Key Terms: socialist realism criticism, ideological criticism, dogmatism, decadence, hermeticism, proletarian partisanship, censorship, Marxist aesthetics, liberal poetic generation of the 1970s
The focus of this study is the methodological dogmatism of literary criticism of socialist realism in Albania, but also the tendencies towards a more liberated criticism from canonical, mainly ideological frameworks in the years 1970-1973, expressed by a limited number of literary scholars and theorists during the debate organized in the literary magazine of the Union of Writers and Artists of Albania, “Drita,” on “Positive Heroism,” as well as the ways and forms of exercising state censorship on literature.
The study begins with a brief presentation of the history of Albanian literary criticism of the twentieth century to create a concept around its development until the mid-1970s, when literature and criticism remained again in opposing and generally incompatible positions. Criticism lost its aesthetic principles, becoming increasingly schematic, ideological, and stereotypical.
Next, I have examined the ideological orientations of this criticism, its limitations, and major problems, seen in the historical and social context in which it developed. I have explored how extraliterary interventions distorted literary and artistic criticism of this time, leading it to failure or close alignment with the political slogans of the time. I have attempted to prove the hypothesis of this theme that politically charged and politically oriented criticism sidelined the literary generation known as the “liberal generation of the 1970s,” ignored it, and even worse, excluded it from the deserved place in our literature, becoming part of the political system of their punishment due to their modernist tendencies in poetry, so condemned at that time. The aesthetic dissidence or the practice of aesthetic refusal, which this generation adapted in its creativity during this period, served for the most extreme political prejudice of it by the criticism of all kinds applied by the system.
Our research and investigation method has relied on a broad theoretical basis, which has helped in proving my hypothesis and the study’s purpose.
I have relied on the well-known book by famous American authors Welek, Renne, and Warren, “Theory of Literature,” New York, 1956. (Published in Albanian: Rene Welek and Austin Warren “Theory of Literature” (Tirana, 2015). In Welek’s book, Rene “Concepts of Criticism,” New Haven 1963. In Gerard Genette’s study: “The New Discourse of Narrative,” Tirana, 2014. From Hans George Gadamar, I consulted the book “History of Philosophy,” Plejad, Tirana, 2008. From G. Lanson: “Essays on Method, Criticism, and Literary History,” Hachette, Paris, 1965.
Similarly, in Tzvetan Todorov’s book “Literature in Danger,” Pristina, 2007. In the book “Eliot, Thomas Stearns-Selected Essays,” London, 1960. (Published in Albanian: Tmos Elitot: “Selected Essays” Pristina, 1982).
In Northrop Frye’s book “Anatomy of Criticism,” Pristina, 1990. In Ann Jefferson and David Roby’s book “Modern Literary Theory. A comparative presentation,” Tirana, 2016. In Jean Paul Sartre’s book “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Tirana, 1997.
In Ibrahim Rugova’s book “Literary Theory. Selected Texts,” (Pristina, 2013). In Agim Vinca’s book “Literary Method” (Pristina, 2016). In Floresha Dado’s book “Theory of Literary Work. Poetics” (Tirana, 2006). In Agron Tufa’s book “Literature and the Literary Process in the Twentieth Century” (Tirana, 2018). In the book “Literary Theory” by Zejnullah Rrahmani, Pristina, 1990. In Arshi Pipa’s book “Criticism” (Tirana, 2006). In Umberto Eco’s book “On Literature.” In the book “Interpreted Literature” by Floresha Dado (Tirana, 2010). In Gjekë Marinaj’s book: “Protonism: From theory to practice, literary visions,” Nacional, Tirana, 2010. In Aristotle’s book “Poetics.” In Ibrahim Rugova’s book “Theories and premises of Albanian literary criticism 1504-1983,” Pristina, 1996, etc.
To have a clearer and more comprehensive result of my work, I had to use several research methods. I have used the comparative method, the method of analyzing texts of criticisms, studies, and reviews, texts of various kinds published in the press of the time, as well as their descriptive method. Since literary criticism of socialist realism and especially that of the 1970s and beyond is a reflection of a social-historical reality and interventions from external, non-literary factors, I have used the historico-literary method.
In an attempt to see the official criticism of socialist realism in Tirana compared to its tendencies in Kosovo and other former communist bloc countries, as well as contemporary Western criticism trends, I have also used the comparative method.
I have brought examples of how this official criticism ignored the form of literary work, giving priority to socialist content and the political nature of the work, as well as the absurd vigilance to protect this literature from “bourgeois and revisionist influences.”
This unprecedented type of criticism, also evident in the form of the criticism of the entire people towards literature, was understood as an aid given to the party to keep proletarian art clean, thus as a kind of civic virtue to spy on anything suspicious about the morality of the time within the party and institutions.
I have provided examples of how the “struggle” of ideologized criticism and critics developed uncompromisingly to protect literature and especially poetry from these “foreign influences” and “decadent influences,” especially after the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania, June 1973, but also the resistance of the main poets of this generation who went to the end with their reformist tendencies, bravely facing the drastic consequences of this punitive criticism.
In this chapter, it is argued that overall official criticism consistently and unchanged until the dissolution of the communist system in 1990, was based on traditional Marxist theory “mainly based on the reduced texts of the classics and the theory of extreme socialist realism as a declared method of literary writing.”
According to Ibrahim Rugova, this theory sees art in the service of the official ideology and to its disadvantage, adopting such terms as: typification, positive hero, class struggle, conflict, etc.
In this context, the chapter presents facts that while criticism in many former communist countries including the Soviet Union, after 1960, made attempts to overcome traditional Marxist criticism and started a new experience known as “Modern Criticism.” Four years after Stalin’s death, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cultural policies of his predecessor as “harsh and incomprehensible.” He declared, “We cannot fix the development of literature, art, and culture with a stick, or by ordering it. He called the policy of restricting art and literature wrong.” “If you try to control artists too much, there will be no clash of ideas, consequently no criticism, and consequently no truth. There will only be a bleak, dreary, and useless stereotype,” he said. As is known, this period of socialism with a human face of Khrushchev brought about greater inspiration in Soviet literature. Now artists and writers were allowed greater freedom, surpassing the absurd limitations of Stalinist doctrine in form and content. Contacts with the outside world were increasingly allowed, while foreign literature, art, and music were increasingly tolerated within the USSR itself. Ironically, scholars observe, this period coincided with the peak of the Cold War, but the relative relaxation of Khrushchev’s cultural policies was reflected by the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962). The novel by the famous Russian writer and later Nobel Prize winner depicts life in a Stalinist labor camp, which would never be published by Soviet censorship before 1953. As Albanian literary criticism declared this new policy revisionist and a departure from Marxist-Leninist theory. They remained faithful, as scholar Floresha Dado says, “to a complete theoretical system confirmed at the congress of Soviet writers in 1934, approved by Stalin, N. Bukharin, M. Gorky, and A. Zhdanov. The basic method of socialist realism literature and criticism demanded truth in reflecting reality and its revolutionary development.” Dado further writes that at this congress, in its statute, four rules were defined for literature and art to be recognized as: “Socialist Realism”. And these were: 1. Art and literature must belong to the proletariat and must be understood by it. 2. It must create typical scenes of the daily life of the people. 3. It must have a party character, meaning it must support the aims of the state and the party.” These strict rules, presented at the congress by Stalin’s cultural spokesman, the dogmatic Zhdanov, in his speech before Russian writers in 1934, expressed the understanding of literature from the Bolshevik ideological perspective led by Stalin, and would soon become a practical part of socialist literature in the USSR and later in the world after World War II. In this chapter, we emphasize that official Albanian criticism did not adapt to what was called “modern Marxist criticism,” which sees “dialectical relations between literary criticism and Marxism,” excluding the debate initiated in Tirana’s literary press about the “positive hero” or hesitant attempts to overcome dogmatic clichés of criticism both for literature and for figurative arts, theater, etc., developed during the years 1970 and the first half of 1973. Official policy did not allow during this so-called liberal period for the views of moderate Marxist theoreticians to be published, positioning itself against any tendency that went beyond the definition of Soviet socialist realism in 1934. From the materials extracted from the archives and the press of the time, it turns out that while in Albania there were calls for deepening criticism in the materials of Marxist classics – Leninism, some theorists and critics in the East, like the famous Hungarian G. Lukács (Gyorgy Lukacs, 1885-1970), even doubted the existence of Marxist aesthetics themselves. To this critical attitude towards Marxist, Stalinist criticism also “joined other non-dogmatic Marxist critics (mostly Westerners, especially those of the third generation: Adorno, Lefebvre, Benjamin, Marcuse, Sartre, Althusser, Lucien Goldmann, but also Lukács himself who engaged against the simplified interpretation of Marx’s thesis, on the basis and superstructure.” Doubters of Marxist criticism and socialist realism also include Albanian theorists and researchers Rexhep Qosja and Ibrahim Rugova, who over time discerned the limitations and consequences that the adaptation of these rigid and dogmatic principles could have on the life of literature. This chapter deals with the main concepts regarding how the official treatment of the poetry of this generation was formed. For example, how ideologically oriented criticism implies in a schematic way the decline of this group of poets under the influence of decadent formalist literature, even to the forms of Sartre’s existentialism, as in the case of poet Xhevahir Spahiu, or any other poet, even though Sartre was unknown in the country. A special sub-chapter deals with the condemnation of this so-called modernist poetry. All the archives of the time have been researched and read, including the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania, which targeted poetic phenomena, such as: hermeticism, existentialism, some extreme poetic figures and the main poets of this generation. Likewise, all the literary press criticism belonging to this period has been researched and read, including the few attempts by some critics to encourage these poets, but also a different art and literature, as well as the dogmatic wing of official criticism stigmatized by writers even then as “the police of literature,” which would win the battle after the fourth plenum of the Communist Party. In this period of literary and artistic judgment for deviation from socialist realism or falling under bourgeois influence, criticism appears to have been carried out by professionals in the field, by editors, journalists, voluntary correspondents, by amateur workers, soldiers, pensioners, by zealous anonymous individuals, and most strangely by various collectives who warned the party about different writers and poets for treason against socialist realism and the communist cause. Criticism also appears to have been carried out by party offices themselves, by government offices, etc., on behalf of their bosses and the party itself for the purpose of appropriate information and reaction. For the preparation of this chapter, I have collected a substantial and quite interesting material, not well known especially to the present generation, which could be the subject of a comprehensive and special study by me, I believe in the near future.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ALBANIAN LITERARY CRITICISM, THE ZHDANOVIST SCHOOL OF TIRANA
The beginnings of literary critical thought are found by Albanian scholars in humanistic literature. During the National Renaissance period, critical thinking about literature becomes clearer. Over 40 newspapers published outside the country, especially during the final phase of the Renaissance, leave space for literature and thought. From the beginning, the magazine “Fiamuri i Arbërit” by De Rada and “La nazzione albanese” reported on contemporary literature, the new books of Albanian authors, and those of the homeland, such as Naim, Çajupi, etc.
