Sterjo SPASSE
BIOGRAPHY
Sterjo Spasse (1914-1989) is a novelist and short story writer
of (Slav) Macedonian origin from Lake Prespa. It was while teaching
in the little village of Derviçan south of Gjirokastra
that the eighteen-year-old Spasse began writing his first novel,
and his masterpiece, Nga jeta në jetë - Pse!?,
Korça 1935 (From life to life - Why!?), usually referred
to for short as Pse!? (Why!?). Like Haki Stërmilli’s
Sikur t’isha djalë (If I were a boy), Pse!?
is written in the form of a diary and focusses on the tragic
dilemma of a young intellectual in a backward rural society.
Gjon Zaveri is an intelligent young man who, after his studies,
returns to his native village. His parents, intent on adhering
to custom and upholding tradition, insist that he marry the girl
they have chosen for him, the village maiden Afërdita. Gjon
knows that such a marriage would be a disastrous mistake, but
after much soul-searching and anguish, he reluctantly concedes
to the alliance, thus submitting to tradition and patriarchal
society, and bringing about his own downfall. Pse!? is
a nihilistic work, a roman i mohimit (novel of denial).
Its pessimistic hero Gjon Zaveri suffers from all the Weltschmerz
of Goethe’s young Werther, a hero with whom he feels
great affinity. In the end, resigned to his fate, Gjon commits
suicide by throwing himself into the lake. Two weeks later, a
letter of farewell is found, with which the novel concludes.
Post-war Marxist critics were unable to deal with Pse,
though it may be considered one of the great Albanian novels
of the early twentieth century. The Schopenhauerian pessimism
and the Weltschmerz conflicted too sharply with the positive
hero demanded by socialist realism and they dismissed the work
simply as the product of the suffering and oppression of the
working masses in pre-liberation, feudal-bourgeois society. It
was referred to publicly only in order to show what progress
Spasse had made with his subsequent novels of socialist realism.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, exactly the opposite is
true. Although Pse?! is the work of youthful inspiration
by a writer as yet unskilled in his métier, this first
novel contrasts favourably with all of the later ‘classics
of socialist realism’ that he produced. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Classical
Authors (19th - early 20th centuries)
