For two days, a video showing a recent meeting between Ismail Kadare and Dritëro Agolli has been circulating in the online media. The meeting between the two most vocal writers during the dictatorship took place after Kadare returned from France to settle in Tirana.
In the video published by the Instagram page ‘n’Dritëro’, the two writers talk about their relationships with each other. It is worth remembering that Kadare and Agolli had a great friendship with each other, but then they broke up.
This is because Agolli was the president of the League of Writers and Kadare claimed that he was not protected enough by the association when he was attacked for his works. Even during the conversation, Kadare brings to attention an interview he gave where he was asked about Dritëroi and the contradictions they had with each other.
CONVERSATION
Ismail Kadare: I gave a very important interview to the greatest specialist on the communist world, Stéphane Courtois, and he asked me a question. Mr. Kadare, you had contradictions with Dritëro Agolli and I notice in your interview that you are gentle with him. I explain why I, we were old friends and she always remained…
The main one is her and the main one is that we are both writers. And I explain to him a detail, a subtlety, and I tell him that even when there was a tense situation in Albania, I remembered Agolli, he said to my friend on the stairs. He shook his finger at her and said: “Listen, Helena, there is no one who loves your husband more than me.” And surprisingly, I believed it. Now Stéphane Courtois said, and I believe it. Look how interesting, a stranger.
In Albania it is a bad habit, they only remember the bad things. You find bad things everywhere in human life, bad episodes, irritations, stains. We remember them. We do not remember the good and here is the progress of a nation, good or bad. The evil way is when you remember only the bad and the good way when you try to avoid them and remember only the good. We don’t want the good ones. This is the story, we are writers, we are for something else…we came to this world.
Dritëro Agolli: I think that if you have no objection, you cannot love the other. Without opposition, neither science nor literature was born. If all writers agreed, there would be no writers in the world.
