– Ismail Kadare, 1974 –
The renowned Albanian author and poet Ismail Kadare recently wrote an article entitled, “Socialist Realism — Great Art of the Revolution.” The Albanian Telegraphic Agency News Bulletin carried a summary of this article, which was published by the newspaper Zëri i Popullit on January 27, 1974.
Kadare is a member of the Presidium of the General Council of the Democratic Front of Albania, a deputy to the People’s Assembly of the People’s Republic of Albania, and a member of the Presidium of the Steering Committee of the Albanian Writers’ and Artists’ Union. He is the author of works such as “General of the Dead Army” and “The Drumming of the Rain” which have been widely commented upon and enthusiastically praised in many countries. French critics have described him as “the voice of millenary Albania speaking to the men of the century about her renewal” (Robert Escarpit), “a refutation of those who were undervaluating the literature of this country” (Alain Bosquet), “an author of great talent that needs no comparisons” (Gilles Laponge), and so on.[1]
Ismail Kadare points out in his recent article that the Albanian people have always loved Albanian poetry, literature and other arts because these have been linked with their destinies. “This link with the destinies of the people and the nation is the main, most important and immortal feature of our literature and arts. All the other values of
this centuries-long art would be annihilated without this essential value. The new Albanian literature of socialist realism has inherited this link as its dearest treasure, enriching it and elevating it to a higher stage through the ideas of the revolution and communism.” The proletarian partisanship of the Albanian literature of socialist realism is “the highest expression of its full link, as never before, with the destinies of the people.”
Over its 30 years of existence, this new literature, communist and national at the same time, has had great successes and achievements at the service of the revolution, Kadare states. It has settled accounts with the old feudal-bourgeois art, with all its baggage of mysticism, irrealism, sentimentalism, boulevardism, etc. Moreover, “It has waged a successful struggle when these fabrications, after having been thrown out the door, have tried to enter through the window clad in modern attire.” In the present era, swept by great revolutionary and counter-revolutionary storms, the task of preserving the purity of the new art is “as difficult as [it is] magnificent.”
Kadare writes that the second half of the twentieth century is witnessing “the unprecedented intensification of aggression.” This “is no longer the old classical aggression, the presence of which was, felt only when the boot of the foreigner was treading your land. Now, you may have the enemy thousands of kilometres away, you perhaps do not exchange fire with it, and despite this, without feeling, you may begin to fail a victim of the aggression. The cultural aggression, the aggression of word, of sound, of colours, is not less dangerous than the aggression of the soldier’s boot.”
The chieftains of the superpowers would like the world to be mute so that it could not judge their crimes. But people are born with tongues. Then, they say, if you are unable to compel them not to speak, try to have them utter the most foolish, incomprehensible things. “And in this way,” Kadare says, “the feverish competition continues to create the most degraded books, hermetic poetry, disoriented prose, animal sounds, abstract compositions.” All this babbling, which frequently resembles the babbling of mentally ill persons, is a great service to the present-day bourgeoisie, a service which it greatly appreciates. Decadentism is centuries-old, but in no century has it had so great an explosion as at present. This is because in no century have the ruling classes been so near the precipice as in this century. In a desperate situation, they are constantly engaged in feverish activity on all fronts — economic, military, political, moral, ideological and artistic — so as to avoid their catastrophe. Fully aware that the connection of literature and arts with the destiny of the people is a great misfortune for them, they try every possible means to destroy this connexion. The essence of all the multitude of “isms,” all the present bourgeois and revisionist flora, can be summed up in the phrase: “separation from people.” This separation is the common aim of all the present reactionary propaganda.
