On the picture are the close friends the Nobel Prize Nominee ISMAIL KADARE and the dictator ENVER HOXHA.
Here is Kadare enthusiastic and euphoric vision on social realism written in 1977, where hw support dictatorship:
THE LITERATURE OF SOCIALIST REALISM IS DEVELOPING IN STRUGGLE AGAINST THE BOURGEOIS AND REVISIONIST PRESSURE
by ISMAIL KADARE
The fight against the bourgeois and revisionist pressure is complete and effective when it becomes the concern of all, when all take part in it - the specialists of critical opinion and poets, artists who take up the theme of the blockade and those who hammer out the major themes of socialism, novelists and playwrights who engage in reflecting key moments of history and those who depict contemporary problems, etc.
AS IS KNOWN, THE PEOPLE'S SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA FINDS ITSELF IN A TWOFOLD ENCIRCLEMENT. THIS ENCIRCLEMENT EXTENDS TO ALL SPHERES, INCLUDING THAT OF CULTURE; CONSEQUENTLY, THE STRUGGLE WHICH THE ALBANIAN WRITERS AND ARTISTS ARE WAGING AGAINST ITS PRESSURE IS PART AND PARCEL OF THE OVERALL STRUGGLE WAGED BY THE ALBANIAN PEOPLE, LED BY THE PARTY OF LABOUR OF ALBANIA, TO SMASH THE ENCIRCLEMENT.
History has known many conflicts among different literary schools, trends and tendencies. But the struggle of realist socialist art against revisionist bourgeois art is not of the same nature. This is a struggle of a new type, part of the class struggle, a struggle of the revolution against counter-revolution, a life-and-death struggle of healthy art against the sick art of the bourgeoisie and revisionism, which stinks of death and decay.
The relentless struggle against bourgeois and revisionist pressure is an indispensable dimension of literature and the arts in the socialist countries. The very development of realist socialist art presupposes this struggle, while the cessation of this struggle would put its very existence in jeopardy. This struggle is one of the forms of its existence. There is no way of having a realist socialist art without engaging in this struggle. There is no way your work can be close to the people, outside this struggle.
The 7th Congress of the PLA re-emphasized once again the necessity and importance of this clash. It has been and should become even more a permanent action of the revolutionary writers and artists, a great school for them. It has long become a part of the great process of the artists' acquaintance with life and must become even more thoroughly a part of it. Only by being considered as such, will it occupy its proper place in our life and our works.
The struggle against the bourgeois and revisionist pressure, as integral part of class struggle, is continuous and does not have the character of intermittent campaigns. The history of the development of realist socialist literature has been, among other things, also the history of its battle with counter-revolutionary literature. And this pressure has constantly increased, particularly in recent years.
No relaxation of this pressure can be expected in the coming years; on the contrary, it will become even stronger and more refined.
Hence, our tasks in the struggle to face up to this pressure are constantly increasing, besoming ever more serious and important.
In his speech of December 20th, 1974, Comrade Enver Hoxha points out that never before has there been imperialist propaganda, of such variety and breadth, for the degeneration of people and society in general, as in our days. Whole regiments of writers are included in this army of the world counter-revolution. Night and day, its kitchen is concocting all sorts of poisonous dishes for the degradation of man. Over the recent decades, the revisionist cuisine, coarser in some respects, but more refined in others, has been added to the old bourgeois cuisine. Their foul alliance, their supplementing each other in order to make the encirclement of the progressive forces more complete, have rendered them even more dangerous.
The present-day bourgeois and revisionist literature, expressing overall the spiritual state of the bourgeoisie and revisionism, is pervaded through and through by an unhealthy spirit. Regardless of all the powder and paint it uses, its face has the pallor of death. It preaches that all is lost because it, itself, is lost, together with the base that has given it birth; it preaches pessimism because it has no future; it preaches disintegration, the absurd, the loss of logic, because its very existence is outdated and incompatible with the logic of development of the whole of mankind. Like those microbes that fear the sun, this literature is terrified of the light, of health, clarity, life. It is afraid of the great art of the revolution, socialist realism, it is afraid of the majestic popular creativeness of all peoples of the world, it is even afraid of great classics of the past. Thus, though it may seem at first sight as if this literature and art have established their tyranny over the whole of the globe, in reality they are isolated and alone. Their domination is illusory, for Marxism-Leninism teaches us that there is no force capable of halting the development of history. Therefore, the struggle against bourgeois and revisionist art is a struggle that can and certainly will be won. Revolutionary art has already scored important victories in this struggle, and it will score still more important ones in the coming years.
