TIRANA, Oct. 13 – Albania is marking one week of events dedicated to Dritero Agolli, one of the country’s most prominent authors, in honor of his 85th birthday. The events scheduled for Oct. 10 to 17 include an exhibition at the National Library, some performances based on Agolli’s creativity at the National Theatre and movie screenings based on his writings.
“It rarely happens to have such a writer loved by all generations, all dialects, territories and the Albanian diaspora,” said Culture Minister Mirela Kumbaro at the opening of an exhibition showcasing the best of Agolli’s 65-year creativity starting from the late 1940s when he wrote his first poems as a seventh grade elementary school student. The exhibition also features his typewriter and several pictures from the most culminating moments in life as a writer and politician.
Persida Asllani, the National Library director, said “the Agolli exhibition is a flashback of his creativity from his early poetry beginnings in 1948 to continue expanding in different genres for more than 65 years of creativity, unveiling both a miscellaneous and contradictory personality and being read and referred to in two different eras.”
Drità«ro Agolli has been a prolific writer throughout the nineties, a rare voice of humanity and sincerity in Albanian letters, says Robert Elsie, a Canadian specialist in Albanian studies, in the writer’s bio.
Agolli is a writer who has had a far from negligible influence on the course of contemporary literature. He first attained success as a poet of the soil with his early verse collections in the late 1950s under communism, introducing him to the reading public as a sincere and gifted lyric poet of the soil and demonstrated masterful verse technique. An attachment to his roots came to form the basis of his poetic credo.
As a prose writer, Agolli first made a name for himself with the novel “Komisari Memo,” Tirana 1970 (Commissar Memo), originally conceived as a short story.
Agolli’s second novel, “Njeriu me top,” Tirana 1975 (The man with a cannon), translated into English as “The man with the gun,” Tirana 1983, takes up the partisan theme from a different angle and with a somewhat more subtle approach.
After these two rather conformist novels of partisan heroism, the standard theme encouraged by the party, Agolli produced a far more interesting work, his satirical “Shkà«lqimi dhe rà«nja e shokut Zylo,” Tirana 1973 (The splendour and fall of comrade Zylo), which has proved to be his claim to fame. Comrade Zylo is the epitome of the well-meaning but incompetent apparatchik, director of an obscure government cultural affairs department. Zylo is considered a universal figure, a character to be found in any society or age, and critics have been quick to draw parallels ranging from Daniel Defoe and Nikolay Gogol’s Revizor to Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera’s Zert.
