous speech in the Georgievskaya Hall of Moscow, and after heated meetings with Khrushchev’s envoys in the place where the Albanian delegation was accommodated, goes down to the hall of the building and enters into a conversation with the workers accompanying the delegation. During the conversation with these workers, Enver Hoxha requests a coffee from the service, which he drank to the last drop and placed the empty coffee cup on the small table in front of him. For this moment, Kadare writes in the novel approximately as follows: “All the old women of Albania, if they had the chance, would rush to see Enver Hoxha’s coffee cup.” This phrase, although in the form of a superstition, elevates Enver Hoxha’s figure much higher than any other praise in prose or poetry.
Who forced Kadare to write this phrase? No one, except his own mental and spiritual conviction. But why did this conviction change after the ’90s? Because he aligned himself with those who left no stone unturned to overthrow socialism in our country. And a servant must necessarily fulfil the “mission” assigned to him.
In these turbulent waters of “imagined” dissidence, unfortunately, falls the author of the article commenting on Kadare’s book “When Rulers Clash.” Both the writer and the journalist, despite having lived and worked with devotion for socialism for nearly four decades, have had their concepts of artistic freedom altered by the three decades of so-called “bourgeois democracy.” According to them, poets and writers should have complete freedom of creation without predetermined commitments. However, the philosophy of Kadare and Islami regarding the role of literature and art in society is not only wrong but highly reactionary. In no social system, even in communism, can there be uncommitted literary-artistic creativity that does not serve society and its progress.
The well-known journalist Bedri Islami titles his article “The Writer Versus Dictatorship,” which in Kadare’s case is a false title. Kadare was never, for even a moment, against the “dictatorship,” but rather part of the superstructure of the socialist state, respected, aided and encouraged by the Communist Party and its leader Enver Hoxha. During socialism, Kadare was, as the saying goes, “like a kidney in fat,” a position he did not achieve in the “fat” of capitalism. Hence, this “duality” will accompany him to the end of his life. Unfortunately, journalist Bedri Islami, without any fundamental reason, sides with the great writer, slipping into the same turbulent waters. Inspired by Kadare’s “mythless legends,” Bedri goes even further. In the long list of dissidents of the “dictatorship” from the fields of literature and art, he does not fail to include characters that his colleagues at the newspaper DITA have considered “deservedly punished individuals.”
What astonishes and disgusts us more today is the lack of commitment from the intellectual army to defend the interests of the country and the people, who in the 1990s were ready to enjoy the “paradise of democracy,” but in reality ended up in the “hell of anarchy.” A significant portion of our intellectuals, including the great intellectual and writer Ismail Kadare, instead of supporting the people and the country, became tools for foreigners for “ten rotten coins” and some fake “title.”
The people love and respect intellectuals because they are the people of knowledge. But not all of these intellectuals reciprocate to the citizens whose taxes have educated them. In fact, a considerable number entirely deny their people and their country, which is why I repeat once more the sarcastic phrase: “Intellectuals are the fortune of the people and their misfortune!”
(Translated from the Albanian original and first published in “Gazeta SOT” on June 19, 2024)
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