Surviving and Subverting the Totalitarian State: A Tribute to Ismail Kadareby Kapka Kassabova

As part of the ceremony honoring Kadare as the 2020 laureate—with participants logging in from dozens of countries around the world— Kadare’s nominating juror, Kapka Kassabova, offered a video tribute from her home in Scotland.

- Kapka Kassabova

It is a pleasure to be broadcasting this tribute to the work of Ismail Kadare from the Scottish High-lands. Though it would have been a greater plea-sure yet to be with you all in autumnal Oklahoma. Ismail Kadare has spoken of literature as an antidote to evil: “Faith in literature and in the creative process brings protection. It generates antibodies that allow you to struggle against state terror.” So I want to start with an antidote of a word that is crucial in this era of mean politics and greedy exploitation of the earth’s resources, when we are all experiencing loss. Generosity. It is the generosity of the Neustadt family that makes it possible for our borderless community of writers, readers, students, and lovers of literature to celebrate great art and the people who make it. Generosity is at the heart of all creative work. To make a true work of art, you have to go for broke, give all you have, and expect nothing in return.

I have been reading Ismail Kadare for twenty years, since I was a university student. And I continue to read and reread him today, when our books are in a sort of background conversation, even if we are not, because that’s the nature of literature—once begun, the conversation doesn’t need the author.

Great literature goes beyond language, of course. Like music, it works by a kind of psychic osmosis. It crosses all boundaries—between the waking and the dreaming mind, between writer and reader, between continents and moments in time. This is why, when I opened my first Kadare book, in the 1990s in New Zealand, it spoke to me instantly, even if it was written around the time of my birth, in a country I knew nothing about. That was