Dhimitër Shuteriqi


Dhimitër Shuteriqi was an Albanian scholar, literary historian, and writer.

Life

Dhimitër S. Shuteriqi was born in Elbasan in a patriotic and intellectual family. His father was Simon Shuteriqi, participant in the Literary Congress of Monastir and Congress of Elbasan, as well as one of the founders of the Shkolla Normale e Elbasanit.
Shuteriqi attended the secondary school in Korça. He studied at the University of Grenoble and Lyon in France and taught school in Elbasan in 1942–1943. Shuteriqi began writing in the 1930s and was to become an influential literary historian during the socialist period. He was a member of parliament for many years, president of the Albanian League of Writers and Artists from 1950 to 1973, and a member of the Academy of Sciences from 1973. As chairman of the ALWA, he participated in the Albanian Congress of Orthography of 1972 and was one of the signatories. Dhimitër Shuteriqi is remembered for his research in the fields of literature, history, and folklore, in particular for his standard histories and anthologies of Albanian literature. Among his many works are Shkrimet shqipe në vitet 1332–1850, Tirana 1976, Autorë dhe tekste, Tirana 1977, and Historia e letërsisë shqiptare, Tirana 1983.
Shuteriqi was also author of prose and poetry. His first poetry was named Kosova and was published in the Kosova newspaper of Albanian community of Constanța, Romania, in 1933. He was inspired by Romanticism until 1943 when he switched to Realism, and later Socialist Realism. His two-volume Çlirimtarët, Tirana 1952 and 1955, the first post-World War II Albanian novel, painted a picture not only of the squalor and sufferings of the peasants before the "liberation" but also of the rise of class consciousness among them. It helped set the rather sluggish pace of socialist realism in the 1950s.

Works