Kadare points out that for fear of being discredited, the bourgeoisie and the revisionists do not dare appeal directly for the separation of art from people. They use the more refined and disguised roads to realize this separation. In order to camouflage themselves, they do not appeal for separation from the people, but for separation from man in general. This explains their passion for the dehumanisation of art, for the side-tracking of man and his replacement with fetish and masks. “My superiority is that I have no heart,” a decadent poet has said. Hence the passion for primitivism, for pre-logical thinking, which, according to the decadents, is deeper, because it comes from far away, from barbarity. Connected with this are the efforts to ignore time in literary work, to destroy laws of composition, of syntax and, finally, of language. (One of the chief decadents, James Joyce, has striven, for example, to create in one of his works the language of water and wind.)
Even when decadents accept man in their works, Kadare writes, this is not man in the normal sense of the word. More than man, it is his surrogate, a biological being, outside time, space and society. Precisely such a being is modern decadentism’s typical hero. “The Man Without Features” is the title of Musil’s voluminous novel, one of the catechisms of modern decadentism. It is known that the man who belongs to no society loses his identity and thus becomes a mask. World reaction greatly needs such masks today. Thus, bourgeois art tries today to create a new model of anti-hero, an “outsider” as they have baptised him in the west. This outsider, who fills the books, plays and films of the bourgeois and revisionist world, embodies the departure from our world, the shameful desertion from time. He is not a new invention: on the contrary, his roots should be sought deep in the Bible and the Quran, those inexhaustible wells of reactionary ideas. It is not fortuitous that one of the present bourgeois ideologists has written: “The individual begins this long trip as outsider and will finish it, perhaps, as a saint.” The present hippies, the outsiders, Camus’ and Beckett’s anti-heroes, are nothing but modifications of the long-whiskered saints who walked up and down more than 2,000 years ago and later on in the Sinai Desert, of hermits, Jesuit pilgrims or the Muslims who left for the pilgrimage to Mecca. All this arsenal of obscurantism and mould is inherited by the present bourgeois and revisionist art. In accepting this legacy, this degraded art, although it claims to be of the time and modern, in fact shows that it is very worn out and dogmatic.
At the 4th Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania, Comrade Enver Hoxha analysed in a deeply Marxist fashion the conservative essence of present-day monopoly capitalism and revisionism. He said that it is not only the old ideologies coming from distant centuries but also present-day bourgeois and revisionist degenerate ideology and culture which have this conservative character. All their liberalism and modernism have this conservative character.
Kadare used examples from Albanian literature to show that the most rabid conservatism stands very close to the most degenerate modernism. He pointed out that one such writer was “on the one hand fanatic conservative, on the other hand arch-liberal, rabid chauvinist and at the same time rabid cosmopolitan.” He was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative when it was a question of the new social ideas, of progress and revolution, but the greatest liberal when it was a question of opening the borders of Albania to Italian fascist aggression.
The holy alliance between conservatism and liberalism is completely explicable because both seek the return to the overthrown world, to the “lost paradise.”
Socialist realism, writes Kadare, is the art of the future. Its great power of portrayal is lent to it by the communist revolution, by the liberation of the masses.
Socialist realism cannot be transformed into the “unlimited realism” of the modern revisionist thinkers such as Roger Garaudy, who in fact want to merge decadentism with socialist realism. Socialist realism can treat every subject from that of proletarian revolution to the ancient legends. “It is able to re-examine and re-explain artistically all the world, beginning with the siege of Troy and ending with the imperialist-revisionist encirclement.” To limit socialist realism to the present means to detach the roots of this art from the national foundations and at the same time to recognize the complete domination of the cultural tyranny of all the old superstructures of the last 5,000 years of the history of the peoples. Socialist realism and the working class will continue to narrow the bourgeois-revisionist cultural empire until it encircles it. Our new Albanian art, writes Ismail Kadare in conclusion, because of the vanguard position of the Party of the working class in the country, has boundless possibilities for the creation of great works of art.
(Literature & Ideology, No. 17, 1974)
Note
[1] See also D. Egan, “The Wedding: A Novel About Albanian Women,” L&I, No. 15 (1973), 45-50.
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