Sensing this great danger themselves, both the bourgeoisie and revisionism try, time after time, to re-organize the structure of their literary and artistic forces. They are in constant movement: one after the other, the trends are being replaced. Those which are exposed more quickly are consigned to oblivion in order to bring out new trends which, also, are withdrawn from the stage as soon as they begin to fade. This recurring stratagem, which, among the naive, gives rise to the illusion of development, is nothing but running round and round in a circle, without the slightest trace of development, but only repetition and stagnation.
In reality, the decadent bourgeois art and the revisionist art which runs along behind it use an obsolete array of refurbished tricks, on which they change only the external wrappings. The deformation of reality, dehumanization, anti-ideologism, apoliticism, hermetism, the disintegration of form, de-heroization, the elimination of commitment, and other trends like these are the favourite weapons of the modern bourgeoisie, selected with great care. They have been chosen from the arsenal of the oldest decadent bourgeois art, from the decadence of the Middle Ages, or from that of barbarism.
If we examine, for example, certain aspects of literature and the art of the present super-states, we shall find that they are repeated at various stages of history. The attempt to create a super-art has been made by all the great aggressor states of the past. The militarists of ancient
Despite the great support of the bureaucratic machine of the super-state, these super-cultures have always failed. They have contributed nothing to world culture, which has been and always will be created by the peoples, whether small or great, but never by the superpowers.
They are trying to reduce the national character of literature into vulgar folklorism, something to excite the curiosity of tourists. What the American imperialists have done to the national character of the cultures of the Indian peoples of the two
The effort to create some sort of superstate art is one of the clearest expressions of the present-day bourgeois and revisionist decadence. Its pseudo-monumentalism is reminiscent of the pseudo-monumentalism of the times of revanchism in
Hence, the so-called flowering of bourgeois and revisionist art conceals only a profound stagnation, its external gigantomania hides only an internal dwarfism, whereas its pseudo-modern veneer covers only an endless obsolescence. Making a profound Marxist-Leninist analysis of the conservative essence of modern revisionism and the bourgeoisie, Comrade Enver Hoxha says that, »those who call us conservative are the conservatives«. And this is in the logic of things. Since they are trying to preserve or to re-establish an obsolete order in the world, regardless of what they call themselves, in essence they remain conservatives and ultra-conservatives. The same may be said of their art, too. It is not fay chance that, in their spirit, in their content, even in their style and intonation, many of the works of the present-day decadent bourgeois literature are reminiscent of the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, the Talmud and other tattered remnants of the Dark Ages. And this is one of the most coveted experiences that the revisionist art has borrowed from the decadent art. The Revelation of St John, or the Apocalypse, has become a favourite source of motifs for the revisionist pacifists. And, for them, the Apocalypse is the revolution and the revolutionary struggle.
The air of catastrophe, which is so prevalent in American and West European books and, particularly, films, is nothing but a variant of the end of the world, which all the religions of the world have preached to discourage the mobilization of revolutionary and progressive people. The bourgeois and the revisionists have drawn and continue to draw many things from the poisoned wells of religion. In this respect, there is the smell of decay about their art.
The co-existence of liberalism with conservatism is a phenomenon often encountered amongst decadent and reactionary men of letters. The ambivalence of such fiercely reactionary writers as Fishta, Koliqi, and Konica, who combined in themselves the most extreme liberalism with the most extreme conservatism, is a clear example of this. It is not by chance that Konica, this bey in the service of the anachronistic Albanian monarchy, had close connections with the decadent modernist circles of
The 7th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania heavily underlined the vital importance, for all the arts, the continuation and advancement of the great militant action of all the revolutionary writers and artists, of their daily and hourly battle with the bourgeois and revisionist pressure. This is a complicated struggle which can be successful only if it is complete and waged in all directions.
