Ismail Kadare Who brought Doruntine
Ismail Kadare Kush e solli Doruntinen
Constantine is the figure of the only dissident in the gallery of Kadare characters. He is by no means a declared political opponent, but belongs to the ghost world, and like the idiots of Hamlet’s father, he returns to stir up the souls of the living. Like the one who defends himself after a well, Ismail Kadare is obsessed with a romantic legend, the ballad of Constantine and Doruntina to write his most innocent and at the same time more political book.
Since many sisters of this ballad live, the writer has chosen what seemed to him the richest and most noble, that is, that of the Arbëresh, Albanians settled in southern Italy since the Middle Ages. Perhaps these emigrants, who have left since the arrival of the Ottomans, are better able to keep alive such a legend, feeling that they have something in common with this Constantine who himself and comes between life and death.
Few Albanian writers have used this ballad, but Kadare has used it early, since 1962, when he wrote down the first stutters of the “Twilight of the steppe gods”. After appearing briefly in “The General of the Dead Army”, the legend to which the writer had not exhausted his possibilities, it took on its novel dimension with “Who Brought Doruntina”.
