Writing in the independence period (early 20th cent. to 1944)

The first decade of independence from the proclamation in Vlora in 1912 to the rise of dictator Ahmet Zogu in the early twenties was marked by extreme political turmoil, bloodshed and starvation in Albania. The formal political goal of the nationalist movement, i.e. independence, had been achieved, and Albanian had become the official language of the country, but the continuing political chaos gave writers and intellectuals within the country little time to reflect on new dimensions for a national culture. The Rilindja culture of romantic nationalism, deeply ingrained in Albanian literature, continued to make its influence felt throughout the independence period.

The most influential of all Albanian writers and publishers of the turn of the century was most certainly Faik bey Konitza (1875-1942), also spelt Konica. He was born in April 1875 in the now Greek village of Konitsa in the Pindus mountains, not far from the present Albanian border. After elementary schooling in Turkish in his native village, he studied, though from a Muslim family, at the Jesuit Saverian College in Shkodra which offered him not only some instruction in Albanian but also an initial contact with central European culture and Western ideas. From there, he continued his schooling at the French-language Imperial Galata secondary school in Constantinople. In 1890, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to study in France where he spent the next seven years. He finished his studies at Harvard University in the United States, although little is known about this period of his life. As a result of his highly varied educational background, he was able to speak and write Albanian, Italian, French, German, English and Turkish. In 1897 Konitza moved to Brussels, where at the age of twenty-two he founded the periodical Albania, which was soon to become the most important organ of the Albanian press at the turn of the century. He moved to London in 1902 and continued to publish the journal there until 1909. In London he made friends with French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire
(1880-1918) who stayed with him in 1903 and 1904.

Faik Konitza unfortunately wrote little in the way of literature per se, but as a stylist, critic, publicist and political figure he had a tremendous impact on Albanian writing and culture at the turn of the century. His periodical Albania, published in French and Albanian, not only helped make Albanian culture and the Albanian cause known in Europe, but also set the pace for literary prose in Tosk dialect. It is widely considered to be the most significant Albanian periodical to have existed up to the Second World War. Konitza valued a free exchange of ideas and he placed the columns of Albania at the disposal of his rivals whom he countered with caustic wit. Faik Konitza’s writings were nonetheless fragmentary and his actual literary production was minimal, a fact lamented by many of his compatriots during his lifetime. Aside from his numerous editorials and articles on politics, language, literature and history which appeared for the most part in Albania e vogël (Little Albania), a fortnightly supplement to his periodical Albania, that was published alternatively in Tosk and Gheg dialect from 1899 to 1903, Konitza did write what could be regarded as a novel, although he never completed it. This is the satirical Dr. Gjëlpëra zbulon rënjët e dramës së Mamurrasit (Dr Needle discovers the roots of the Mamurrasi drama). In his writing, Konitza attacked the often banal nationalist outpourings on the lofty virtues of the Albanian people and called for a more realistic and critical stance towards his nation with all its failings. The biting sarcasm with which he expressed his intransigence towards the naivity of his compatriots and towards the many sacred cows of Albanian culture and history let a breeze of fresh air into the aula of Albanian letters.

Fan Noli (1882-1965), also known as Theophan Stylian Noli, was not only an outstanding leader of the Albanian-American community, but also a pre-eminent and multi-talented figure of Albanian literature, culture, religious life and politics. Noli was born in the village of Ibrik Tepe (Alb. Qyteza), south of Edirne/Adrianopole in European Turkey on 6 January 1882.

