Panaït Istrati

Panaït Istrati (August 10th 1884, Brăila - April 18th 1935, Bucharest) is a writer of French language, called the Gorki of Balkans .

Biography

It is born with Brăila, a Rumanian port on the the Danube, wire of the washing machine Joiţa Istrate and a Greek smuggler .

Raised in Baldovineşti, he studies at the elementary school during six years, including two doubled years. He earns then his living while becoming the apprentice of a Greek café owner, then of an Albanian pastrycook, and then as travelling merchant. For this period, he is a compulsif reader, and its vagrancies lead it to Bucharest, with Constantinople, the Cairo, Naples, Paris and in Suisse.

Living in misery, patient and alone, it tries to commit suicide in January 1921 with Nice, but it is saved and one finds on him a letter not sent which it had written with Romain Roland. This one is informed by it, and answers him promptly by encouraging it in its step of writer: I await work! Carry out work, more essential than you, more durable than you, of which you are the pod . In 1923, its account Kira Kyralina is published, with a foreword of Roland.

In 1927, fellow traveller of the Communist party, it visits Moscow and Kiev with the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, and in 1929 it again travels in Soviet Union where it discovers the reality of the Stalinist dictatorship, which inspires the writing of to him Towards the other flame, confession for overcome , in which, seven years before the Retour of the USSR of André Gide, it denounces with a great virulence the arbitrary one and the Soviet bureaucracy (the work is in fact Co-writing with Boris Souvarine and Victor Serge). A violent calumny campaign follows led to its opposition by the intellectuals to the PCF, the first of which Henri Barbusse. Treated “fascistic ” by Stalinist propaganda, it regains, sick and morally weakened, the Romania, returns to Nice in order to look after a Tuberculose there, then sets out again with Bucharest. He collaborates in the last years of his life in the review the Crusade roumanist with articles denouncing the social injustices of his time. He dies of tuberculosis in a sanatorium of Bucharest in 1935.

Very famous figure of the literature of between two wars, Panait Istrati falls into a quasi complete lapse of memory during several decades; its work is prohibited in France during the war. It is republished little by little as from the Sixties, on the initiative of the association of the friends of Breaded Istrati, located at Valence.

Literary work

Collections of news in collections of pocket:

Codine - Mikhaïl - My departures - the sponge Fisherman (the youth of Adrien Zograffi) , ISBN 2070375927
Domnitza de Snagov (accounts of Adrien Zograffi) , ISBN 2070374947
Kyra Kyralina (accounts of Adrien Zograffi) , ISBN 2070372537
Uncle Anghel (accounts of Adrien Zograffi)
the Thüringer house - the labor exchange - the Mediterranean (Sunrise) - the Mediterranean (Sunset) (Life of Adrien Zogfraffi) , ISBN 2070375935

Testimony: the trilogy of Towards the other flame

T1 - After 16 month in the USSR , ISBN 2070324125
T2 - Soviets 1929 , Paris, the Rieder Editions, 1929
T3 - naked Russia , Paris, the Rieder Editions, 1929

Books on Panaït Istrati

Mircea Iorgulescu, Panaït Istrati , ED. Oxus, coll “Roumanians of Paris”, Paris, ISBN 2848980370
Boris Souvarine, Memories on Isaac Babel, Panaït Istrati, Pierre Pascal , Free field, 1985, ISBN 2851841556
Monique Jutrin-Klener, " Panaït Istrati, a thistle déraciné" , Maspero, 1970.
Jeanne-Marie Santraud, Elisabeth Geblesco, Catherine Rossi, Monique Jutrin-Klener, Martha Popovici, Helene Lenz, Daniel Lérault, " Haïdoucs in the work of Panaït Istrati" , Harmattan, 2002.

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