Published Paper Details:

Albanian writer Ismail Kadare was living in a dictatorship in which the harassment, interrogation, torture and even assassination of dissidents was common. And yet he produced works which were provocative and potentially seditious. He appears to have suffered greatly from the strain of writing, unable either to rein in his imagination or refrain from publicizing his work in the volatile and politically explosive environments of the 1970s and 1980s. He describes the machinations of the party factions, the intimacies, hatreds and daily familiarities of the tiny Tirana Nomenclature. He made enemies among the old guard and in the Sigurini, in a country where a word out of place could bring about imprisonment, physical harm, and death. Like many others he was sent to Berat in 1967 in the wake of the cultural revolution, but worked as a journalist and writer there and appears to have been free to return to Tirana. While the events surrounding the production of his works were dangerous, he succeeded in creating a protective shield from communist leader Enver Hoxha's vanity and survived the scandal of his attack on the Party bureaucracy.