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INTERVIEWER
I’m going to become the devil’s advocate, if I may, and suggest that in [Albanian] society survival itself becomes suspect, as in Stalin’s Russia. . . . In 1970 you wrote a six-hundred-page novel, The Long Winter, which was not based on a myth or a historical event, but on the current political situation in your country. Your book seemed to be an attack on revisionism, and therefore a defence of Hoxha. What reason did you have for writing the book? After all, you could have just gone on writing the sort of covert, allegorical stories you had written.
KADARÉ
From 1967 to 1970 I was under the direct surveillance of the dictator himself. Remember that, to the great misfortune of the intellectuals, Hoxha regarded himself as an author and a poet, and therefore a “friend” of writers. As I was the country’s best known writer, he was interested in me. In such a situation I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter. Albania had become an ally of China, but there were frictions between the two countries, which later led to a break. Like Don Quixote, I thought that my book could accelerate this break with our latest “ally” by encouraging Hoxha. In other words, I thought that literature could accomplish the impossible—change the dictator!
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