The most famous “Albania” by Konica, published in 1896, which from its first issue had a section for literature, as Konica says, “a connected critique of the literary works that come out in our language.” Konica would maintain this section even at the beginning of the twentieth century. Konica’s critique published in Albania can be mentioned for Çajupi’s volume “Baba Tomorri” and another for Asdreni’s book “Rreze dielli,” and later for an announcement for the publication of the first song of Fishta’s “Lahuta e Malcis” in 1905, etc.
Mithat Frashëri (known by the pseudonym Lumo Skëndo) is a well-known literary writer, translator, analyst, and critic. He published the first monograph on Naim Frashëri in 1901. His literary and cultural critiques were published in the “Singing a Book” section of his newspaper “Lirija” (Thessaloniki 1908), which only ran for 108 issues. Later, he also published in “Hylli i Dritës.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, as is known, there was no appropriate time for literary criticism or literature itself. But with the formation of the independent Albanian state in the 1920s-1930s, literary criticism underwent considerable development. All publications of the time paid attention to literary criticism. Magazines like “Hylli i dritës,” “Minerva,” “Përpjekja shqiptare,” “Shkëndija,” “Kritika,” etc., left space for review criticism and critical thought in general.
The literary magazine “Shkëndija” (Tirana, 1940-1943), continuously directed by Ernest Koliqi, is considered the largest and most comprehensive during the wartime period. The magazine “Kritika” (Tirana, March-June 1944) published by Arshi Pipa, was dedicated to literary criticism.
During the wartime period, a number of short-lived periodicals were also published, such as the monthly “Fryma” (Tirana, January 1944), published by Myzafer Pipa, and the biweekly “Revista letrare,” founded by Mitrush Kuteli, Vedat Kokona, Nexhat Hakiu, and Sterio Spase.
In the 1920s-1930s, we have the beginnings of famous translations by Fan Noli, while well-known authors of the time wrote criticism, such as Krist Maloku, Mitrush Kulteli, Eqrem Çabej, Vangjel Koça, Dhimitër Shuteriqi, and during the Second World War, Arshi Pipa, but also Stefan Shundi, Kudret Kokoshi. Writers themselves also engage in criticism during this time, such as Gjergj Fishta, Ernest Koliqi, Kosta Cipo, Z. Kodra, Jolanda Kodra, Mitrush Kulteli, Petro Marko, Nonda Bulka, and A. Xhuvani, etc.
In the 1940s, new critics also debut, such as Nexhat Hakiu, Pashko Gjeci, Vedat Kokona, Sterio Spase, etc.
Important for the history of Albanian studies is the work of the Arbëresh Gaetano Petrota “Populli gjuha dhe letërsia shqiptare,” published in 1931, as well as the study by Eqrem Çabej “Për gjenezën e literaturës shqipe” (Tirana, 1939).
With the establishment of the communist regime in 1945, the Union of Writers of Albania was founded. The literary magazine “Bota e re” (1945), later named “Literatura jonë” and later “Nëntori,” was published, playing an important role in the development of contemporary criticism, as did the newspaper “Drita” of the Writers’ and Artists’ Union in Tirana.
In the early post-liberation years, writers and critics who had debuted in the 1930s wrote literary criticism, such as Dhimitër Shuteriqi, Andrea Varfi, Aleks Çaçi, etc.
Some scholars who had made a name for themselves before the war continued to write and publish, such as Ziaudin Kodra and Dhimitër Shuteriqi, as well as others such as Vehbi Bala, Mahir Domi, Koço Bihiku, Drago Siliqi, etc.
In Kosovo, the first writings with literary criticism, whether informative or as reviews, would be published with the founding of the newspaper “Rilindja” and subsequently during the 1950s mainly by critics such as Vehap Shita, Hasan Mekuli, Hilmi Agani, Gani Bobi, Ramiz Kelmendi, etc.
At a time when Albanian literature was functioning in the form of isolation and lack of communication, divided in Albania, Kosovo, and in the Diaspora, so was literary criticism. Ernest Koliqi’s magazine “Shêjzat” (1903-1975), founded in Rome in 1957, was the only one to look at this literature from a unified national perspective.
For 18 years, Koliqi directed this literary and cultural magazine, with dedication, informing its pages about new literary contributions from all Albanian territories, continuously publishing professional critiques based on aesthetic and literary criteria. Besides Koliqi, writers like Camaj, Pipa, and other literary exponents as well as critics in the Diaspora wrote there.
“Shêjzat” served as a platform and window of information on Albanological scientific activities worldwide. They also recorded in their chronicle social events that would be somewhat valuable in the future as historical and cultural documentation for a ninety-year period.
In the 1960s, a group of new critics entered Tirana, such as Dalan Shapllo, Kundret Velça, Razi Brahimi, followed by Jorgo Bulo, Alfred Uçi, Gjergj Zheji, Josif Papagjoni, Trim Gjata, Miho Gjini, Adriatik Kallulli, Fisnik Sina, Mexhit Prençi, etc.
In the 1960s, literary criticism in Kosovo reached greater maturity. Now not only preliminary criticism or reviews appeared but also full-fledged literary criticism, including two monographs. Thus, Rexhep Qosja writes a monograph on Naim Frashëri, Ali Aliu deals with journalistic criticism, while Ali Jasiqi publishes a monograph on Josip Rreli.
Meanwhile, in 1959, the university text “History of Albanian Literature” I, II was published in Tirana, from the beginnings until the end of the Renaissance, and in 1983, “History of Albanian Literature from the beginnings until the National Liberation War.” And finally, “History of Socialist Realism” in 1978.
In the 1970s, many writers and poets in Tirana also engaged in criticism, such as Dritëro Agolli, Ismail Kadare, Fatos Arapi, Klara Kodra, Muzafer Xhaxhiu, Skënder Buçpapaj, Rudolf Marku, etc., but also critics like Xhezair Abazi, Bujar Skëndo, Floresha Dado, Çapajev Gjokutaj, Foto Malo, Bashkim Kuçuku, Nasho Jorgaqi, Nexhip Gami, Ilia Lëngu, Ymer Çiraku, Shaban Murati, Ismail Hoxha, etc.
In Pristina, well-known writers and poets also publish writings of the nature of notes and reviews for new books in local media, such as Ali Podrimja, etc.
The short liberal period that Albanian literature and arts experienced in Tirana in the years 1970-1973 included some literary criticism. There were debates about the positive hero and the rigid schemes of socialist realism, while in the visual arts, there was, despite more caution, a tendency towards openness to modern forms of Western art and benefiting from some of their technical aspects.
The Fourth Plenum of the PPSH (Party of Labour of Albania) put an end to this “liberal” period, ideological criticism regained ground over the moderate one, turning into what Ismail Kadare had called the “Literary Police,” and the party took complete control of literature.
In the 1970s, Albanian criticism in Kosovo opened up to contemporary modern criticism, and we can say that it consolidated as literary criticism. Mensur Raifi applies psychoanalytic criticism, while the distinguished scholar Ibrahim Rugova… This passage delves into the successful and original literary criticism based on Western schools, primarily French and American. Sabri Hamiti engages in criticism with a new formalist perspective, etc.
In the 1980s and beyond, a new generation of critics emerged in Prishtina, including Ramadan Musliu, Milazim Krasniqi, Basri Çapriqi, and later Vehbi Myftari, among others.
In Albania, due to political circumstances, literary criticism had its characteristics and setbacks, resembling a schematic adaptation of the Russian tradition of socialist realism, especially before the 1960s. These principles, formed in Russia since 1934 at the Congress of Soviet Writers, were dogmatically applied by Tirana’s critics, as Russian schools began opening up to Western tendencies.
Our school adopted the term “Marxist literary criticism,” based on what was called Marxist-Leninist ideology, refusing to acknowledge any other aesthetic diversity until 1990, even Eastern ones, thus becoming a solitary, outdated, and punitive concept for literature.
Criticism in Tirana at that time claimed to be based on a healthy Marxist perspective, as it deemed all revisionist criticism, mainly post-1960s, as unhealthy and deviating from Marxist theory on literature.
Our criticism claimed to adhere to international Marxist thought, represented by various figures. However, according to Dr. Rugova, these references were weak, general, and inconsistent with the theoretical and aesthetic concepts of literary criticism.
Scholar Ibrahim Rugova wrote that the term “Marxist ideology” was too general and lacked specific treatment for literature or criticism by classical Marxists, namely Marx, Engels, Lenin, and later Stalin.
Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, in “Aesthetic Refusal,” distinguishes two types of Marxist criticism: “A. Traditional Marxist Criticism” and “B. Modern Marxist Criticism.”
According to Rugova, “Traditional Marxist Criticism mainly relies on reduced texts of classics and the theory of extreme socialist realism as a declared method of literary writing. The key term of this criticism is reflection in an extreme sense, which seeks a simplification of reality that places and resolves it in the art-society relationship to the disadvantage of art, because it serves the officially declared ideology from which it deviates very little. Other terms of this criticism are: typification, positive hero, class struggle, conflict as a technical solution of class struggle within literary and artistic works, etc.”
Objective reflection of objective and revolutionary reality was a criterion for literature, as literature could only be understood in this historical and social reality.
Thus, criticism left very little space for understanding literature as a creative process, of the writer, who ultimately was an individual, and the creative process itself.
Dr. Rugova rightly emphasizes that “this critical school led to the narrowing of creative, aesthetic, and thematic freedoms,” as this critical theory oriented a literary model that resulted in “the struggle between good and evil, between reactionary and progressive, which he calls ‘traditional Manichaeism.’ This criticism would spread after World War II in all socialist countries, including Albania, which would remain conservative against any kind of reform and in the course of the years.
From the review I have made to the press, after the 1960s and especially after the 1970s, criticism and the people who practiced it, such as scholars, university professors, members of literary or political media editorials, but also translators, were included in a denunciatory campaign against revisionist literature and their most famous theorists.
According to them, the reformist course of this literature and criticism was degenerating socialist realism and developing it in harmony with bourgeois decadent art. These reformist steps of art, literature, and revisionist criticism, according to Tirana’s opposition, were in line with the anti-Marxist policies dominant in the Kremlin and its satellite countries.
Rugova in his studies also comments on modern Marxist criticism, which in Tirana was considered revisionist, decadent, and therefore dangerous.
According to him, modern Marxist criticism: “Let’s call it conditionally, is that criticism that seeks to be based on Marxism as a philosophy and theory open to contemporary issues, following the example of Marx’s work and its relationship with its time. This criticism began to develop especially after the 1960s and beyond.”