The sphere of criticism, of theoretical and philosophical literary thinking, is an important field in which this struggle has been developed and should be developed further. Not only the critics and scholars, but all the artists are duty bound to assist in the timely detection and prevention of alien influences, and to render them harmless, whether they come from the bourgeoisie or the revisionists, whether they are of the nature of a Garaudy or Fischer, a Sholokhov or Solzhenitsyn.
Another sphere of which this struggle can be waged successfully and directly is that part of literary creativeness which deals with the reflection of the struggle against the bourgeois and revisionist blockade. Parallel with the struggle against the world bourgeoisie and revisionism, in these works the struggle is waged against their ideology, thinking and art, which are an integral part of the two-fold counter-revolutionary encirclement.
The strengthening of the proletarian partisanship and the national and popular character of literature is a heavy blow to the bourgeois and revisionist pressure. The bourgeoisie and revisionism well know how difficult it is for them to infiltrate such a literature, therefore they direct their attacks, first of all, against its proletarian partisanship and its national character. However, against the background of their slanders, proletarian partisanship and the national character are highlighted even more brilliantly.
The linking of the writers with the people, with their life, their worries, their concerns, and their feelings, along with their thorough knowledge of life, their »reading in the open book of life«, as comrade Enver Hoxha puts it in his speech of December 20, 1974, all those things constitute another factor in the struggle against reaction. The active life, the broad sweep of the people, are an unsuitable environment for the bourgeois and revisionist microbe. Such germs do not thrive amongst the people and in the thick of life, for they develop and multiply in a closed environment, outside life, apart from the people, in the dark corners of subjectivism and ego-centrlsm. Therefore, the more our creative artists live in a climate pervaded by the popular spirit, the more immune with they be to the evil influence of the old world.
The treatment of great themes, which is one of the special recommendations of the 7th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania, is also is a factor in the struggle and resistence against the pressure. As was said above, a characteristic feature of bourgeois and revisionist art is the petty theme with the trappings of gigantomania. The true, socialist realist art is, in the first place, the art of great themes. It is up to the writers of socialist realism to continue the magnificent traditions of the art of Mayakovsky, Gorky, or Brecht, abandoned by the revisionists. The encyclopedia of communism will not be written and can never be written either by the revisionists or the emigrees, whether they live in
Another factor of no lesser importance in this struggle is the effort to raise the artistic level of revolutionary literature and art, their seriousness and solidity. Compared with them, the extravagances and clownish tricks of bourgeois and revisionist literature and art will look even more ridiculous.
In dealing with the problems related to our opposition to the pressure of reactionary bourgeois and revisionist literature and art, we mentioned these two pressures together, for that is what they are, component parts of one front, component parts of the two-fold bourgeois and revisionist encirclement. But while considering them as such in general, we are aware that bourgeois art and revisionist art have their own differences and contradictions; they are differences and contradictions that stem from the contradictions between the group of bourgeois states with the
In his report to the 7th Congress of the PLA, Comrade Enver Hoxha says: »Our Party upholds the thesis that both when the two superpowers work together and when they quarrel, it is others that pay the bill. The collaboration and rivalry between the superpowers represent the two sides of the one contradictory reality .... They pose the same threat ... — therefore one must never rely on one imperialism to fight or to escape from the other«.
Applying this profoundly Marxist-Leninist thesis to our sphere of literature and art, we can say that the quarrels or rapprochements between the bourgeois and revisionist writers are just the continuation of the quarrels and rapprochements of their patrons. Hence you cannot rely on the arguments of the one art to combat or expose the other. To us writers of socialist realism, the revisionist literary lights, whether official writers in their countries or dissidents fled to the West, are the two sides of the same coin, for both of them have betrayed the art of the revolution for the art of the counter-revolution. Therefore, they are equally alien and dangerous to communism.
Although they have mobilized entire regiments of men of letters and artists, both these forms of bourgeois and revisionist art are essentially weak, because they have no future. Therefore, in our fight against them, attack and not just defence, should characterize us.
