Daily Inspiration Quote by Ismail Kadare

History, in Kadare's hands, is not a stately archive but a sleep paralysis demon: intimate, sticky, and hard to shake. "Nightmare" flips the usual civic piety on its head. Instead of history as lesson or inheritance, it's history as a claustrophobic script that keeps replaying, trapping the living inside someone else's violence. The line stages a private struggle ("I am trying") against a force that pretends to be impersonal. That verb matters. You don't overthrow a nightmare; you wake from it. Kadare is smuggling in a political diagnosis: oppressive systems survive by making themselves feel inevitable, like the air in the room.

The subtext is the predicament of Eastern Europe in the 20th century, and especially Albania under Enver Hoxha: a country sealed off, surveilled, mythologized, and punished for remembering incorrectly. Kadare's fiction repeatedly shows how regimes weaponize the past - heroic epics, blood feuds, ancient enemies - as a technology of control. If citizens can be convinced they're merely reenacting destiny, they stop demanding choice. The nightmare is propaganda, but it's also older than propaganda: Balkan histories of conquest and vendetta, the sediment of grievance that turns every present dispute into a rerun.

There's a sly aesthetic stake, too. Novelists are supposed to "bring history to life". Kadare wants the opposite: to drain history of its hypnotic power, to convert the trance into consciousness. Waking up is both liberation and risk; you open your eyes and discover the room is real, and you're still in it.