“This criticism, according to Rugova, seeks to stand on equal terms with Marxism, or seeks dialectical relationships between literary criticism and Marxism.”
Rugova takes as an example of this criticism the well-known Hungarian theoretician Gergely Lukács, who poses a great dilemma “with the observation and conviction that Marxist aesthetics exists and does not exist.”
Rugova distinguishes in the French religion Lysien Goldanin, who “solves the issues of Marxism based on his genetic structuralism, based on his class consciousness.”
In the German sphere, Rugova singles out Adorno, Ernest Bloch, and Ernest Fisher, etc., “with the demand that first, art and literature should be viewed in their own artistic entirety and then correlations should be established with other fields of life and philosophy.”
While theorists from communist countries were involved in attempts to overcome traditional Marxist criticism, only in Albania did critical concepts of socialist realism remain unchanged, as did the political leadership throughout the 45 years of the regime.
Dr. Rugova, illustrating the example of Marxist criticism, modern brings the case of “Ernest Bloch, who adds to the traditional criticism of reality also “the utopia of the future. Bloch creates his hermeneutics for understanding the present, and this approach is based on Marxist alienation theory.”
A similar concept to Ernest Bloch, according to Rugova, is also found in Roland Barthes.
Rugova notes that “from Walter Benjamin, Goldman, Fisher, Bloch, and Rozhe Garodi onwards,” the concept of modern Marxist criticism has evolved, seeking to address contemporary issues while maintaining dialectical relationships with Marxist thought.
Criticism with Marxist explanation is required to be oriented towards modern art, something traditional Marxist criticism didn’t do. Among the critics and aestheticians in question, especially those from the French region, the issue of alienation in literature is analyzed and sought after with considerable argumentation, particularly in contemporary literature. Several analyses by Goldman and Roland Barthes lead in this direction. Thus, in these analyses and criticisms, writers whom traditional Marxist criticism deemed decadent, such as Kafka, Proust, and Joyce, are present. From this time, we also have the interesting term coined by Garodi, “realism sans rivages,” with which the central concept of traditional Marxist criticism is sought to be expanded.
Analyzing literary criticism in former Yugoslavia, Rugova observes that traditional Marxist criticism existed until the 1950s, but after this period, when the federation separated from the Soviet Union, Marxism began to be creatively applied in literary criticism as well.
Rugova emphasizes that “In Kosovo, in our literature and art, where traditional Marxist criticism has not been felt, because our criticism tends to develop more after this phase, it could be said more about a traditional literary criticism in its beginnings.” But Rugova notes that “in the 1970s-1980s in Kosovo, alongside the traditional criticism called Marxist that opposed the new tendencies of literary criticism, there was also a more formalist criticism, which benefited from contemporary European criticism, developing theoretical debates as well.”
According to Rugova, “these critics seek to examine different aspects of criticism in the spirit of the theoretical plurality that exists in the contemporary world.”
The renowned academic literature theorist Floresha Dado, in defining Marxist literary criticism of socialist realism, emphasizes its extreme poverty. She writes, “After so long, knowing the theories of literary criticism and its modern trends that prevailed throughout the XX century, we understand what poverty, not to say misery, prevailed in the critical thought of socialist realism, over the essence and types of literary criticism. A modern tradition that emerged with the critics of the first 45 years of the twentieth century was erased with the branding of its authors (F. Konica, K. Maloku, M. Kuteli, V. Koca, A. Pipa, V. Kokona, P. Gjeci, E. Koliqi, K. Ashta).”
The shallowness of stereotypical criticism in Tirana contrasted with the literary criticism flourishing in Pristina. “If we look at the current situation of Albanian literary criticism and studies, we can ascertain that contacts with modern theoretical-literary orientations in terms of acceptance developed more smoothly and forcefully since the early 1970s. Thus, we have had some incorporations of structural linguistics into linguistics, then into semiology, text analysis, reading theory, and psycho-criticism later in the field of criticism.”
Literary criticism in Albania only liberated itself from traditional Stalinist experiences after 1990. With the fall of socialist realism, this practice of literary and artistic assessment ceased to exist. Most of the critics who had dominated the field’s studies over the 50 years adapted their views to the new reality. Generally, they denied Marxist criticism, while the younger generation of critics held a harsher stance towards the questionable values of this criticism, forcibly imposed by extraliterary factors.
The return of banned and excluded writers for ideological reasons, along with them the condemned writers, reshaped our literary studies and literary criticism. Likewise, the translation and publication in Tirana of well-known Western literary critics, scholars, and theorists enriched our literary criticism theoretically as well.
Even criticism transcended geographical and political boundaries by examining national literature as an indivisible unit, regardless of where it is written, surpassing the ideological walls of socialist realism.
LITERARY CRITICISM AND IDEOLOGICAL CULTURAL POLICIES, THE CULT OF THE WORKING CLASS.
The criticism of the time has not hidden the fact that it was inspired by non-literary and prejudiced principles from an aesthetic point of view towards literature and the arts. If we were to seek another standpoint, it would be inaccurate, as the political system of the time had intervened within aesthetic concepts, deforming them by giving them an ideological direction.
But even within this politically oriented criticism, there are critics who highlight the harshness and lack of culture of those who practiced this criticism.
Abandoning the modern criticism of the 1930s and the rejection of the well-known names of that period, such as: Faik Konica, Mit’hat Frashëri, Vangjel Koça, Ernest Koliqi, Krist Maloku, Arshi Pipa, Mitrush Kuleti, etc., all educated in the West, left socialist realist criticism often in the hands of amateurs who compensated for the lack of writing culture of criticism with ideological orientation or political slogans, party loyalty, heroes from the working class, revolutionary spirit, etc.
From the study of newspapers, magazines, and books published at that time, as well as the party materials formulating the ideological orientation of literature and criticism, there is no solid theory that would create a broad aesthetic platform even within the socialist theoretical system. For example, at the height of the period, which is now called liberal in literature and arts, the “Plenum of Criticism” was held, organized by the LSHA, from February 24-25, 1972, which was thought to respond to this liberal tendency of literature, but in fact, it was a moment of restraint against this opening. Similarly, if you look at it from a theoretical point of view today, it turns out to be another expression of the harshness of this criticism, even though some of the names that constituted the literary and critical elites of the time participated and spoke in it.
This canonized dogmatic spirit is also expressed by one of the main critics of this period, who makes it understood that criticism would continue to be a series of frozen quotations without ideas and inspiration. “Oriented by the teachings of the Party and comrade Enver Hoxha, our criticism, which has been cultivated by critics as well as writers and artists, has made progress in several key directions. Immediately, the lack of broad culture is felt, as well as the recognition of social issues directly from life.
This struggle is and will be delicate, so the party teaches us that by fighting conservatism and liberalism, by fighting views expressed in specific cases or as a better consequence, we should beware of sick egoistic passions, and together with the views. From 1970 to 1973, one of the authoritative voices with cultural influence like Gjergj Zheji made efforts to broaden the narrow framework of contemporary criticism to at least match the literature of that period, which had acknowledged Ismail Kadare’s international achievements.
But the facts were disappointing, if not disheartening.
“Such an unprepared critique in many ways will find it difficult if not impossible to understand, let alone explain and assist, the novelty, let’s say, of I. Kadare’s literature. By repeating the conclusions of the old ones, relying on ‘premise culture,’ operating only through adaptations, speaking, let’s say, of romanticism and not stopping at the German, French, or English one, but insisting on incompetence, solely, for example, with Pushkin or Zhukovsky, who come fifty if not 100 years after the romantic movements in these countries, and when moreover, our Albanian romanticism develops mainly under the influence of the broader European romanticism, it can never be claimed to become science.”
While Zheji seeks to “become fully oriented as independent and confidently in such complex issues that require effort and work,” the political system had positioned criticism in the same positions as the philosophical doctrine of Stalinism, even with boasting and pride. Some representatives of this practice formally called for innovation, but never provided another theoretical basis other than the orientations of the Communist Party, which was a poor and poorly written slogan orientation. While acknowledging the dialectical development of life and socialism itself, the Zhdanovist principles of literary criticism remained unchallenged ever.
From this point of view, “The literature and arts of socialist realism are innovative in nature, and their innovation is not only contained in the results they achieve in a certain direction and not even in the experiments of one or more writers and artists. It would be deceitful to say that only now are the phenomena of the 1960s beginning to be appreciated. At that time, only a few poets who write critical articles moved into conservative positions.”
Even in the most favorable times of literature and criticism, as in 1972, calls for innovation were vague, and the theoretical basis for a different criticism was lacking. It is clear that innovation and Stalinism were two different things. Critics’ names, whom Rugova calls “modern Marxists,” were declared revisionists and cursed as much as Western theoreticians, who did not consider either socialist realism or its ideological criticism. The exercise of criticism by individuals of any kind, by students, workers, pensioners, or even by groups of workers who made noise even to the best writer, had raised the cult of the working class, not only in the content of literary works but now also in criticism of them. The cult of the working class and its absurd power to help professional criticism in a ridiculous way, as it was said “to better understand literature” or “the essence of literary works,” was a total distortion of it, better to say a devaluation of the critic’s work, the scholar, and the aesthete.
“The active participation of the mass of readers in the discussion of our creations not only does not weaken the role of professional criticism but, on the contrary, helps it to be more objective, deeper, and more accurate. However, as much as in our reports we continuously call for lively literary debate, we seem to be trapped behind the expression that our problems should be solved in as narrow a circle as possible ‘head to head.’ By condemning excessive enthusiasm, panegyrics in our criticism, we also rise forcefully against manifestations of nihilism, which has its origin in sick intellectualism, eclecticism, disbelief in our national culture, submission to everything foreign. When it comes to a new unknown writer, then we expect the Greek calendars. When some unheard-of writer makes a mistake, they’re given condolences. When another makes a mistake, a signal is expected.”
While since Walter Benjamin, Goldman, Fisher, Bloch, and Roger Garaudy insisted that Marxist criticism with explicit explanation should also be oriented towards modern art, the criticism plenum, attended by communist elites of literature, found innovation in the deepening of scientific literary analysis “avoiding superficiality, vulgarity, excessive exaltation, leveling of authors,” etc. Dritëro Agolli, without naming him as such, sees it as a burden of criticism and its professional poverty, expression through political and ideological means, reminiscent of the political relations of the time. I have studied almost all the published criticism of the time, and they all began with expressions of the nature of “our criticism guided by the teachings of the party and Comrade Enver, in the spirit of this plenum or that congress of the party, has marked achievements and progress … etc.”