In April 1906, he set off for the New World and arrived in New York. In this period, Orthodox Albanians in America were growing increasingly impatient with Greek control of the church. Tension reached its climax in 1907 when a Greek Orthodox priest refused to officiate at the burial of an Albanian in Hudson, Massachusetts, on the grounds that, as a nationalist, the deceased was automatically excommunicated. Noli saw his calling and convoked a meeting of Orthodox Albanians from throughout New England at which delegates resolved to set up an autocephalic, i.e. autonomous, Albanian Orthodox Church with Noli as its first clergyman. On 9 February 1908 at the age of twenty-six, Fan Noli was made a deacon in Brooklyn and on 8 March 1908 Platon, the Russian Orthodox Archbishop of New York, ordained him as an Orthodox priest. A mere two weeks later, on 22 March 1908, the young Noli proudly celebrated the liturgy in Albanian for the first time at the Knights of Honor Hall in Boston. This act constituted the first step towards the official organization and recognition of an Albanian Autocephalic Orthodox Church. In Albania, on 21 November 1923, Noli was consecrated Bishop of Korça and Metropolitan of Durrës. He was now both head of the Orthodox Church in Albania and leader of a liberal political party, the main opposition to the conservative forces of Ahmet Zogu (1895-1961), who were supported primarily by the feudal landowners and the middle class. On 17 July 1924, Fan Noli was officially proclaimed prime minister and shortly afterwards Regent of Albania. For six months, he led a democratic government which tried desperately to cope with the catastrophic economic and political problems facing the young Albanian state. Noli subsequently spent several years in exile in northern Europe, primarily in Germany and Austria. Back in Boston, his great dream of an Albanian national church was fulfilled on 12 April 1937 when the Patriarch of Constantinople officially recognized the Albanian Autocephalic Orthodox Church. Politics and religion were not the only fields in which Fan Noli made a name for himself. He was also a dramatist, poet, historian, musicologist and in particular an excellent translator who made a significant contribution to the development of the Albanian literary language. He has not been forgotten as a poet though his powerful declamatory verse is far from prolific. It was collected in a volume with the simple title Albumi,Boston 1948 (The album), which he published on the occasion of his forty years of residence in the United States.

Fan Noli’s main contribution to Albanian literature was as a stylist, as seen especially in his translations. Together with Faik bey Konitza, Noli may indeed be regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the Tosk dialect of the Albanian language. Particularly impressive are Noli’s translations of Shakespeare. His Othello (Otello) was printed in 1916 and his equally eloquent translations of Macbeth (Makbethi), Hamlet (Hamleti) and Julius Caesar (Jul Qesari) were all published in Brussels in 1926.

It is a pity that Fan Noli and Faik Konitza, these two greatest stylists of the modern Albanian language, who were both residents not of Albania but of the United States, should have devoted so little of their energies to creative literature. But such were the times. For historical and political reasons, the cult of nationalism has always had priority among the Albanians over the cult of the sublime. Though he wrote comparatively little in the way of literature per se, Fan Noli remains nonetheless a literary giant. He was instrumental in helping the Albanian language reach its full literary and creative potential. A modern literary language had been created, a language as yet in search of its literature.

By far the greatest and most influential figure of Albanian literature in the first half of the twentieth century was the Franciscan pater Gjergj Fishta (1871-1940) who more than any other writer gave artistic expression to the searching soul of the now sovereign Albanian nation. Lauded and celebrated up until the Second World War as the ‘national poet of Albania’ and the
‘Albanian Homer,’ Fishta was to fall into sudden oblivion when the communists took power in November 1944. The very mention of his name became taboo for forty-six years. In August 1919, Gjergj Fishta served as secretary-general of the Albanian delegation attending the Paris Peace Conference. In 1921, he represented Shkodra in the Albanian parliament and was chosen in August of that year as vice-president of this assembly. His talent as an orator served him well in his functions both as a political figure and as a man of the cloth. In later years, he attended Balkan conferences in Athens (1930), Sofia (1931) and Bucharest (1932) before withdrawing from public life to devote his remaining years to the Franciscan order and to his writing. From 1935 to 1938 he held the office of provincial of the Albanian Franciscans. These most fruitful years of his life were spent in the quiet seclusion of the Franciscan monastery of Gjuhadoll in Shkodra with its cloister, church and rose garden where Fishta would sit in the shade and reflect on his verse.

