Albania

Albania frames the rise of two generations in Nachum’s tale of the Zannoviches. For the elder Zannovich it is the country he leaves in poverty and returns to with money and status; for Stefan Zannovich it is home and the setting for a cultivated identity built around descent from the national hero Skanderbeg. The country’s significance lies in this double movement: departure offers a way out of hardship, while return makes Albania a source of family memory and public distinction.

A Point of Departure

The elder Zannovich leaves Albania for Venice carrying what he has to sell. He soon supplements hawking with card-playing, exploiting the urban crowd’s desire for entertainment. The tale presents his change of fortune as a shift in setting and means: trading among peasants had brought him hardship, while in the city he finds people willing to pay for diversion, though his success depends on cheating them.

His new prosperity does not end in Venice. After a dispute over his dealings brings blows and police attention, he decides to evade the law and return to Albania with his children, horses, and money. He buys an estate and an entire village, turning the place he had left into the foundation of his wealth and household.

Return, Reputation, and Memory

Back in Albania, the elder Zannovich sends his children to college and eventually dies peacefully as a respected man. The peasants mourn him, even though he could not abide them: he remembers standing before them with cheap trinkets while they handled the wares and then walked away. His standing at the end of his life therefore sits beside an older grievance, and the tale does not erase the poverty and humiliation behind his ascent.

The elder Zannovich explains his children’s education through the gap between his own life and the future he wants for them. He recalls spending twenty years hawking in Albania and blames himself for not having used his intelligence differently. By sending his sons to Padua, he hopes they will avoid those lost years. Albania is thus also the measure of an inheritance: a place associated with the father’s hard beginnings, from which he wants his children to advance.

Stefan Zannovich’s Albanian Identity

After studying in Padua, Stefan returns to Albania while his father is still alive. The elder Zannovich welcomes him as a man already ahead of his father’s long apprenticeship in trade. Stefan’s education has taught him not only from professors but from the nobility, and the story links this social fluency to the identity he will later assume.

In Nachum’s account, Stefan first accepts being treated as Baron Warta, then enlarges the claim by presenting himself as Prince Castriota, a descendant of the celebrated Skanderbeg. He promises to make Albania great again and maintains a retinue; people give him money to live in keeping with the supposed lineage. Albania supplies the national history that makes his invented rank persuasive, while the money and attention he receives show how readily his audience supports the performance.

The Country Within the Tale

Albania appears through movement between places rather than through a detailed description of its landscape. The elder Zannovich compares the country and the city as different fields of opportunity: in the countryside there is quiet and time, but little reward for his efforts; in Venice, people stand closer together and pay for entertainment. His return reverses the direction of that movement, bringing the proceeds of urban deception back to the country and converting them into land, a village, and education for his children.

Told as an example of what Stefan did after learning to see and approach the world, the family history makes Albania part of a broader account of ambition, adaptability, and self-invention. It is at once the setting of the elder Zannovich’s remembered hardship, the home to which he returns, and the national frame Stefan uses to claim distinction. The tale leaves those meanings in tension: the family’s rise brings wealth and respect, but its foundations include fraud and an identity sustained by other people’s belief.