Agolli speaks of the need for linguistic and stylistic criticism but does not speak of the narrowness in which ideology had confined criticism.
“In a word, according to my opinion, the first phenomenon that damages the principle of scientific analysis of our criticism is superficiality vulgarity. The second that hinders the scientific analysis of a work in our criticism is the absolutism of this work, its return to a model or pattern as if it were a consumer item: this piece is beautiful, therefore you should make a costume out of it. Or the idea has emerged that now the novel should be 200-300 pages. The third that hinders the scientific analysis of a work in our criticism is excessive exaltation, it is the panegyric speech we give to this work. The fourth that hinders the scientific analysis of a work in our criticism is the leveling of authors. But how does the individuality of this writer and that other one manifest itself, where do they differ, what expressive means and what language do they use – this is left silent.”
In this kind of ideological schematism, the one who could be considered the father of liberal literature and arts in the 1970s, who spoke more through some dramas, where new heroes, new subjects, where as novelty seemed to be the fact that the role of the party was not in the forefront, as conceived in other works of the socialist tradition.
While Marxist liberal criticism, after the 1960s, sought that ideological spirit not to dominate 100% of literary works and thus their criticism, making a progressive step in liberating literature from ideological burdens, in Albania, there were calls to preserve literature and criticism itself from bourgeois and revisionist influences. While theorists like Gjergj Llukaci questioned whether “there really existed a Marxist aesthetic,” Pacarimi (inclined toward his prosperous success and often speculative) found the improvement of this criticism in “the study of the Marxist-Leninist aesthetics of the party’s materials and Comrade Enver’s thoughts.” Criticism can and should speak out on these issues, trace, uncover, and help steer creativity. Another crucial demand, also to aid in steering creativity away from slipping into errors to avoid bourgeois and revisionist foreign influences, requires a deep study of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics of party materials and thoughts of Comrade Enver, understanding life and its issues, which anticipate our art.”
“It’s clear that political frameworks haven’t allowed literature and criticism to progress, but even in those circumstances, literary criticism has turned out to be an additional hindrance to literature, with its extreme dogmatism and professional weakness.”
“Researcher Floresha Dado, referring to Arshi Pipa, explains the reasons behind the backwardness of literary criticism in Albania. According to Pipa: ‘Literary criticism is obligated to comply with the rules of socialist realism, while in poetry, prose, and drama, a strong writer avoids some barriers by using art as a flight in an airplane. And while a creative writer allows himself some creative freedom, essential for the creative act, a literary critic must evaluate a work by applying to it some party rules based on partisanship, ideological consistency, principledness, and class character, being careful to overcome individual preferences and tastes.’”
“To gauge the level of criticism, its obstacles, and its political limitations almost like torture, we can examine the following text, which discusses half of its content with references from party slogans, its meetings, plenums, conferences, and programmatic orientations for literature and the arts.”
“Later, criticism has brought to light and analyzed, from the positions of party politics – and this is of paramount importance – works that, with realism and militant spirit, dealt with moments of the National Liberation War and the work of the working class, peasants, and all people in building socialism. In the party documents on literature, art, and criticism, in Comrade Enver’s report at the sixth congress and especially in his speech at the 17th Tirana Conference and in Comrade Ramiz Alia’s speech given recently before writers and artists, among the orientations of ideas and thoughts, it has been emphasized several times that in judging works of art, we must start (and the Party has started) from within to assess what is innovative and what is conservative, what is socialist and what is archaic.”
“In these circumstances, a significant problem has emerged before criticism, the problem of the relationship between art and life, reality. Under no circumstances should it be accepted as correct the idea that there may also be works illustrating a historical fact.”
“Wanting in this way, from an eclectic position that accepts the coexistence of academic and archaic art with innovative and revolutionary art, to defend academism, its essential interpretive, ideo-emotional essence is removed from art.”
“Meanwhile, the well-known director Viktor Gjika expresses concern about the lack of film criticism. ‘One of the reasons for such a lack is the fact that we still don’t have specialized film critics, and literary critics in general do not engage in film criticism.’”
“Even one of the well-known critics and researchers of socialist realism like Jorgo Bulo, who has the necessary culture to highlight the schematism that had enveloped criticism and literary studies in general, makes a contradictory proposal. On one hand, he seeks the strengthening of Marxist-Leninist methodological foundations, and on the other hand, he seeks to move towards ‘the processing, perfection, and assimilation of a coherent scientific system of theoretical-literary notions.’”
“He tried to reconcile two things that never go together.”
“To address these tasks, I think the fundamental directions of work in the field of criticism, its qualitative improvement, should be:
Further strengthening of Marxist-Leninist methodological foundations.
Processing, perfection, and assimilation of a coherent scientific system of theoretical-literary notions.”
“It seems to me that some of the shortcomings of our criticism stem precisely from its insufficient scientific level, from its fragile theoretical basis, from the lack of a scientifically processed system of theoretical-literary notions. For example, one flaw of our critical writings is subjectivism.”
“The phenomenon of amateurism in criticism or its massiveness, disregarding every literary principle and neglecting every terminological criterion, is also noted by Prof. Floresha Dado, who expresses that ‘there are inaccuracies and obvious inconsistencies in the use of certain theoretical terms.’”
“In various critical articles, even in discussions related to problems of our literature, if we follow them closely, we notice that there are often inaccuracies and obvious inconsistencies in the use of certain theoretical terms.”
THE GENERATION OF THE 1970s FACING OFFICIAL CRITICISM AND OFFICE CRITICISM
Official literary criticism in Albania appears to have developed with a complex and interconnected structure with the ideological system it served, specifically the political leadership. It was a criticism of ideological and sociological nature.
The construction of parallel mechanisms for controlling literature as a whole, but also individual authors and works, including a poem or a story, in the 1970s seems to have been consolidated into its own distinct type. From reading them in newspapers, magazines, and especially in the relevant archives of the regime, it is understood that in particular cases, they were written in a language more suitable for the secret police than for the social nature of socialist realism literature, which was supposed to be… Literary criticism in Albanian socialist realism seems to have developed in various directions, involving many actors and institutions, always based on the Stalinist theory of socialist realism, where literature was understood as an ideological mechanism in the education of the working class, and criticism was responsible for controlling the implementation of this ideology in literature and the arts. In a way, it appears that there was not only a doubling of criticism but also a crossing of analyses, information, and open and secret comments, even including suspicions, conjectures, and party notifications to uncover any hidden undertones in a verse or figure, any allusion against the system, the regime, or even the leadership.
In these often anonymous letters, they informed the party about this or that book, film, song, and author for deviating from socialist realism, diluting class struggle, for the de-heroization of the positive hero, for falling under bourgeois influence, and revisionism, etc. Because, according to the concepts of the time, the victories of socialism were threatened not only by the fierce imperialist-revisionist encirclement or external enemies but also by the infiltration of literature and the arts with the spirit of bourgeois decadence.
Regarding Albanian literary scholars of this period, especially concerning the phenomenon of censorship or literary criticism in general, there have been many interesting studies since 1990, but Prof. Shaban Sinani views the phenomenon as a series of developments and factors and arrives at interesting conclusions.
He asserts that Albanian socialist realism criticism existed as official criticism and criticism from the offices.
Official criticism was public criticism, usually published in newspapers and magazines of the time, or consumed on occasions of promotions or creative discussions. This was done by critics, editors, or even writers and critics close to specific editorial offices or commissioned by them. It was a vigilant and evidential criticism, towards any publication that might have escaped editors and publishing authorities.
According to Prof. Sh. Sinani, “Criticism from the offices had no connection with the public, not even the writer should be aware of it, as it was their secret competence.” According to Prof. Sinani, “Academic criticism sees the criticism from the offices as an expression of the essence of controlled, closed societies,” thus totalitarian and with prohibited freedom of expression, as was the regime in Tirana.
Under criticism from the offices, Prof. Sinani includes:
Criticism from voluntary writers and scholars who wished for their viewpoints to be known to the leadership, but not to the writer himself.
Criticism from secret reviewers, the content of which the writer was unaware of. Official reviewers’ criticism, according to the rules of the time, should present their opinions to the publishers but without communicating with the authors themselves.
Correspondence between publishers and party and state offices about problematic works and their approval sought to prevent publication, withdraw a work from publication, or halt the circulation of a work.
Discussions within the party about cases such as Kadare’s works, in the grassroots organization meetings, party committees at the local level, and even in the party’s secretariat.
Literary Criticism towards the Generation of Poets in the 1970s
Criticism from the offices during the period of socialist realism appears to have been a functional structure aimed at examining works deemed questionable in terms of ideological reliability and processing the stances that the party and state leadership would subsequently adopt concerning the future of literary or artistic works, up to their non-publication or prohibition from circulation in cases where they were already published.
Within this group of office criticism, as noted by academic Shaban Sinani, there was “criticism from voluntary writers and scholars who wished for their viewpoints to be known to the leadership, but not to the writer himself.”
This criticism seems to have been widespread in its style, which could stem from feelings of service to the party to animosity and malice typically directed against talented poets and writers.
The totalitarian regime was based on severe constraints that encouraged and stimulated voluntary spying in all segments of society, including literature and the arts, perceived not as a defect but as a civic virtue.
Under the guise of this voluntary and anonymously preserved criticism by party structures, the writer Ismail Kadare emerges, starting from his novel “The General of the Dead Army” and onwards.
The poet Frederik Rreshpja also appears to have been the subject of such criticisms for his first book “Albanian Rhapsody,” compiled and prepared for publication by the renowned critic Adriatik Kalluli in 1969.
These letters, constituting a separate chapter from Rreshpja’s life under censorship, besides signaling abstractness, modern metaphorism, and symbolism, warn about his formalistic, decadent tendencies.
Rreshpja is further targeted through letters for his careless lifestyle, for his jokes both for and against Stalin, and even for the leader of the communists. These well-crafted and thoughtful formulations were sent to the party to alert them to the poet’s precarious positions, with a note at the end that the letter should remain anonymous.
In the trial of the poet Frederik Rreshpja, his dossier included reports on conversations between Rreshpja and his colleagues during a lunch on Lezhë Island, including jokes and free banter, some of which were about Stalin. Rreshpja, with his undeniable talent, was a rising star, as Kadare describes him, but as it happened in the dictatorship, even a poet of remarkable stature could be targeted and destroyed.
Unfortunately, this kind of criticism was widespread. Even though anonymity was supposed to be maintained, party apparatus employees would slip in a word or a warning through third parties, indicating that a critical letter had been received regarding their work.
The mission of this type of criticism was to assist the party in clarifying its stance on that particular work. Surprisingly, the party often trusted these critical letters more than the official critiques from specialized editorial boards in the field.