Although Gjergj Fishta is the author of a total of thirty-seven literary publications, his name is indelibly linked to one great work, indeed to one of the most astounding creations in all the history of Albanian literature, Lahuta e malcís, Shkodra 1937 (The highland lute). ‘The highland lute’ is a 15,613-line historical verse epic focussing on the Albanian struggle for autonomy and independence. It constitutes a panorama of northern Albanian history from 1862 to 1913. This literary masterpiece was composed primarily between 1902 and 1909, though it was refined and amended by its author over a thirty year period. It constitutes the first Albanianlanguage contribution to world literature. In 1902 Fishta had been sent to a little village to replace the local parish priest for a time. There he met and befriended the aged peasant Marash Uci (1810-1914) of Hoti, whom he was
later to immortalize in verse. In their evenings together, Marash Uci told the young priest of the heroic battles between the Albanian highlanders and the Montenegrins, in particular of the famed battle at the Rrzhanica Bridge in which Marash Uci had taken part himself. The first parts of‘The highland lute,’ subtitled ‘At the Rrzhanica bridge,’ were published in Zadar in 1905 and
1907, with subsequent and enlarged editions appearing in 1912, 1923, 1931 and 1933. The definitive edition of the work in thirty cantos was presented in Shkodra in 1937 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the declaration of Albanian independence.

Despite the success of ‘The highland lute’ and the preeminence of its author, this and all other works by Gjergj Fishta were banned after the Second World War when the communists came to power. The epic was, however, republished in Rome 1958, Ljubljana 1990 and Rome 1991, and exists in German and Italian translations. Gjergj Fishta chose as his subject matter what he knew best: the heroic culture of his native northern Albanian mountains. It was his intention with this epic, an unprecedented achievement in Albanian letters, to present the lives of the northern Albanian tribes and of his people in general in a heroic setting.
In its historical dimensions, ‘The highland lute’ begins with border skirmishes between the Hoti and Gruda tribes and their equally fierce Montenegrin neighbours in 1862. The core of the work (cantos 6-25) is devoted to the events of 1878-1880, i.e. the Congress of Berlin which granted Albanian borderland to Montenegro, and the resultant creation of the League of Prizren
to defend Albanian interests. Subsequent cantos cover the Revolution of the Young Turks which initially gave Albanian nationalists some hope of autonomy, and the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 which led to the declaration of Albanian independence. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Gjergj Fishta was universally recognized as the ‘national poet.’ Austrian Albanologist Maximilian Lambertz described him as “the most ingenious poet Albania has ever produced” and Gabriele D’Annunzio called him “the great poet of the glorious people of Albania.” For others he was the “Albanian Homer.”

After the war, Fishta was nonetheless attacked and denigrated perhaps more than any other pre-war writer, and fell into prompt oblivion. The national poet became an anathema. The official Tirana ‘History of Albanian Literature’ of 1983, which carried the blessing of the Albanian Party of Labour, restricted its treatment of Fishta to an absolute minimum. The reason for Fishta’s fall from grace after the ‘liberation’ in 1944 is to be sought in the origins of the Albanian Communist Party. In July 1946, Albania and Yugoslavia signed a Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance and a number of other agreements which
gave Yugoslavia effective control over all Albanian affairs, including the field of culture. Serbo- Croatian was introduced as a compulsory subject in all Albanian high schools and by the spring of 1948, plans were even under way for a merger of the two countries. It is no doubt the alleged anti-Slavic sentiments expressed in ‘The highland lute’ which caused the work and its author to be proscribed by the Yugoslav authorities, even though Fishta was educated in Bosnia and inspired by Serbian and Croatian literature. In fact, it is just as ridiculous to describe ‘The highland lute’ as anti-Slavic as it would be to describe El Cid and the Chanson de Roland as anti- Arab, but such were the times. Yet despite four decades of unrelenting Party harping and propaganda reducing Fishta to a ‘clerical and fascist poet,’ the people of northern Albania, and in particular the inhabitants of his native Shkodra, did not forget him. After almost half a century, Gjergj Fishta was commemorated openly for the first time on 5 January 1991 in Shkodra. During the first public recital of Fishta’s works in Albania in forty-five years, the actor at one point hesitated in his lines and was immediately and spontaneously assisted by members of the audience - who still knew many parts of ‘The highland lute’ by heart.

