SOURCE: Elsie, Robert. Review of Novembre d'une capitale, by Ismail Kadare. World Literature Today 73, no. 3 (summer 1999): 569.

In the following review, Elsie describes the circumstances surrounding the publication of Novembre d'une capitale as well as its subsequent revision.

One of the most frightening moments in the history of the long Stalinist dictatorship in Albania was the so-called Purge of the Liberals at the Fourth Party Congress in 1973, which unleashed a reign of terror against Albanian writers and intellectuals lasting to at least 1975. Comparable in spirit to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, this event followed in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in China, with which dictator Enver Hoxha had allied his little Balkan country. The years of the purge constituted a major setback for the development of Albanian literature and culture. Almost all major authors had a work withdrawn from circulation and “turned into cardboard,” and many intellectuals...