What made matters worse was that behind these critical letters, there would often be someone from the coffee shop, a coworker, or even an acquaintance from the arts and literature scene.
After 1992, it was accidentally revealed that I, too, had fallen victim to these critical letters, as a young poet whose manuscript had been held at the “Naim Frashëri” Publishing House for years.
Poets of the 1970s generation, immediately after public criticism by the top leadership of the Communist Party, appeared to have been attacked by these letters. Their aim was to make it easier for the party to argue against these poets for indulging in modernism, decadence, and existentialism.
This type of criticism was favored by the atmosphere the country had experienced during the years 1967-1969, the so-called period of the cultural revolution, where open letters, anonymous letters, and denunciatory leaflets had become a lifestyle for the revolutionary society.
After the fourth plenum, letters against this generation of poets and writers in general took on a political agitation style and unfortunately called for tighter creative freedoms and increased control filters. They also suggested that the party judge the responsible editors who had allowed the publication of this allegedly ideologically flawed literature in newspapers, magazines, or even books.
After being condemned by the party’s culture group, letters of this nature were simultaneously sent to both the party and the secret police for some of the poets of the 1970s generation, especially for their connections with the “coup plotter” Fadil Paçrami.
These letters not only criticized him for distorting the party’s ideological line in dramas, but also informed the party about trivial conversations, discussions in meetings, or phone orders that Paçrami might have given as secretary of culture in the Tirana party, to support, according to them, the liberal wing in literature and the arts, while undermining the conservatives, whom they claimed he scorned and ignored.
It’s clear that socialist realism was a literary and artistic form imposed from above, with strict dictates and rules, but there were still writers with an unwavering literary conscience in offices who could distinguish between propaganda and literature, some of whom were talented writers or poets themselves during this period.
After June 1973, these individuals would be dismissed from editorial offices with various punitive measures, even in Tirana, to make way for editors from the working class, without any pronounced talent or sufficient editorial and literary culture, but who had the Leninist trust to keep literary publications under control. This became especially prominent in the “Naim Frashëri” Publishing House, where the poetry editorial office turned into a censorship office.
To illustrate the issue of literary criticism, I will modestly share my own experience as a young poet of that time, even as a student, with a document I became acquainted with after 1992.
In one of these letters addressed to the secretary of the faculty party bureau and the dean of the faculty, besides highlighting the modernist tendencies observed in some of my published poems and many others they had read from the manuscript, which was in the publishing house’s archives, they criticized my political biography and suggested that I should not continue the two-year course on special Balkan languages, which took place in the third and fourth years of study, as according to them, at its conclusion, I could enter state institutions in need of people with knowledge of these languages, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, embassies, Radio Tirana, ATA, etc., and this would be inappropriate for someone with questionable political reliability. And in fact, my name was removed from the list on the first day of this course, with a banal claim from the secretariat that the ministry had announced at the last moment a reduction in the number of trainees and that I had been randomly left out.
1. b) The criticism of official reviewers, who, according to the rules of the time, were supposed to present their opinions to the publishers without communicating with the authors themselves. The covert criticism of reviewers regarding the content of the reviewers’ criticism did not reach the writer.
It was known since then that the covert criticism of reviewers existed, but poets did not know which of these reviewers might have had their book in their hands.
According to the academic Shaban Sinani: “Office criticism is an expression of the general vigilance of state and party structures, to exercise, in addition to legal control, another form of control, a secret, undeclared, unpublished one, especially for the leadership, especially to help it determine its position towards the subject.”
A group of permanent reviewers activated by the “Naim Frashëri” Publishing House were known for their schematic extremism, and writers begged that their manuscripts not be given to them, as rejection was anticipated. This practice was torturous for the majority of talented poets and writers, who apparently didn’t adhere to or even worse, circumvented the Leninist principle that literature was for workers, to reflect their lives, and most importantly, “to be understood by them.” The issue of being understood by them was where writers, especially poets, couldn’t quite bridge the gap in the critical materials of the reviewers.
After the pressure of the fourth plenum, where the top leadership itself took on the role of literary criticism, we witnessed the phenomenon of simplifying poetry and its descent into the realm of political slogans, or as Prof. Agim Vinca calls it, “plaque poetry,” to the extent that most distinguished poets of the time, including even the most affected ones, the poets of the 1970s generation, preferred silence or temporarily withdrew from publishing, to the extent that it caught the attention of the party leadership.
Even though the criticism by reviewers was carried out covertly or without the author’s knowledge, it functioned immediately after the submission of the manuscript to the publishing house. According to a routine protocol, after the manuscript arrived, the editor would send it to two or three reviewers. When the author was known for formalist or problematic tendencies, as they were called then, those poets who had abandoned the traditional style of regular verse and rhyme, or who used free verse and metaphor, were immediately identified. Rreshpja, with his undeniable talent, was a rising star, as Kadare describes him, but as it happened in the dictatorship, even a poet of remarkable stature could be targeted and destroyed.
Unfortunately, this kind of criticism was widespread. Even though anonymity was supposed to be maintained, party apparatus employees would slip in a word or a warning through third parties, indicating that a critical letter had been received regarding their work.
The mission of this type of criticism was to assist the party in clarifying its stance on that particular work. Surprisingly, the party often trusted these critical letters more than the official critiques from specialized editorial boards in the field.
What made matters worse was that behind these critical letters, there would often be someone from the coffee shop, a coworker, or even an acquaintance from the arts and literature scene.
After 1992, it was accidentally revealed that I, too, had fallen victim to these critical letters, as a young poet whose manuscript had been held at the “Naim Frashëri” Publishing House for years.
Poets of the 1970s generation, immediately after public criticism by the top leadership of the Communist Party, appeared to have been attacked by these letters. Their aim was to make it easier for the party to argue against these poets for indulging in modernism, decadence, and existentialism.
This type of criticism was favored by the atmosphere the country had experienced during the years 1967-1969, the so-called period of the cultural revolution, where open letters, anonymous letters, and denunciatory leaflets had become a lifestyle for the revolutionary society.
After the fourth plenum, letters against this generation of poets and writers in general took on a political agitation style and unfortunately called for tighter creative freedoms and increased control filters. They also suggested that the party judge the responsible editors who had allowed the publication of this allegedly ideologically flawed literature in newspapers, magazines, or even books.
After being condemned by the party’s culture group, letters of this nature were simultaneously sent to both the party and the secret police for some of the poets of the 1970s generation, especially for their connections with the “coup plotter” Fadil Paçrami.
These letters not only criticized him for distorting the party’s ideological line in dramas, but also informed the party about trivial conversations, discussions in meetings, or phone orders that Paçrami might have given as secretary of culture in the Tirana party, to support, according to them, the liberal wing in literature and the arts, while undermining the conservatives, whom they claimed he scorned and ignored.
It’s clear that socialist realism was a literary and artistic form imposed from above, with strict dictates and rules, but there were still writers with an unwavering literary conscience in offices who could distinguish between propaganda and literature, some of whom were talented writers or poets themselves during this period.
After June 1973, these individuals would be dismissed from editorial offices with various punitive measures, even in Tirana, to make way for editors from the working class, without any pronounced talent or sufficient editorial and literary culture, but who had the Leninist trust to keep literary publications under control. This became especially prominent in the “Naim Frashëri” Publishing House, where the poetry editorial office turned into a censorship office.
To illustrate the issue of literary criticism, I will modestly share my own experience as a young poet of that time, even as a student, with a document I became acquainted with after 1992.
In one of these letters addressed to the secretary of the faculty party bureau and the dean of the faculty, besides highlighting the modernist tendencies observed in some of my published poems and many others they had read from the manuscript, which was in the publishing house’s archives, they criticized my political biography and suggested that I should not continue the two-year course on special Balkan languages, which took place in the third and fourth years of study, as according to them, at its conclusion, I could enter state institutions in need of people with knowledge of these languages, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, embassies, Radio Tirana, ATA, etc., and this would be inappropriate for someone with questionable political reliability. And in fact, my name was removed from the list on the first day of this course, with a banal claim from the secretariat that the ministry had announced at the last moment a reduction in the number of trainees and that I had been randomly left out.
1. b) The criticism of official reviewers, who, according to the rules of the time, were supposed to present their opinions to the publishers without communicating with the authors themselves. The covert criticism of reviewers regarding the content of the reviewers’ criticism did not reach the writer.
It was known since then that the covert criticism of reviewers existed, but poets did not know which of these reviewers might have had their book in their hands.
According to the academic Shaban Sinani: “Office criticism is an expression of the general vigilance of state and party structures, to exercise, in addition to legal control, another form of control, a secret, undeclared, unpublished one, especially for the leadership, especially to help it determine its position towards the subject.”
A group of permanent reviewers activated by the “Naim Frashëri” Publishing House were known for their schematic extremism, and writers begged that their manuscripts not be given to them, as rejection was anticipated. This practice was torturous for the majority of talented poets and writers, who apparently didn’t adhere to or even worse, circumvented the Leninist principle that literature was for workers, to reflect their lives, and most importantly, “to be understood by them.” The issue of being understood by them was where writers, especially poets, couldn’t quite bridge the gap in the critical materials of the reviewers.
After the pressure of the fourth plenum, where the top leadership itself took on the role of literary criticism, we witnessed the phenomenon of simplifying poetry and its descent into the realm of political slogans, or as Prof. Agim Vinca calls it, “plaque poetry,” to the extent that most distinguished poets of the time, including even the most affected ones, the poets of the 1970s generation, preferred silence or temporarily withdrew from publishing, to the extent that it caught the attention of the party leadership.
Even though the criticism by reviewers was carried out covertly or without the author’s knowledge, it functioned immediately after the submission of the manuscript to the publishing house. According to a routine protocol, after the manuscript arrived, the editor would send it to two or three reviewers. When the author was known for formalist or problematic tendencies, as they were called then, those poets who had abandoned the traditional style of regular verse and rhyme, or who used free verse and metaphor, were immediately identified. To familiarize themselves with the new books of literature and culture spectrum being published abroad, including Western countries. This gave them some advantage in interpreting literary phenomena in the West or in the communist East and simultaneously served ready-made theses against any literary evidence in the country to the top communist leaders.
These structures served as intermediaries between the central party, i.e., the Central Committee, and the institutions of literature, culture, and arts at the national level, including publishing houses, newspaper and magazine editorial offices within the cultural spectrum, and at the same time, they diligently followed the implementation of the party line in these institutions down to the grassroots level.
Writer Ismail Kadare appears to have been the most persecuted writer by these structures, as his novels from “The Great Winter of Loneliness” to “The Concert at the End of Winter” have been subjected to close scrutiny by the structures near the administration of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Unfortunately, from the examination of the archives, the majority of them cast doubt on strong allusions of the writer against the totalitarian regime, as well as the disorientation that this writer himself had brought to socialist realism.
