What’s Left Unsaid: How Ismail Kadare Escaped Suppression but Embraced the Style It Taught Him, by Peter Constantine

Essay Photo by Tyler Quiring / Unsplash Ismail Kadare has a remarkable quality of saying a great deal and with much clarity, but in an elusive, oblique, and allegorical way. Peter Constantine situates Kadare’s work in the long history of the Balkans and in the broader tradition of writers who practice their craft under the constraints of censorship. Anton Chekhov, in his comical short story “The Cross,” which he wrote in 1883, sets the scene in a high-society Moscow salon: a gathering of elegant Muscovites is crowding around a poet who, it seems, has just received a medal for his work. Is it a Stanislav Cross for the valor of his latest book of poetry? Is it an Order of Saint Anna Cross for patriotic stanzas in service of Imperial Russia? The tension mounts until the poet holds up his book and the guests see the large red cross of the czar’s censorship bureau. The poet’s latest book of poems has been banned. The eye of the imperial censor was severe, and some of its censors, such as Ivan Goncharov, were literary celebrities in their own right. All the great authors of the Russian literary canon of the nineteenth century—Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov—had to set pen to paper with great care to avoid the censor’s red cross, and the problems that might follow in its wake. They each developed a personal way of self-censoring, a way of saying things without actually saying them, perhaps crossing the line occasionally, but... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2021-02-18 14:09:58 UTC ]
News tagged with: #break free #northern europe #nineteenth century #publishing houses

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