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When Enver Hoxha described Kadare as a "raven poet"

When Enver Hoxha described Kadare as a "raven poet"

From: Falcon Kelliçi

On the third Sunday of 1975, in the weekly literary newspaper Drita Kadare's short poem with the title had to be published At noon the Politburo met. But, the night before, when the poem was being printed, after a service outside Tirana, Duro Mustafai, the editor-in-chief of light who took a quick look at the subject of the newspaper and stopped at the above poem that was sent days before by Kadare to the editorial office and was approved by the collegium secretary, by the well-known critic Abdurrahim Muftiu.

Naturally he was moved to read it. And, he immediately made the decision not to publish the poem, because according to him there were ... problems.


On Monday morning, a quick meeting of the leadership of the League of Writers was organized, where Ismail Kadare was also called and the shortcomings of his poem were discussed at length. And, since he defended the idea that the poem At noon the Bureau Political was gathered had to be published, it was decided that it would be sent for review to Ramiz Ali, the head of Propaganda in the Central Committee of the PPSh.

Until then, Kadareja had been heavily criticized in 1969 for the publication in the pages of November  of the novel monster, which was immediately withdrawn from circulation in 1973, due to ideological errors in the novel The winter of great loneliness, which our great writer was forced to rework and reprint a few years later, in 1975.

Ramiz Alia read the poem, approved it and decided to give it to the dictator himself for judgment with the conviction that he too would have the same positive opinion as him. But it didn't happen like that. On October 20, 1975 in diary his own Enver Hoxha qualified the poem At noon the Political Bureau gathered (which was then called The Red Paschalars), hostile work and Kaderën himself "raven poet".

As stated in the pages of this diary, among others, he was horrified by such lines of this poem as:

Bureaucrats are another thing.
Not with pelican paint running,
Like a nice bunch, ho, ho, ho,
But ghastly,
With bloody hands,
I see them elbow wide.
Therefore, the dictator wrote a whole lot about the above verses in his diary:

"For this reactionary poet, our socialist order is a bureaucratic order, and the bureaucrats have 'hands stained with blood up to the elbows.' All these monsters dressed 'like red pashalars with decorations, etc.', have the offices, the ministries, the Central Committee and take the body of the revolution to the grave". (Personal diary October 20, 1975).

And below this so-called follower of the work of Mark, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, using a banal and disgusting vocabulary worthy of a rascal, thus orders his lackey, Ramiz Alia: "Get ready and call Ismail Kadare and see in front of his 'puss' and make him lick it".

That's not enough, but then he attacks Ramiz Ali himself, who had his own ideologue, and annihilates him with contemptuous words: "You are not allowed to give such superficial thoughts and not look at the interior, the philosophy and get caught by the figures and pseudo-charms that Enver Hoxha makes. This, I say to Ramiz, shows a sick sympathy on your part for these sick people... You must have the strength to fight the liberal views that stand out from time to time in you". (Personal diary, October 20, 1975).

Of course, with the words "liberal point of view" the dictator was referring to the 11th Song Festival at RTVSh (December 22-26, 1972) and other events in the field of literature and arts, for which Ramiz Alia had been responsible , against which he had taken measures up to prisons and exiles, while only a few criticisms were made against him, precisely for these liberal views that were rearing their head again.

If this poem had been written by any other poet, without the slightest doubt he would have ended up behind bars. But, as it seemed, despite the hatred, but also the envy towards Kadare, who was being translated abroad by "bourgeois publishing houses", as he calls them in his diary, while his so-called works ended up in the basements of embassies or in the bins of garbage thrown by those to whom it was donated, Enver Hoxha did not take this extreme measure against Kadare.

And, this, because he guessed that great personalities of world culture and literature would stand up and demand the immediate release of this writer who was already popular in many countries of the world and would expose him as a fanatical Stalinist dictator. . And, they wouldn't be wrong one bit.

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