Almost all the people working in the cultural administration near the central party were familiar with Kadare, even in different cases they praised him for his new books, but when they sat in party offices to write reports for their bosses, they made them negative. Human and personal hypocrisy in this case is very evident, but it was typical for the socialist new man, for the party’s apparatchik to make the noise without knowing where the blow came from, only when the book was blocked in the printing press or when it was removed from circulation, then when there was no possibility of defense.
These descriptions were not the only ones. An army of apparatchiks from the circles, provinces, and cooperatives systematically initiated amateur but clear criticisms against the writer to avoid socialist realism principles, etc.
The liberal generation of poets from the 1970s is also part of the selected themes of the cultural structures near the party.
For poet Xhevahir Spahiu, many reports of people in the culture apparatus near the party have been published in recent years in an attempt to interpret his doubtful and formalistic poems. He appears to have been engaged by structures of investigation within the Ministry of the Interior, in an attempt to involve the poet in hostile groups and aesthetic movements that cast doubt on socialist realism, under the influence of bourgeois decadent art, following the imprisonment of Fadil Paçrami.
As for the poem “Life” by Xhevahir Spahiu, party experts near the Central Committee, think they were inaccurate in serving it to the high leadership as a poem expressing existentialist philosophy, or “under the influence of existentialism” made known by the French writer and philosopher J.P. Sartre, a moment I will address in the next chapter.
Returning to the theme of criticism from state offices, he goes even further into the tendentious, even dangerous interpretation of Spahiu’s modernist poetry. In a secret material from the Ministry of the Interior sent to the Central Committee, it is stated that “During the tracking and discovery of the hostile and anti-party activities of the enemy group in the sectors of art and culture led by Fadil Paçrami, Todi Lubonja and Dashnor Mamaqi, it turns out that these materials have emerged against Xhevahir Spahiu.”
The accused Fadil Paçrami, in the investigative processes, has stated “…
“In hermetic poems, which in themselves presented unclearness; they left many meanings, were dark and caused misunderstandings and distorted ideas to readers. The most involved in this process were Fatos Arapi, Xhevahir Spahiu … Xhevahir Spahiu was also in favor of dividing the generations. As a result of this, various types of creators with different concepts and tastes were involved, based on society, knowledge, aesthetics or other interests, up to those of a localist nature.
…. By acting in this way, young people with skewed ideo-artistic views were encouraged, who became promoters of foreign displays in our literature and arts, such as Xhevahir Spahiu, Fatos Arapi, Sulejman Mato, Faslli Haliti, Moikom Zeqo, Ali Oseku, Llambi Blido, Ksenofon Dilo, Nikolla Zoraqi, Shpëtim Kushta, Kristaq Dhamo, Minush Jero and some others I can’t remember.
Archive of the Ministry of Order, Investigative File No. 2370 A of the trial against Fadil Paçrami. Years 1975-1976. Quoted from the book “Kadare and the communist regime, p.419-430).
The central party, in addition to its employees in the culture, press and education sector who were experts in the field, also activated the security to monitor writers, their daily lives and even the rumors they said about each other.
On the other hand, the party and the Central Committee received information from their representatives, in all important meetings of the Writers’ and Artists’ Union. According to archival materials, it turns out that their people informed in detail about certain issues. In one of them it is said that “In conclusion, it was said that our best poets and foreigners have passed from unclearness to clarity, while with some poets, especially young ones, a contrary phenomenon is noticed: they have passed from clear poetry to others. dark (as such were mentioned Fatos Arapi, Ndoc Gjetja, Moikom Zeqo, who now as they mature become more hermetic and incomprehensible).
The text clarifies the leadership in detail and professional competence how these poets have fallen under the influence of “Anthropomorphism” “where everything takes human form and the animism of things place and out of place, also affects badly and darkens the content. “For illustration, examples are given from Rudolf Markut’s poem “My Connection with Nature”, but also other examples from the poems of Moikom Zeqo, Xhevahir Spahiu, Fatos Arapi, etc.
The information does not fail to mention a controversy of Ismail Kadare, which as this material says has called the critic Razi Brahimi “a person who holds a police stance towards literature.”
In another critical information that the education sector of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania directed to this party with the theme: “On some problems of literature and arts of this period of further revolutionaryization of the country”, started in 1973 it is announced about foreign influences in literature and arts, the name of the new poet Moikom Zeqo and his cycles are mentioned, alongside Xhevahir Spahiu and Faslli Haliti. According to this report: “In prose and in drama we had the known examples and that we have condemned with time, of foreign influences, and there we have the new recesses, like the drama of M. Jeors “The Foul Stains”, the film of V. Gjikës “The Stars of Long Nights”, the novel of S. Gjikës “The Campaign”, which now must be added to them, alongside the story of I. Kadare “Provocation” or the drama of F. Paçramit “The Issue of Engineer Saimiri”, even some poems like “The Sun and the Shadows” by F. Haliti, and “The Brilliance” by V. Qurku, verses like “Life” by Xh. Spahiu, hermetic cycles of Fatos Arapi, M. Zeqos, and others. ”
Poet Moikom appears to have been monitored since high school in Durrës and college, because of the friendship he had with writer Bilal Xhaferri, a former political persecutor, who fled the country in 1969. The Party’s Criticism
The office of the party in Durrës, in a report from the First Secretary of the Committee of the Party in Durrës, Rita Marko, sent to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania, Ramiz Alia, dated May 21, 1969, using the term “secret,” provides detailed information about Moikom’s life since high school. The letter informed the Central Committee to uncover Bilal Xhaferrit’s hostile connections and, of course, to obtain permission to act.
The letter states: “Moikom Zeqo from Durrës, a first-year student at the University of Arts, a candidate of the Writers’ League, very close friend with Bilal, appears with significant reservations regarding the novel ‘The Wedding’ in an article published in our local newspaper. As he himself has admitted, a few days before the discussion meeting of the novel, he has read the first pages of Bilal’s discussion, it is rumored that Moikomi has also informed him about the meeting. We suspect that Adriatik Kallulli and Bedri Myftari, who work in Tirana, but are close friends with him, also had more complete knowledge about Bilal’s preparation for the discussion. In Durrës, there have also been close associations with Namik Mana, about whom we have discussed earlier and who is dissatisfied with the ban on the publication of his poems. He has also been associated with Met Gjergji, a teacher and a member of the literary circle, whose father was also executed by the partisans.”
For Xhevahir Spahiu, the state security also sent another piece of evidence to the Party’s Central Committee that had fallen into their hands against the poet. As it is said, “In a material prepared by Xhevahir Spahiu, the so-called ‘Symposium on Rakia,’ the lessons of the classics of Marxism-Leninism are despised and ridiculed, and their development in a creative manner by our Party,” continuing that “Young people like Xhevahir Spahiu are dissatisfied. For example, Ali Oseku has used insulting words against his former professors, calling them simply, daubers…” The secret letter is signed by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs himself, Feçor Shehu, in Tirana, on June 1, 1977.
But poet Xh. Spahiu is also judged within the party. In the meeting organized “by order from above” in the editorial office of the newspaper “Zëri i Popullit,” in the summer of 1977, the poet undergoes a severe political trial, where the party, in the role of literary critic, qualifies his poetry as influenced by Sartre’s philosophy. Xhevahiri is also judged “as an unrestrained rebel poet and criticized several times by Enver Hoxha himself.”
Criticism against Xhevahir Spahiu from the Party’s Central Committee comes from all sides, including another secret letter signed by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs himself, Feçor Shehu, in Tirana, on June 1, 1977. It states that “Young people like Xhevahir Spahiu are dissatisfied. For example, Ali Oseku has used insulting words against his former professors, calling them simply, daubers.” (Interview with journalist Arshin Xhezo, a friend and colleague of Xhevahir Spahiu, given to journalist Naim Zoto.)
Meanwhile, just a few days after the circulation of the magazine “Nëntori,” the head of state Enver Hoxha, in a speech delivered at the Presidium of the People’s Assembly, on January 9, 1973, among several “directives for art and literature,” would personally address Spahiu’s poem.
Hoxha, among other things, expressed that “Xhevahir Spahiu and some young poets have many ideas, but the way they express them is not always real, lifelike.”
Party’s Self-Criticism
The Party has often engaged in criticism and analysis of specific books, mainly by Ismail Kadare. According to the researcher Shaban Sinani, “This has happened not only with ‘The Great Winter’ or ‘The Palace of Dreams,’ but also with ‘Night with the Moon’ and ‘The Year of the Foul.’ In these cases, the meetings in the Central Committee were improvised after letters, protests in writing, or at least suspicions coming from grassroots organizations of the party in various districts, or local leaders of this party, who expressed serious doubts about Kadare’s novels ranging from the banal to the fading of the class struggle and influences from decadent Western literature.
In these cases, it was the party, the top political leadership, that decided whether the work had deviated from the principles of socialist realism, thus whether it should stay in the market or be removed. Also, for the punishment of the author.
The poet Xh. Spahiu was twice analyzed by the top political leadership within 1973. After the so-called speech of the Presidium of the People’s Assembly at the beginning of January 1973, he again becomes the object of criticism of the “leadership” in the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania in late June 1973, dedicated precisely to foreign manifestations in literature and the arts and the fight against them.
It was the leader in the role of literary critic who classified Spahiu’s poem “Life” as modernist poetry and under the influence of Sartre’s idealist philosophy.
Hoxha’s criticism, who also considered himself knowledgeable about literature, that “Xhevahir Spahiu and some young poets have many ideas, but the way they express them is not always real, lifelike,” was devastating for the poet and encouraging for official criticism.
With Spahiu after the publication of the poem “Birds,” the office of Nexhmije Hoxha in the Central Committee of the party was also involved, bringing another proof that with literary criticism, even with a specific poem, the party offices were also involved.
Her official reaction with the expression “This poem is against Enver Hoxha and it is left to be understood that the enemy of birds, i.e., of poets, is Enver himself,” said to her aides, was not just an ordinary literary comment, but a threat to the poet and of course a party orientation to hit him.
In both cases of party criticism, the measures against Spahiu have been severe and influential not only for his creativity but also for his life and family.
The role of criticism towards Xh. Spahiu is also taken by the party organization of his work at the newspaper “Zëri i Popullit.” In 1977, this organization, by order of the top leadership, improvised a meeting to analyze Spahiu’s decadent influences and his violation of the party line in his poetry.
At the end of the meeting, five punitive measures were taken against the poet, such as: exclusion from the party, removal from the newspaper, family expulsion from Tirana, internment in Puka, sending to the mine for education in the working class circle, and even worse, the prohibition of publication…
There is no more severe example of intervention in the literary life and creativity of a poet than this. The party takes on the role of the critic and declares his poetry decadent; the party also decides whether he should write or not, whether he should continue to publish or not, and his removal from Tirana along with his family.
