Mitrush KUTELI
BIOGRAPHY
Mitrush Kuteli (1907-1967), pseudonym of Dhimitër
Pasko, known in Romanian as Dimitrie Pascu, was born
in Pogradec on the banks of Lake Ohrid on 13 September 1907 and
attended a foreign-language school in Greece (a Romanian commercial
college in Thessalonika) and later moved to Bucharest, where
he studied economics and graduated in 1934 with a dissertation
on the banking systems of the Balkans. He collaborated for a
time as a journalist at the Albanian weekly newspaper Shqipëri'
e re (New Albania), edited in Constanza from 1919 to 1936.
For his journalistic activities, he employed the pseudonym Janus,
after the two-headed Roman god able to see into the past and
into the future at the same time. It was also in Bucharest that
Kuteli began publishing the collections of short stories for
which he is best known. His first book, Nete shqipëtare,
Bucharest 1938 (Albanian nights), was a compilation of eight
tales on village life in and around his native Pogradec. Of the
1,200 copies of the first edition, about 1,000 were destroyed
in a fire in Constanza before they could be sold, and the book
only became widely known after the second edition of 1944. It
was in Bucharest, too, that Kuteli arranged for the publication
of Lasgush Poradeci's breathtaking verse collection Ylli i
zemrës (The Star of the heart) in 1937. Romanian culture,
still under the spell of national poet Mihai Eminescu, had left
its impact on Mitrush Kuteli, as it had on Asdreni, Lasgush Poradeci
and the many Albanian writers and intellectuals living there
in the early decades of the twentieth century.
In the autumn of 1942, as the destruction and horror caused
by the Second World War was gradually approaching its peak in
the Balkans and the Soviet Union, Kuteli returned to Albania,
which was itself on the verge of disintegrating into open civil
war. It was during these war years that Kuteli, at his own expense,
was able to publish most of his major works: Ago Jakupi e
të tjera rrëfime, Tirana 1943 (Ago Jakupi and other
tales), a collection of seven tales of peasant life; Kapllan
Aga i Shaban Shpatës. Rrëfime - Rrëfenja,
Tirana 1944 (Kapllan Aga of Shaban Shpata. Tales - Stories),
five short stories written between 1938 and 1944; Këngë
e brithma nga qyteti i djegur, Tirana 1944 (Songs and cries
from a charred city), a collection of folk songs; Shënime
letrare, Tirana 1944 (Literary notes); and Sulm e lotë,
Tirana 1944 (Assault and tears), a collection of modest nationalist
verse written by Kuteli and a fictitious friend named Izedin
Jashar Kutrulija whom Kuteli claimed to have met in Prizren in
May 1943. Also in this period, he edited a collection of the
verse of Fan Noli (1882-1965) entitled Mall e brengë,
Tirana 1943 (Longing and grief), and published a number of works
on the finance and monetary system.
Mitrush Kuteli set the pace for the short story in southern
Albania and managed to attain a higher level of literary sophistication
than most other sentimental prose writers of the period: Milto
Sotir Gurra (1884-1972), Foqion Postoli (1889-1927), Haki Stërmilli
(1895-1953) or Kolë Mirdita (1900-1936). He derived many
elements for his tales from the Tosk oral literature he had heard
as a child, using them to create crystalline motifs of village
life and a lively narrative style. Kuteli's syntax and lexicon
are elaborate and his diction is often compelling. The peasant
themes and the mixture of folksy humour and old-fashioned adventure
made his tales popular with broad sections of the reading public
during the war and thereafter. In some of his short stories one
senses the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Russian prose, of
Nikolay Gogol and Ivan Turgenev, whom the author had read and
particularly enjoyed in his earlier years, and of Romanian prose
writer Mihail Sadoveanu (1880-1961).
At the end of the Second World War Mitrush Kuteli, now an
executive at the Albanian State Bank, was a leading figure of
Albanian letters. On 15 February 1944, together with Vedat Kokona
(1913-1998), Nexhat Hakiu (1917-1978) and Sterjo Spasse (1914-1989),
he founded the fortnightly literary periodical Revista letrare
(Literary review), which had a significant impact on Albanian
culture during its short life. He was also a founding member
of the Albanian Writers' Union, which was set up under the direction
of Sejfulla Malëshova (1901-1971) on 7 October 1945, and
a member of the editorial board of Albania's first post-war literary
journal Bota e re (New world).
Kuteli managed to survive the transition of political power
in Albania until the real terror began in 1947. During a purge
which ensued after the Albanian Communist Party had come under
Yugoslav domination, he unwisely disapproved of the proposed
customs and monetary union between Albania and Yugoslavia. As
a member of an official delegation to Yugoslavia, received among
others by writer Ivo Andri? (1892-1975), he is also said to have
expressed a critical attitude to the Serb re-occupation of Kosova,
a stance reflected earlier in his Poem kosovar (Kosovar poem),
published in 1944. Upon his return to Albania, he was arrested
and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
For Kuteli, as for most writers of the late forties, life
had become a nightmare. He survived the first two years of his
prison sentence (April 1947 to April 1949) in a labour camp near
Korça where inmates were put to work draining the infamous
mosquito-infested swamp of Maliq. Working and living conditions
for the prisoners were unimaginably harsh, and Kuteli, amidst
such horror, attempted suicide. But with the elimination of Yugoslav
influence in Albanian party politics, the open persecution of
Kuteli subsided and he was released. He returned to Tirana and
was allowed, like Lasgush Poradeci and a number of other suspicious
intellectuals, to work as a literary translator for the state-owned
Naim Frashëri publishing company.
Zhdanovism, which had penetrated and taken thorough control
of what was left of Albanian literature in the fifties, made
it expedient at the time to translate Russian literature to serve
as a model for the introduction of socialist realism in Albania.
Kuteli willingly acquiesced by producing noted translations of
recognized Soviet authors such as Maksim Gorky, Aleksey Tolstoy,
Konstantin Paustovsky, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeyev and Nikolay
Ostrovsky. Aside from these writers recommended by Soviet cultural
and political advisors, Kuteli also managed to publish some translations
of his favourite Russian authors of the nineteenth century: Nikolay
Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Krylov, and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin.
In addition to these many translations from Russian, and others
from Romanian (Mihai Eminescu, Mihail Sadoveanu), Spanish (Pablo
Neruda), and French (André Maurois, Paul Eluard), etc.,
Kuteli is remembered in particular for his prose adaptation of
a collection of Albanian oral verse, including the heroic cycle
of Mujo and Halili, in Tregime të moçme shqiptare,
Tirana 1965 (Early Albanian tales). He was also able to publish
some verse and tales for children, the safest pastime for Eastern
European writers in the Stalinist period. A novel on an Illyrian
theme remained unfinished. Mitrush Kuteli died of a heart attack
in Tirana on 4 May 1967, bereft of the honour and recognition
due to the man who had made the short story a popular genre in
Albania and who, had politics not interfered, might otherwise
have been the leading prose writer of the fifties. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Classical
Authors (19th - early 20th centuries)