Gjergj Fishta and the Scutarine school represented the mainstream of Albanian literature up until the Second World War - creative, innovative and yet traditionalist. Fishta had raised the little Balkan country to the level of literary sophistication which the more advanced nations of Europe had known in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century.
This in itself was quite a significant step forward in view of Albania’s tardy consolidation as a nation and its sluggish political and cultural development. This period of Albanian literature was to some extent, however, now losing touch with the realities of the independent Albanian state of the 1930s. The road to modernity, and thus to Europe, was to be taken by two poets of a new
generation, two outsiders who broke with the traditions of mainstream literature and gave Albanian culture its place in a contemporary Europe: the messianic Migjeni and the pantheistic Lasgush Poradeci.

Migjeni (1911-1938) was born in Shkodra and died in Italy at the age of twenty-six, a tragic loss for modern Albanian letters. He made a promising start as a prose writer, as the author of about twenty-four short prose sketches which he published in periodicals for the most part between the spring of 1933 and the spring of 1938. Ranging from one to five pages in length,
these pieces are too short to constitute tales or short stories. It is thus far more as a poet that Migjeni made his mark on Albanian literature and culture, though he did so posthumously. He possessed all the prerequisites for being a great poet. He had an inquisitive mind, a depressive pessimistic nature and a repressed sexuality. Though his verse production was no more voluminous than his prose, his success in the field of poetry was no less than spectacular in Albania at the time. Migjeni’s only volume of verse, Vargjet e lira, Tirana 1944 (Free verse), was composed over a three-year period from 1933 to 1935. The main theme of ‘Free verse,’ as with Migjeni’s prose, is misery and suffering. It is a poetry of acute social awareness and despair. Previous
generations of poets had sung the beauties of the Albanian mountains and the sacred traditions of the nation, whereas Migjeni now opened his eyes to the harsh realities of life, to the appalling level of misery, disease and poverty which he discovered all around him. He was a poet of desperation who saw no way out, who cherished no hope that anything but death could put an
end to suffering. Migjeni was a precursor of socialist verse or rather, in fact, the zenith of genuine socialist verse in Albanian letters, long before the so-called ‘liberation’ and socialist period from 1944 to 1990. Migjeni was, nonetheless, not a socialist or revolutionary poet in the political sense, despite the indignation and the occasional clenched fist he shows us. For this, he
lacked the optimism as well as any adherence to political commitment and activity.