After the punishment of poets or writers, it was again the party at the center that, in communication with publishing houses and newspaper offices, prepared a list of authors to be removed from circulation, others who were denied the right to publish, even banning books in the publishing process. While literature was engaged in portraying an optimistic view of life and, as it was said, in its revolutionary development, the efforts of the poets of the 1970s to bring it out of poverty in terms of themes, structure, and lexicon were viewed with suspicion by official critics, but also by the army of hundreds of work collectives and individuals who read these poems while holding Stalin’s works and speeches of the Albanian dictator in their hands to see their conformity, or non-conformity, with the party’s ideological spirit and the latest speeches of the leader.
The fact that the ideology of the time viewed literature as a tool in the service of the working class, and as a result to reflect its interests, as a single ruling class of the country, was a clear temptation, if not an open incitement, to unleash class dogmatism against literature and writers. The concept of the positive hero at the core of this literature, a hero who prevailed above all to defend the interests of the party and the revolution, had brought literature itself into a narrow bed of themes, ideas, and subjects, but on the other hand had provided a basic criterion for the working class to judge poetry, short stories, or novels.
Evidence of this ideological pandemic to harm the writer, if not to destroy him, is also the collective letter of ten high school students from Lushnja against a poem by Faslli Haliti, published in the local newspaper of the district in early 1972.
The letter raised strong accusations of a political nature, for distorting reality, for opposition to the party’s power for diminishing the role of the party, for distorting the figure of the communist leader, and finally for interfering in the system’s own competences. It was the party that made the critique, that struck the enemies, and took the necessary measures. Who are you to dare to raise such issues that undermine popular power and distort objective reality? This was one of the questions most frequently asked of the poet.
The letter published in the newspaper “Shkëndija” on January 25, 1973, titled “Critical Notes from Ten High School Students,” begins with the words, “We did not expect Faslli Haliti to write such a poem as ‘The Sun and the Shadows’. It is the result of a political and ideological distortion and gives us a fundamentally skewed mirror of our reality, the nature of popular power, and the party’s relations with the people.”
Faslli had been attacked since the release of the poetry book “Today” by another letter, this time written by a writer and others unrelated to literature, including a worker. This completed the ideological concept of the time that literature should be understood by the working class and it would be precisely that which should judge it for its healthy and revolutionary content.
If the malicious letter of the writer K.R remained in the drawer, the letter of the high school students was taken seriously by the party structures in the district and in Tirana, and here begins the ordeal of judging, even the unmasking of the Lushnja poet during the spring of 1973.
It was a cynical, Byzantine policy that the system as a whole used, such as striking its opponents using the supposed will of the people, the desire of the working collective, the organization of the front or the youth at the grassroots level, and so on.
This practice was especially applied against Kadare’s books. Let’s say the letter of a high school graduate from Berat, a veteran pensioner from Vlora, or a young woman from a certain company in Tirana, had the power to damage the work and the writer himself.
In addition to the numerous letters that the party received from the people regarding almost all of Kadare’s controversial books, letters also came from other talented writers.
The talented poet Sadik Bejko recalls this difficult period as follows: “For many years, the books I submitted for publication were returned to me. I published my first poem in January 1965, and my first book in December 1972.” The letter that had been sent to the party in the district, which unjustly punished the poet accused of concealing the dark past of his family’s political biography, specifically alleging that his relatives had been with the Balli Kombëtar or other anti-communist organizations during the war, had caused much suffering to the young poet Ndoc Papleka by the end of the 1960s. A letter to the District Party Committee in Tropojë informed them that he had a father executed by the partisans in 1944, which hindered the normal course of the poet’s education and creativity. Ndoc faced many difficulties, and only with the intervention of Todi Lubonja, he managed to gain the right to pursue secondary education. These letters from the people, as the poet claimed, were based on some unfortunate individuals in his village who would sit and write letters “against so-and-so’s son” or against the family of so-and-so to destroy them.
It took a lifetime for Papleka to correct this misunderstanding or malice of the letter writers, to avoid the slander that the party tended to believe so easily. Even without any information from the poet or the person damaging him, the party offices asserted that they had information indicating a dubious biography, which was enough to blacklist him as undesirable by the regime, for any career advancement or evaluation.
As for the letters from the people against the poet Ndoc Papleka, the only coincidence was that the poet’s father and his cousin had died around the same time, but while his cousin had been executed by the partisans, his future father had died of natural causes, leaving young Ndoc orphaned and defenseless.
As Papleka says, it took him a long time to clarify the issue of his suspicious biography with the regime. Although he struggled to graduate in literature and began working in his hometown, being one of the best poets in the country, due to his supposed biography, he was not allowed to enter a more important institution of culture in Tirana.
So these letters were written both out of spite to harm someone and as an expression of the revolutionary party’s vigilance in the service of strengthening the class struggle, but as it was said then, also “against enemies hidden among us.”
One of the most talented poets of this time, Skënder Buçpapaj, was the subject of these anonymous letters informing the central and local party that “the son of a reactionary family should not publish in the central press, let alone appear in books.” So even at a time when the party was making some concessions to the class struggle and allowing some tolerance for the sake of the strong talent of a young poet, it was precisely these letters that reminded it not to make any concessions, not to lessen the class struggle against the enemies of the party as we were considered brothers.
With this stern biography for the time, after completing the 7-year school, Skënder would start working as a miner, but due to his young age of only 15, he was not allowed, and after many other difficulties, he managed to resume work at the “Rruga-ura” enterprise, where usually those who had been released from political prisons or had a bad biography worked, unjustly preventing him from continuing his secondary education even though he was an excellent student.
After the publication of his first poems in the central press of Tirana and especially the famous cycle in the “Nëntori” magazine in early 1973, the party would make a concession, as they said, for the sake of talent, allowing Skënder to complete his secondary pedagogical education through correspondence and continue higher education in the branch of language and literature. The issue of biography, now being written by party offices in the district, would hinder any insistence from central literary institutions to employ him in Tirana, despite being a powerful poet, scholar, and publicist. Only after Dritëro Agolli’s veto, then chairman of LSHA in 1986, could Skënderi start working at the “Drita” newspaper in Tirana, after several years of sporadic work as a teacher in the deepest villages of Tropoja.
Even hermetic poetry by Moikom Zeqo was subjected to criticism from the people. These varied from letters signaling to the party that Zeqo had been a friend of the enemy poet Bilal Xhaferi and his group with the interned poet Namik Mana, etc., to his persistent tendencies to oppose socialist realism. It’s not entirely clear whether the letters were written by the poet’s jealous rivals or detractors in offices, but they reached institutions with a language surpassing the literary culture of the individuals or working collectives who signed them.
In the case of the letter from high school students in Lushnje against Faslli Haliti’s poem “The Sun and the Clouds,” it’s clear it wasn’t written by the students but by a hand well-versed in literature. A typical denunciatory letter against a poet is the one from the writer K.R with two other persons, one an employee and the other a worker, written around 1970, against Faslli Haliti’s volume “Today.” It’s hard to conceive how a writer could have written such a letter condemning the debut book of a younger colleague, almost in every poem, and worse still for ideological errors, even though the book was written in a clear revolutionary spirit of the time. The letter, although not published by “Zëri i Popullit,” reached the Secretary of the Central Committee for Culture three years later, to prove the poet’s ideological mistake and further undermine his already shaky positions after the high school students’ letter in February 1973. The letter to “ZP” was several pages long and provided a detailed analysis of each stanza of the poems in the book, according to them dubious and anti-revolutionary. Both letters against Faslli served as a basis for criticism from the party in Lushnje and Tirana to prove the poet’s deviation onto the enemy path of distorting reality and tendencies, as it was said, “semi-formalist.”
The criticism of literature by the people was a pressure on publishing institutions to strengthen ideological spirit and increase vigilance in editorial offices. It was a social style adapted in the country from the failed model of the “Chinese cultural revolution,” implemented in Albania during the years 1967-1969. This mass practice directed at intellectuals, writers, and artists was a major anomaly for cultural life in the country and particularly distorting in the communication between writers and their readers. It touched not only the literary style but also the very lifestyle of writers and the people. In the Chinese style of understanding life, most distinguished writers and artists were forced to leave Tirana for one or two years to go to the countryside to write works about the life of the working class and cooperative peasantry.
Criticism, conceived as a series of quotes from Mao Zedong to Enver Hoxha, turned criticism from a literary field into a political, ideological discipline. China itself had implemented socialist realism as an official policy since 1949. Communist leader Mao’s quotes on the role of the artist in the new socialist state echoed those of Stalin in the 1930s in Russia: “Our literature and art are for the masses of the people, first and foremost for workers, peasants, soldiers.” The philosophy of the cultural revolution in China had terrifying consequences in the vast Asian state with 400 thousand killed and three million people interned, affected, or imprisoned.
In Albania, although this spirit was overcome at the beginning of 1970, the style of anonymous letters, pamphlets, and other secret letters remained as a new way of life for the new man, stimulated with enthusiasm also by the political leadership of the country.
OFFICIAL CRITICISM TOWARDS THE POETIC GENERATION
Official criticism, published in newspapers and literary magazines, mainly those of LSHA, treated the emergence of this poetic generation, at best, as a continuation of the achievements of the 1960s generation or as a confirmation of the aesthetic achievements of that generation. Criticism did not distinguish the generation of poets of the 1970s as a generation that brought about significant formal changes that could be considered as new aesthetic features that could surpass the previous generation. While the generation of the 1960s was led by three distinguished poets such as Dritëro Agolli, Ismail Kadare, and Fatos Arapi, in the generation of the 1970s, we had a number of distinguished poets who walked parallel to each other, without having one or two names to lead the group. The generation of the 1970s, instead of a confrontation of theoretical, methodological concepts with the previous generation, chose to confront this generation through a poetry that was actually an expression of new aesthetic, literary concepts of a generation with a different aesthetic orientation, without claiming dissidence and within what was called socialist realism. The fact that this generation boycotted in a way the classic verse with rhyme and strict metric rules, mainly writing in free verse, sometimes with a prose-like style, based on imagery, metaphor, and abstract search, was not liked by neither the official criticism nor the political leadership behind this criticism. They saw in this new form of writing, in the poetic subject, in the poetic perception, and in their poetic structuring, an apparent tendency of formalism, entirely unacceptable to the dogmatic concepts of Albanian socialist realism. The support given to this talented generation of poets, until mid-1973, would be removed with their inclusion in the list of decadent poets, influenced by hermeticism, existentialism, and other modern currents, condemned by the political regime. The fact that the majority of this generation, after the fourth plenum, were subjected to punishments, internments, forced labor in cooperatives and construction sites, damaged their path of individual or group approach, interrupting the emergence of a new poetry from them, which as Rugova said, differed in form, image, and sign from that of the previous generation. A poetry that had its influences from great poets such as Whitman, Rilke, Lorca, Eliot, etc., but also from Albanian poetry written in Kosovo, a symbolic, hermetic poetry imposed by political circumstances due to Serbian oppression, simultaneously as an influence of Western poetry, with which they had contacts. Criticism itself didn’t think it would invest in recognizing and highlighting another literary generation, which clearly had a debatable poetic perception and a tendency in many cases towards darkening verse, especially outside the state political will, while this politics had made its own choice with Agolli, Kadare, Arapi, and filled what was called the poetic hierarchy.
