Ismaïl Kadaré, “Balkan poet, herald of freedom”, grand officer of the Legion of Honor

Emmanuel Macron decorated Ismaïl Kadaré as a great officer of the Albanian Legion of Honor on Monday in Tirana, saluting his work which “was strengthened in adversity” and “galvanized against the forbidden” under the communist tyranny of Enver Hoxha, one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century.

“Poet of the Balkans”, “herald of freedom”, the 87-year-old novelist, alternating grotesque and epic, explored the myths and history of his country to dissect the mechanisms of a universal evil, totalitarianism. For the French head of state, who came to Albania for a two-day bilateral visit, he is “one of those whose every word was torn from silence, of those whose every line risked making their report heavier, of those whose each novel threatened to be the epitaph of their career.

“You lived and created as a free man in a country that was not, post-war Albania, more Soviet than the Soviets, more Stalinist than Stalin,” the president said during a brief speech. applauded for a long time, before an official dinner hosted by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. Emmanuel Macron returned to the way in which the writer knew how to play with the imposed codes of the dictatorship to join “the resistance fighters of freedom of style”, “resist, thwart censorship” through “circumvention, metaphor, parallel ”, via “fables with double meanings and double bottoms”.

His immense work, rich in around fifty works - novels, essays, short stories, poems, theater - translated into 40 languages, has earned him to be nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Protected by his fame when others were condemned to forced labor, or even executed, Kadaré was criticized for this status of “official dissident”. But he always denied any special relationship with the dictatorship, for whom, according to recently discovered documents, the writer "was only a crow of misfortune." Described as an “enemy of the people”, he could have “left the burning ship”, noted the French president. “But you refuse to abandon a people to the arsonists of their freedom,” he said in front of Ismaïl Kadaré.

Until exile in France in 1990. “You turn to the country which was the first to publish your books.” “In Tirana your departure led to the first student protests in more than 40 years”, “you participated in this great awakening of the people which raised the iron curtain”, he added.