Entre le roman de la tragédie d’une nation et l’allégorie théâtrale grotesque. Ismail Kadaré et Matéi Visniec: une lecture parallèle

Abstract

Fine connoisseurs of totalitarian mechanisms and familiar with the experience of censorship and uprooting, Ismail Kadaré and Matei Vișniec are, in different proportions, followers of a type of literature that, often adopting the principles of allegory, illustrates the sunset of a nation crushed by political extremism. While the novels of the Albanian author evoke, in a style that combines macabre rough detail and shades of magical realism, the ruins of a people in the proximity of tragedy since its origins, the Romanian playwright orchestrates in his plays tragicomic metaphors about how the destiny of a country has been seized by the ambitions of an aberrant political system. This article1 2 proposes a parallel close reading exercise of the two authors who, although coming from different geographical spaces, share the same thematic obsession, in an attempt to capture a detailed yet painful picture of a people marked by the terror of a totalitarian history.