KADARE, ISMAIL

born 1936, Gjirokastr, Alb. Albanian novelist and poet who gained an international readership. The son of a post-office worker in Gjirokastr, Kadare studied at the University of Tiran and later at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow until 1960. Upon returning to Albania, he became a journalist and also embarked on a literary career. He endured periods of controversy in his native country during the long rule of Enver Hoxha, whose government Kadare alternately praised and criticized. Kadare first won fame in Albania as a poet, but it is his prose works that are known internationally. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. His best-known novel is Gjenerali i ushtris s vdekur (1963; The General of the Dead Army), a study of postwar Albania as seen through the eyes of an Italian general who descends into madness while repatriating the remains of his country's soldiers who died in Albania during World War II. Among Kadare's other novels dealing with Albanian history are Dasma (1968; The Wedding), about a peasant girl who rejects the traditional custom of arranged marriages after she is exposed to socialist doctrines, and Dimri i madh (1977; The Great Winter), a panoramic view of events leading to the rift in Soviet-Albanian relations that began in 1961. Kadare's fiction blends Albanian history and folklore with socially critical realism in a somewhat surreal fashion. Among his semiautobiographical works is Kronik n gur (1971; Chronicle in Stone), about his childhood in the town of Gjirokastr during the wartime fascist occupation there.