The Antitotalitarian Allegories of George Orwell and Ismail Kadare - A Comparative Analysis of the Forms of their Expression

The object of this study is the analytical comparison between the antitotalitarian allegories of George Orwell and Ismail Kadare, with a special focus on the similarities and differences in the forms of their expression. With this overall aim in view, from the rich and varied oeuvre of Kadare we have selected “The Palace of Dreams†and “The Pyramid†, as two of his most representative antitotalitarian novels written in a totalitarian environment, and placed them alongside the antitotalitarian classics of Orwell - “Animal Farm†and “1984†. As the many stylistic and structural differences between these novels tend to fall into a consistent pattern, in order to make sense of them, we have directed our attention beyond the texts themselves into matters related to the context in which they were conceived, the history of their publication and the type of readership to which they were primarily addressed. Our critical examination shows that the novels of Kadare tend to be more structurally complex than those of Orwell, while the exploration of their deep allegorical meaning is follows a less straightforward route than the allegorical probing of “Animal Farm†and “1984†. This difference, far from being a blunt literary fact, which should be taken simply for what it is without any attempt at explanation, follows very logically from the great gap that separates the world of Orwell from the closely monitored totalitarian environment in which Kadare’s novels were written and published.