THE IMPACT OF FRENCH CULTURE ON FAIK KONICA’S WORK

Abstract

In place of a prologue
After an absence of half a century from the pantheon of Albanian culture, Faik Konica, has finally taken his rightful place among the most prominent and deserving figures of Albanain political and artistic thinking of the end of the XIX century and begining of the XX century. He was destined to live in tumultuous times, when his life-long love – Albania – was dozing, half-dead under the Anatolian reign of ignorance and darkness, which had abrogated every right that guaranteed the preservation of heritage. Throughout his life, he tried to reclaim the centuries lost in the Asian wastelands and to find the most appropriate ways to return Albania to the bosom of its biological mother, to the bosom of Europe. His education in grand European and American centres of culture, his erudition and intelectual courage to address taboos and to face the countless afflictions that had gripped our being and rendered it unsusceptible to the machhinations of others enabled him to do this....This was certainly not an easy task and took a heavy toll on Konica, who understood that he could fight his battle only through the force of the essay, by deliberately sacrificing his extraordinary talent for other generes, such as the novel, for which he had an undisputable capacity, as fellow French artists had continuously maintaned. The influence of multiple languages and cultures helped him gain a vast wealth of knowledge, as he spent much of his life abroad, (in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, France, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Germany and the United States), yet his extraordinary personality would be influenced, above all, by French culture and language, which Konica mastered as if it were his native language. Luan Starova, who according to Moikom Zeqo1 is – “the most reknowned authority on Konica, whom he spent a lifetime studying”, confirms these facts. He writes that at the Albanian polygraph a great impact has had “the aesthetic formation in French language, acquisition, assimilation of the inherent characteristics of the Gallic spirit, fastidious Voltaire feeling for irony and sarcasm, criticism as the only criterion to achieve to the truth of the Cartesian spirit”2.