The Writer's Star

Before I wrote this book, I read several biographical books on well-known writers, starting from famous books of Stefan Zweig on some writers to books from contemporary writers. I focused especially on books about Franc Kafka, since a comparison has been made between Kadare and Kafka. When someone who has lived under the communist dictatorship looks at the spiritual drama that a writer like Kafka has gone through, one cannot help smiling and think that people like Kafka must have been under much easier conditions. For the Austro-Hungarian society in which Kafka lived, we have the description given by a master like Stefan Zweig in his memoirs, who talks nostalgically about the atmosphere of intellectual freedom which existed there. The Czechoslovakian state of post-WWI, where Kafka lived during the last years of his life, had even more freedom. Kafka wrote about the man who was under the thumb of the totalitarian despotic forces, without having experienced despotism and totalitarianism. What kind of a writer would Franc Kafka had been if he had lived in a communist dictatorship? It’s not hard to answer this question. A Franc Kafka writer would not have existed under such a regime. Had Franc Kafka lived under a dictatorship like that of Enver Hoxha, he would have committed suicide before he became 20 years old. Thus he would not have left behind a literary work which would make him distinguished as a writer. Franc Kafka belonged to the kind of people who are able to describe hell through their imagination, but who are not able to deal with it personally. At this point, Franc Kafka is similar to Dante Alighieri. Kafka and a writer who has experienced the communist dictatorship are two human beings who belong to different planets. It is one thing to sit at the work table and imagine the infernal aspects of life and society in the relations of humans with the state, and a completely different thing to live in a society which is built intentionally based on a project of hell from a regime which has built the hell-state. The first one is the case with Kafka, and the second is that of Kadare. In the second case, it’s not necessary to try hard to imagine hell because hell is your daily doze. And even if you will have some privileges in this infernal society, again you would just be a privileged person in hell.