The imprisonment of Frederik Rreshpja and Visar Zhitit, the removal of Xh. Spahiu’s publishing rights, the sending of Sadik Bejko to the mines, the death of Viktor Qurku, the exile to the provinces of the hermit Moikom Zeqo and Sulejman Mato, the intimidation of Papleka and the imposed silence of Skënder Buçpapaj, Hamit Alia, and Rudof Marku, etc., brought them all together out of the attention of official criticism.
Even our ideological criticism felt good about this cleansing, as it would no longer be provoked by their unclear poetry with a formalistic tendency. Creative freedom was something not tolerated by the strict rules of socialist literature and by the criticism that oversaw this process.
The majority of this generation were already mentioned in the negative list of poets burdened with modernism, hermeticism, existentialism, metaphorism, etc.
However, this generation, by enriching Albanian poetry in style and form, took it out of the excessive ideological function, to lead it to its natural bed, as subjective poetry of individual lyricism, as poetry of the human spirit and deep reflections on life, love, and death. This made them outstanding personalities of a lost literary generation, and so I think it is enough for them to enter the history of Albanian literature as avant-garde poets of a change that would come at least two decades later.
While the generation of the 1960s rightly held the top of the pyramid, nourishing literature to the end with the model of revolutionary political poetry, the generation of the seventies had already entered into a struggle for existence. Almost all the other part of this generation that had escaped imprisonment, in the midst of the 1970s, were scattered throughout the country as worker wings, cooperatives, miners, and simple teachers in the most remote and dilapidated schools of the country. They, ironically, had turned into what Marxist methodology from Marx to Stalin demanded, “typical heroes in typical circumstances”.
There was no longer any possibility for their voice to be heard, for their concepts of aesthetics to be promoted, they did not have support, influence, nor enough time to systematize their concepts, to impose themselves on criticism and historiography that repeated the same hierarchy of names in sync with the party, which was the biggest literary critic.
Criticism itself, being an ideological criticism, bypassed the poetry of the seventies, which had another face conceived as a modern creative spirit, with Western influence, while the poems of the generation of the 1960s were a political model of engaged art that coincided with the style of the country’s governance in the wild imperialist and revisionist encirclement, or by splitting history with a sword in hand, and other political slogans like these.
The criticism of the time did not recognize the fact that the poets of the seventies put an end to the imitation of Russian poetry in Albanian literature.
This criticism was itself a dogmatic variant of Soviet criticism, enthusiastically excluding every legacy of modern Albanian criticism, especially that of the 1930s.
The literary criticism of the second half of the twentieth century denied everything from the sensitive achievements of the Western school criticism of the 1930s in Albania, even though it was composed of great names and more culture.
Ideological criticism, by dividing Albanian literature into reactionary and progressive, mechanically adapted the Soviet style of judging our national literary values.
According to academic Floresha Dado, “… literary criticism in the second half of the last century instead of focusing on the question: what is poetry? turned to the other aspect: What is the poet? Was he a cleric? Or an opponent of the communist regime? Or an adherent of other cultural systems?
So it is clear that the criticism of this period focused on the author, on his biography, on political beliefs, according to Marxist political concepts that were divided into reactionary, anti-national, or patriotic progressive, and not on the work itself. So criticism, in its methodological concepts, was in unison with the ideology in the treatment of these national literary phenomena.
I believe that this criterion was also followed for the generation of the seventies, who, by conflicting with the regime over aesthetic principles, were excluded from literary criticism, entering their analysis only in the paragraph of poets who had provoked socialist realism with their decadent manifestations in poetry.
By focusing only on the implementation of proletarian partisanship, as Professor F. Dado rightly observes, literary criticism lost its fundamental function and equally the relationship with the writer and the reader.
In this sense, the modern-leaning poetry of the seventies was prejudiced and bypassed by official criticism, as it lacked the display of high partisanship, as implemented in the poems of the generation of the 1960s, which were clearly identified with socialism, with their futurist-communist style poems of industrialization and deep socialist reforms.
Socialist literature criticism, apart from other things, seems to have been confused even in the terminology used, firstly by adapting the concept of “method of socialist realism” from the Soviet school in a schematic way.
“In all our literary criticism, the term ‘method of socialist realism’ has been used to name the phenomenon of ‘socialist realist literature.’
It is not only the inaccurate use of literary criticism terminology that makes it so weak and failed, but also the ideological constraints that defined its work as literary criticism. This criticism was incompatible with its fundamental function of interpreting literature.
Since there are no questions that “Interpretation is a methodological and hermeneutic problem. When I say it is a methodological problem, I mean the solution of the theoretical aspect and the method we approach the work, and when I say hermeneutic, I mean the method that primarily involves the interpretation of the work.”
It is clear that socialist realist literature, or socialist literature, failed to become a literary direction, as it fell along with its ideological system, but what should it have been then? I’m sure there was no method in the full sense of the word. The term was used in a schematic way by literary criticism without making an accurate interpretation of it. Even the “Explanatory Dictionary of Literary Terms,” published in 1972, defines the term “method” in general as “a way of studying,” but when it comes to defining the “artistic method,” the authors play with words, expressing their confused, unclear positions. More precisely, the dictionary gives such a definition: “The artistic method is one of the principles of artistic reproduction of the social characteristic of life, it is the principle of reflections of characters in artistic figures. The artistic method thus deals with the principle of typification.”
In the contemporary definition of the term, “The word method means a way to proceed. In various dictionaries and encyclopedias, the notion of method is defined as a way, a path, an action that
To pursue a goal, in science, method is the path we follow to discover the truth. If we wish to simplify the problem a bit, we could say that to critically, rationally, and systematically investigate the tasks that arise during your scientific and creative work, means to have a method.”
“We pause to provide a perspective on the ambiguity of the critique of socialist realism and its operation in political terms in the field of literary studies, not so much to undermine the positions of this imposed critique, but rather to see the damages it inflicted on Albanian literature for about half a century, with its inability.”
“Being overtly ideological and pragmatic, this critique did not focus on the liberal generation of poets of the 1970s, who preferred timeless themes such as love, pain, human weakness, and speculation about the future, creating poetry that inspired powerful aesthetic feelings, but not so much ideological ones. In fact, this generation was seen as greatly flawed by its avoidance of the theme of national liberation war.”
“Because of this study, I had to read almost everything from literary criticism from 1968 to 1976, and there is no doubt, this critique is 100% ideological. Poets are praised for the themes of actions, class struggle, for the ‘realistic portrayal of life and the reflection of revolutionary reality,’ and generally, poems that address other themes are either not mentioned at all or are placed on a list of non-representative, even problematic poems.”
“In the end, I think this experimental literary generation was bypassed or not highlighted to the extent it deserved, even though the literary criticism of the time lacked the necessary professionalism to interpret it.”
“Until the end of the 1980s, when young and well-prepared scholars entered this field, such as Skënder Buçpapaj, Rudolf Marku, and others, criticism was carried out by people with limited theoretical, literary, and especially linguistic culture. They lacked the professional ability to analyze texts.”
“This is evident in the reviews, notes, and criticisms published in literary publications, in all critical articles of analytical nature, up to critical studies held in conferences or plenums organized for literature and especially for contemporary criticism, where the texts resemble political speeches.”
“This professional weakness led criticism to be oriented towards an ideological, ideologized approach. For this reason, academic F. Dade expresses that ‘Writers feel praised or criticized only in ideological terms.’”
“The generation of poets from the 1970s, although writing within the frameworks of socialist realism, was far from these clichés that ideological criticism demanded for literature. Therefore, I believe that even this type of Zhdanovist critique bypassed them.”
Short biography of dr. Dr. Mujë Buçpapaj:
“The poet and literary scholar Dr. Mujë Buçpapaj was born in Tropojë, Albania (1962). He graduated in Albanian Language and Literature from the University of Tirana (1986).
In the years 1991-1992, he studied for two years for a film script at the Kinostudio ‘New Albania’, Tirana, today ‘Albafilmi’ (considered postgraduate studies), as well as completed many other qualifications in the field of culture, both in Albania and abroad.
Mujë Buçpapaj is a doctor of literary sciences with a thesis on the survival of Albanian poetry during communist censorship, defended at the Institute of Linguistics and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Albania.
He is one of the founders of political pluralism and press freedom in Albania (1990) and has been a journalist for many years in the most well-known newspapers of Tirana. He is the director of the literary and cultural newspaper ‘Nacional’, the Publishing House ‘Nacional’, and the Institute for National Studies and Projects.
In the years 1991-2005, he was a co-founder and journalist of the first opposition newspaper in the country after 50 years of communist dictatorship, ‘Rilindja Demokratike’, and founder of the newspaper ‘Tribuna Demokratike.’
From 2005 to 2009, he was the director of the International Cultural Center in Tirana, and from 2010 to 2014, Director of the Albanian Office of Copyright, in Tirana.
Since 2014 and onwards, he has been involved in leading ‘Nacional’ publications and the ‘Nacional’ newspaper.
He is currently a lecturer at the University ‘Luarasi’ in Tirana, where he teaches Academic Writing.
Buçpapaj is one of the most prominent exponents of contemporary Albanian poetry with the greatest national and international success, published in several foreign languages and honored with several prestigious international awards from Greece to the USA and one of the most prominent managers of culture in the country. He is a policy maker in culture.
He is an organizer and director of many international conferences held in Tirana on issues of art, literature, and copyright.
He is the author of many study books on literature and those with poetics, as well as hundreds of publicistic writings, reviews, essays, studies including those on regional issues, national security, and art management in market conditions, cultural policies, and national culture strategy.
He is known as one of the strongest public debaters on issues of Albanian transition, regional political developments, as well as democracy in general. He is the founder and director of the newspaper/magazine ‘Nacional’. He lives, works, and creates in Tirana, together with his wife and two daughters.
You can contact him:
Email: bucpapaj@yahoo.com
Mobile: +355 6820 74 316”