Elegy for Kosovo: Stories [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

I am a fan of Kadare's and recomend all his books, this one in particular. What beautiful language and powerful image. This is also one of the few books of his that was translated directly from the Albanian, and not from the French, which is important too. We see Kosovo from a completely different angle, as a Serb and an Albanian are thrown together by fate during a medieval battle. The book is full of superb surprises.

Kosovo unraveled before our eyes in the ending years of the twentieth century. In ELEGY FOR KOSOVO, Ismail Kadare takes us back to the Field of the Blackbirds in 1389 to explain when, as the Russian proverb goes, the cloth began unraveling at the edges. There, Albanians, Bosnians, Romanians and Serbs loosely unite under Serbian Prince Lazar to fight the invading Ottoman Emperor, Murad I.

The author presents peninsular residents as quarrelsome types. Things get out of hand only when the newest kid on the block makes the fight ugly. Such happens, from the Albanian perspective, with the invading Slavs in the 5th to 7th centuries and the conquering Muslims in the 14th century.

Known for hospitality to guests, invited or otherwise, the peninsular fighters let the Ottomans get to the battlefield first. The peninsular battle campers then throw a loud party with much drinking and musical bickering while the Ottomans get a good night's sleep. The next day, the peninsular troops lose, and their leaders either hightail it home or become slaughtered captives.

The peninsular history draws on an old oral epic tradition, so minstrels are among the battle's surviving witnesses. They wander north, where only a Great Lady recognizes that the Greek-credited civilization cradling Europe is still among the peninsular fugitives. Accompanying them part of the way, a runaway Turk aspires to three faiths, and just as the three religions fertilize the peninsular killing fields, he too loses his life.

The diverse peninsular peoples never agree to one name for their homeland until the Ottomans call them Balkans. This is the apple of discord left by the Ottomans, along with the buried blood and intestines of their sultan. Kadare suggests that the blood feud can only stop by everyone starting anew. This echoes his autobiographical ALBANIAN SPRING, at the end of which he quotes the first known Albanian language published poem, the 16th century DIRGE, by Lek Matrenga, who asks for mercy since wrongs are everywhere.

Norman Maclean suggests in A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT that we can be so personally involved in facts that we need fiction for perspective. Thus, all of Kadare's novels make the Albanian mysteries familiar. ELEGY FOR KOSOVO in particular prepares readers to go tackle the non-fiction works, available through Amazon Books, which help to understand Balkan turmoil.

The French philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal once suggested that we "imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of man."

It is also the image of Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans painted so vividly by Albanian poet and writer Ismail Kadare in his masterfully imagined "Elegy for Kosovo". Elegy consists of three inter-related stories centered on a famous battle that took place in Kosovo more than 615 years ago. On June 28, 1389 a combined army of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians waged a fierce battle against an Ottoman-Turkish army in Kosovo on the Field of the Blackbirds. The battle was seen as one in which the combined Balkan armies fought on behalf of Christian Europe to halt the surging westward expansion of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman army, led by Sultan Murad I was victorious. The Sultan was killed on the day of the battle and was buried in Kosovo. Ironically, despite their victory the Turks never followed up on this victory and did not return to the region for another 150 years.

The first part of the story takes us from the night before the June 28, 1389 battle and through the battle itself. In the camp of the combined army on the eve of the battle peoples who have long fought each other prepare to fight a common enemy. Old animosities are forgotten temporarily. The soldiers and officers, drinking perhaps too much, demand that their minstrels sing songs to prepare them for battle. The minstrels (who serve as narrators of the first two stories) sing battle songs but they are songs in which the Serbs speak of the horrid Albanians, and the Albanians sing songs of the hated Serbs. When asked why they rely on these old songs the minstrels respond that songs take long to change than alliances.

The second part begins at the end of the battle. The minstrels, along with the others, are devastated by the loss and begin wandering west. The Balkans were considered the `fringe' of Europe by Europeans even them. As they wander, some of the old animosities come back. They face hunger, suspicion, persecution and the occasional act of kindness.

The third part, "The Royal Prayer" is the most moving of the three. As noted, the victorious Sultan Murad I was killed at the battle and buried in Kosovo. This story is narrated in the voice of Murad's spirit, locked in his tomb. We read of his watching as the same battles rage around him, unresolved, for six hundred years. He catches snippets of information from newspapers tossed aside near the tomb. "From these I learn what is going on all around. The surprising names of viziers and countries: NATO, R. Cook, Madeline Albright. The slaughter of children in Drenice." The more things change.

Kadare has said, in commenting on the symbolic importance of the 1389 battle that "on the six hundredth anniversary of the battle in 1989, Milosevic launched the first massacre of Kosovars, and started the explosion of Yugoslavia." Kadare says, in the second elegy, that "[t]he Serb's eyes were filled with the same tragic laments. Both men were prisoners, tied to each other by ancient chains, which they could not and did not want to break." As seen through the eyes of Ismail Kadare the chains that bind the people of the Balkans are old, strong, and not easily broken. The beauty of his prose highlights the tragedy of what he describes.

Some may challenge Kadare's viewpoint or suggest he bears, as an Albanian, the prejudices of his ancestors. As an outsider all I saw was an exposition in beautfully constructed prose on a tragedy whose beginning cannot be traced and whose ending cannot be seen.