Winner's Speech 2005
Speech given by Ismail Kadare on winning the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.
Mr. Chairman, members of the panel, ladies and gentlemen:
Thank you, thank you with all my heart, for the great distinction you award me, and for the kind words that have been said.
There would be a grave risk of you thinking a writer who has travelled two thousand kilometres to be here a little simple-minded and banal if he were to begin his speech with a hymn declaring his faith in literature, and saying, more precisely, that literature is what made him a free man.
It's true that it is two thousand kilometres from Tirana, the capital of my country, to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. All the same, I shall not only make such a declaration of faith in literature, but however strange it may seem, I will also add that for me, at the very start, Scotland played a key role in understanding how freedom and literature relate to each other.
Allow me to summarize what I wrote forty years ago in one of my first books, Chronicle in Stone, which Professor Carey quoted from so perspicaciously a few moments ago.
I was born and grew up in a small, medieval Albanian city overshadowed by a great castle, as daunting as it was impressive. All regimes had used the castle as a prison, and the Communist regime was no exception. As it could be seen from all parts of the city, the castle and its prison-tower radiated power and menace in every direction.
As a child I grew up in the shadow of that castle. When I was 11 or 12, however, in the season of our first serious encounters with reading, another castle took over my mind and my imagination. It was a Scottish castle, located not so far from here: the castle of Macbeth.
My fascination with that distant northern castle was enough to make my local fortress fade into insignificance. Its prison and its prison guards and its menace all grew somehow blurrier. A very strange thing had come to pass. A teenager from the back end of a tiny country crushed under the heel of Communism - Albania - had been propelled, by force of Shakespeare, so to speak, towards the inaccessible shores of misty Scotland.
That teenager was already a citizen of another realm, the realm of literature. He had entrusted to it his imagination and also his moral conscience. Its laws came to override all other law. Its leaders - Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Kafka - became his true masters.
I gave myself up to that fascination as to a religion.
The same question has been put countless times to people who like me are writers from the former Communist empire: "How do account for the fact that, in those times, and in that place, where and when it seemed quite impossible to do so, you were nonetheless able to write real literature?" My own answer to that question usually goes like this: "We believed in literature. In return for our belief and our fidelity, literature granted us her blessing and protection."
Believing in literature means believing in a reality above that which is. Believing in literature means saying that the ghastly regime holding sway over your country is altogether insipid, compared to literature in all its funereal majesty. Believing in that art means being convinced that the regime to which you are subjected, with its policemen who spy on you, its top leaders and its functionaries- in sum, that the entire edifice of tyranny is but a passing nightmare, something dead in comparison to the Supreme order whose disciple you now are.
To explain myself briefly, I'd like to refer you to an episode in the Divine Comedy. Dante Alighieri, as he travels through Hell, is frightened of a huge, oncoming storm. Dante's master Virgil tells him: "Be not afraid, for it is a dead storm!"
That phrase helps to clarify what I was just saying. If you can manage to make yourself see the rough weather of dictatorship as a "dead storm", you'll have the key to the enigma. But a writer can only get that key from literature.
When you are a writer, it is not easy to be aware of living in a regime of death. In the totalitarian system, literature and the other arts suffered an ordeal of unprecedented cruelty. Of course, writers have been punished in all eras, and censorship, prisons, deportation and exile have always existed. But the regime I am referring to was not content merely to ban the most famous works in the canon - the "cathedrals" of artistic creation. No, the regime tried to annihilate the very possibility of such monuments ever being built again. In other words, it tried to destroy the raw material from which such cathedrals are hewn. It did its best to create a new race of writers who then proceeded with enthusiasm to destroy literature by their own hand.
In a sense, Stalinism was a great success. The line of writers abandoning the Temple grew ever longer, whilst those who kept the faith and stayed put saw their number dwindle by the day. We were only a tiny minority in that boundless, hopeless desert called Socialist Realism.
We propped each other up as we tried to write literature as if that regime did not exist. Now and again, we pulled it off. At other times we didn't. The idea that we could create a few mouthfuls of spiritual nourishment for our imprisoned nation filled us with joy.
Let me stress this point: that modest spiritual nourishment was a kind of survival ration for our people in their prison-land.
And then, suddenly, one day, passing through the night of dictatorship, our prison bread ended up by accident on your table. In your free cities - Paris, London, New York, Madrid, Vienna, Rome ... - you picked up the prison loaf and inspected it with curiosity. You took a bite and found it good, and reckoned it was just as edible by you who live in the free world.
An Albanian writer could not have imagined any higher kind of praise ever being given. For him it was a miracle of Biblical proportions. Tiny, forgotten, isolated Albania, a land that had almost been buried alive, had apparently shown a sign of continuing life. Albania had signalled that though bound hand and foot by dictatorship, it hadn't yet enslaved its soul.
That signal, broadcast by means of literature and so nobly picked up by you, my dear friends, is what has made the unthinkable possible. It's that signal which made today's prize possible. It's what enabled me to travel here, to far distant Scotland, and it's that little sign which will enable me to undertake a visit tomorrow to where my imagination first dwelt, to a house which, more than any other edifice, fired my passion for literature: the castle of Macbeth, Thane of Glamis and Cawdor.
Ismail Kadaré
Translated by David Bellos
