ABSTRACT
In Ismail Kadare's terms, literature and dictatorship are completely opposed to each other as mutually exclusive realms of human being. Dictatorship and literature coexist in only one way: they devour each other day and night. Many twentieth-century European intellectuals were seduced by the promises of modernization in its various forms. Those honest enough to confront reality rather than dogma faced a long journey of engagement and confrontation with the disappointments and betrayals of the modernizing project. In the European imagination since William Shakespeare, Albania has been the place of wild barbaric customs and romantic adventures. The Albanian memoirs of the British agents of the Second World War, Julian Amery and David Smiley, read more like nineteenth-century romance than records of modern warfare. With an eye on the European Union in the 2006 essay, 'The European Identity of the Albanians', Kadare reiterated the need for Albania to be reincluded into Europe.