The road to modernity in Albanian literature was also taken by a poet of a very different nature, another outsider who, half a century later, is now regarded by many as the greatest Albanian poet of the twentieth century: Lasgush Poradeci (1899-1987). He is the author of two extraordinary collections of poetry. Vallja e yjve (The dance of the stars) and Ylli i zemrës (The star of the heart), published in Romania in 1933 and 1937 respectively, are indeed just as much a revolution in Albanian verse as was Migjeni’s Vargjet e lira (Free verse). Primordial to the work of Lasgush Poradeci are the waters of Lake Ohrid on the Albanian-Macedonian border. It was in the town of Pogradec that he spent his youth, not far from where, at the foot of the ‘Mal i Thatë’ (Dry Mountain), the River Drin takes its source, and but a few kilometers from the famed mediaeval monastery of St Naum’s just over the border. And there in retirement, he also spent his last summers in a run-down little house of Balkan architecture, tending his garden and strolling along the lake with his dog. Lake Ohrid never ceased to fascinate and enchant him. He studied its hues, the reflection of light both upon its waves and in the depths of its sparkling waters, and observed the surrounding mountains cast their shadows over it. Apart from the two main poetry collections of the thirties, Poradeci published some verse in literary journals of the late thirties and forties, in particular in Branko Merxhani’s cultural monthly Përpjekja shqiptare (The Albanian endeavour). With the rise of Stalinism, however, the venerable quill of Lasgushi, as he was to be affectionately known to posterity, began to run dry. Though secretly lauded by many a critic and connoisseur, this romantic aesthete, devoid of any
redeeming ideological values, never enjoyed the approbation of post-war Marxist dogmatists. Poradeci’s subjects, his structures and language were very much attuned to southern Albanian oral literature, in particular to Tosk folk verse from which he drew a good deal of his inspiration. Mitrush Kuteli (1907-1967), who edited his Ylli i zemrës, called him “the only Albanian poet to think, speak and write only in Albanian.” Lasgush Poradeci is at the same time an artist of truly European stature. He combined the verbal sensuousness of Charles Baudelaire, the aesthetic philosophy of form and the discerning elegance of Stefan George, the humanity and philosophy of Naim Frashëri, and the cosmic immortality of his Romanian master, Mihai Eminescu. Scholar Eqrem Çabej (1908-1980) said of him that he was the “poet whom Albania would one day bequeath to the world,” and although Poradeci’s verse does not lend itself particularly to translation, time may prove Çabej right.

For almost a quarter of a century after the declaration of political independence on 28 November 1912, Albanian writers and intellectuals continued to draw their inspiration from the ideas and ideals of the nineteenth-century Rilindja movement. By the thirties, however, Albanian culture had entered a new phase. An influx of new ideas from abroad and a higher level of formal education among intellectuals flung open the gates to cultural advancement. For a decade, Albanian literature and culture flourished as never before, initially in Shkodra and later in Tirana and throughout the country. Within the space of five years in the mid-thirties, an advance in quality was made in literature. In poetry, Lasgush Poradeci published his breathtaking lyric collections Vallja e yjve 1933 (The dance of the stars) and Ylli i zemrës 1937 (The star of the heart); the consumptive Migjeni managed to send his slender Vargjet e lira 1936 (Free verse) to press before it was banned and before death put an end to his brief literary career; and Gjergj Fishta came out with the definitive version of his incomparable epic Lahuta e malcís 1937 (The highland lute), in thirty cantos. Albanian prose witnessed the publication of the nihilist novel Nga jeta në jetë - Pse!? 1935 (From life to life - Why!?), by Sterjo Spasse (1918-1989); of Ernest Koliqi’s (1903- 1975) second collection of short stories, Tregtar flamujsh 1935 (Flag merchant); of the muchread novel of social criticism Sikur t’isha djalë 1936 (If I were a boy) by Haki Stërmilli (1895- 1953); and of Mitrush Kuteli’s first volume of tales Nete shqipëtare 1938 (Albanian nights). Migjeni, too, published twenty-four of his trenchant prose sketches in periodicals within the five years from 1933 to 1938 and completed the manuscript of his unpublished Novelat e qytetit të veriut 1936 (Tales of a northern city). In drama, Etëhem Haxhiademi (1902-1965) captivated the discerning public with his classical tragedies which, though not revolutionary in conception or content, evinced a linguistic refinement previously unknown to the Albanian stage. Intellectual life in the mid-thirties and early forties had reached unprecedented heights, a zenith in Albanian written culture. A modern literature had been created in Albania and the nation had finally come of age. It was a brief blossoming in the shadow of the apocalypse to come, which would snuff out all genuine literary production for about twenty years.

Courtesy of Albanologist Dr.Robert Elsie from his Article
Albanian literature: an overview of its history and development.
in: Österreichische Osthefte, Vienna, 45, 1-2 (2003), p. 243-276.
Source: http://www.elsie.de/pdf/articles/A2003AlbLitOsthefte.pdf