Analysis Of The City Without Signs By Kadare

through his early written novel The City without Signs. The novel contains themes of modernism, alienated youth, disillusionment and cynicism influenced by post-war existentialism. In it Kadare reveals himself to be a young writer of imagination and audacity, fresh from Moscow, well disposed towards the modernization of his country but increasingly aware of the negative aspects of communist progress. In this work, there emerges the image of an “other” Albania different from that of the regime. The young writer becomes aware of aspects that he cannot integrate into a positive, let alone a socialist realism. The relationships between ideology and power, the rejection of the Albanian past as the “new Albania” and the “new man” are created, and the potential of the regime itself to become the inner monster - these themes cohere during the 1970s into a set of literary ideas which not only express opposition to the regime and its vision of the new Albania, but also penetrate to the heart of the dictatorial system.
Keywords: Socialist realism,

The protagonist of The City, Gjon Kurti, is sent out as a newly trained teacher to the provincial town of N... for his first teaching position. He is unwilling to leave the capital, his girlfriend, his friends, his philological research and hopes of an academic career, in order to face the daily grind of a class of unruly and provincial children suspicious of his citified ways and clothes. Gjon soon falls in with the local bohemian intellectuals, the poet Eugjen Peri and the chemistry teacher Mentor Rada, both of whom had also studied in Tirana and, like Gjon, miss its urbanity and student life. In Tirana they can discuss art and formalism, subjectivism and history, and recite poems such as Eugjen’s “A Sunday in the Country” with its suggestive modernist metaphors of