SOURCE: Morgan, Peter. “Ancient Names … Marked by Fate: Ethnicity and the ‘Man without Qualities’ in Ismail Kadare's Palace of Dreams.” European Legacy 7, no. 1 (February 2002): 45-60.

In the following essay, Morgan examines the role of ethnicity in The Palace of Dreams, concluding that Kadare utilizes “ethnicity as a central factor of social change in post-communist societies.”

Introduction1

The Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare made a radical break with the tradition of socialist realism in his novel, The Palace of Dreams.² In this work, published in Tirana in 1981 and banned shortly afterwards, Kadare identifies ethnicity as a category of social and individual identity in the context of communist Central and Eastern Europe and thereby foregrounds ethnicity as a central factor of social change in post-communist societies. Kadare uses Albanian ethnic identity to thematize the “Balkan syndrome” of imperial domination in which minority ethnic identity is at once repressed and perpetuated. He...