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Albania: Kadare (Nonino Prize 2018), "A chaotic country"

Writer living in France. "Let the Balkans aspire to the EU"

26 January, 19:23
(ANSA) - UDINE, JAN 26 - Today's Albania is ''a chaotic, somewhat anarchic country. It's democratic, with far right and far left parties debating in very harsh terms, but things are not clear and there are many unresolved problems''. Albanian intellectual, poet and novelist Ismail Kadare, resident in France, winner of the International Nonino Prize 2018, spoke today in Udine. He will receive tomorrow the award at Ronchi di Percoto (Udine) in the historic site of the famous distillers from Friuli who have been promoting this event for 43 years.

''Due to my stances - he said - some consider me an enemy of communism, others an enemy of the West''. Kadare then claimed that he never supported Enver Hoxha, the dictator of the communist regime of his country.'' See how I describe Enver Hoxha in the only novel in which I represent him, ''The Winter of the Great loneliness'',1973), a totally negative character'', he underlined.

About the circumstances that pushed the author - published in Italy by ''La Nave di Teseo'' - to leave Albania in 1990, Kadare explained that he ''decided to leave after the visit to the USA of Hoxha's successor, Ramiz Alia, who gave signs of openness.

When he come back to our country - Kadare said - he said that the USA welcomed Albania, just the way it was'' I was in Paris, I realized that I could no longer hope and therefore I applied for political asylum''.

Talking about today's Europe, Kadare said that ''union seems natural to me and I support the aspirations to EU membership of the Balkan peoples who have been excluded: on this side we can not be too positivist, but not nihilists. Legends and myths in the relations between dictators and intellectuals are the focus of the essay that Kadare is writing. ''The theme - he announced - is the relationship between the Nobel Prize winner Pasternak and the dictator Stalin, between a writer and the Soviet Union that considered him a traitor at that time''. (ANSA).

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