Panaït Istrati

On August 10, 1884, he was born in Braila (Wallachia, Romania) The writer in languages Romanian and French and revolutionary, first communist and Then libertarian, Gherasim Istrati, better known as Panaït Istrati and also called Gorky of the Balkans. He was the son of a Romanian peasant woman, Joita Istrate, which is He earned his living doing laundry, and a Greek smuggler from the Danube. When was nine months old, his father died in an operation of smuggling and with his mother went to Baldovinesti, a village near Braila, to the house of a brother of this, for taken care of a family farm and where the child made the primary education. Seven years later they returned to Braila, where his mother resumed the office of laundry, and He went to school until the age of 14. Then He began to work first as a learning in the cafe of a Greek and after a Albanian pastry chef, and then made of everything: street vendor, manoeuvre, sawmill, boilermaker, unloader, painter of walls, man-advertisement, mechanic, whitewasher, journalist, Photographer traveling  , boarding on board the packages of the navigation company "Service Romanian Maritime", etc. In 1904 settled in Budapest, where you make contacts with the Socialist movement. In 1905 participated in a large demonstration of support for the Russian Revolution. Between 1906 and 1912 he made numerous trips (Bucharest, Constantinople, Algiers, The Cairo, Beirut, Syria, Greece, Damascus, Naples, Paris, Switzerland) and was a reader compulsive, especially from classical Russian and European authors.   He collaborated the newspaper România Muncitoare became secretary of the trade union Docks of the port Braila and organizer of the great strike of 1910, with Jeanette Maltus, a Socialist militant and his future first companion. In these years he start to be hospitalized for tuberculosis. In 1913 he spent a season in Paris, a House of Georges Ionesco. In 1916 he entered a Leysin sanatorium (Switzerland), where he learned French with The help of a dictionary and the writer Russian Jew Joshua Jéhouda.

The years 1917 and 1918 They will be particularly difficult, crossing the Swiss corners performing various trades, by finish hospitalized by the American Red Cross in the sanatorium of Sylvana-sur-Lausanne. He settled for a while in Nice, where he fall into a deep depression when he learned of the death of his mother who led him to cut off the Coll on January 4, 1921. He was saved thanks to one epistolary confession that was kept in an old suitcase and that the hospital director of Nice, where Istrati was debating between life and death, sent whom was directed, the French novelist and musicologist Romain Rolland, which Istrati had discovered in 1919 and that then enjoyed great prestige in the cultural spheres Galas. Rolland was impressed by ideas and prose of Istrati, and it will become in a kind of protector of his: he presented him in the circles French Literary and He helped him publish his first novel, Kyra Kyralina (1924), with a preface by Rolland, which was followed by his work More important, known as Vie d'Adrien Zograffi (1925-1927), composed of several novels. The culmination of his ideas philosophicals came with The novel by Les chardons du Baragan (1928), considered by critics and readers as his masterpiece, and one of the fundamental works of the World narrative of the 20th century. Later he published Mes Départs (1928), Le pêcheur d'éponges (1930) And Mediterranée (1934). In 1924 married Anna Munsch and the following year she left established in Romania, where He suffered violent attacks from the Romanian reactionary press. Guarded and persecuted by the Romanian political police (Siguranta Statului), He will flee to Paris, where will denounce the atrocities committed in Romania in Paris-Soir and in Le They're Dating. In 1926 he became a member of the "Committee for the Defense of the victims of White Terror in the Balkans" and He took part in the anti-fascist rally "Italia engrillonada". After one short stay in Menton and Nice, was hospitalized in the Montana-sur-Sierre sanatorium. In 1927 he took the Word at the rally at the Wagram Hall in Paris against execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. In October 1927, Communist Party roadmate – never It doesn't go have the card–, visited Moscow and Kiev with the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, invited to the events of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, and two Years later he will return to the Union Soviet. During these stays he could to see the reality of the Stalinist dictatorship, which inspired him the Book Towards the autre flame. Confession pour vaincus (1927-1929), where, seven years before Retour of the USSR by André Gide, denounces with great virulence the arbitrariness of the Soviet regime and the state bureaucracy; in the work, of Three volumes, Boris Souvarine and Victor Serge participated. Following the the publication of this book, triggered a Typical and violent campaign of slander against his person performed by Party Intellectuals French Communist (PCF), captained by Henri Barbusse. Sick and morally weakened, he returned to Romania, but there was to return to Nice in order to recover from tuberculosis, then leaving for Bucharest. For his report on the massacre of miners in Lupeni and for his reports published in the Lupta newspaper (The Fight), where he denounced the Romanian government, was attacked hard for the reactionary means and returned to Paris.

In 1930 He went to Egypt, expelled of Alexandria, he was imprisoned in Trieste, but was released thanks to the intervention of the French consul. When returned to Paris found a Communist press campaign that accuses him of betrayal. From here the deep disagreement with Romain Rolland who interrupted the correspondence up to to 1934. In April 1932 he married Margareta Izesco and the year next is going installed in Bucharest. During the last years of His life collaborated in the magazine Cruciada Românismului (The Crusade Romanian), with articles denouncing the social injustices of his time, and vilipended so much by the Communists, who treated him as a "fascist," as for the Fascists, that the They described as "cosmopolitan," and only He received the support of the circles European libertarians. In 1935 the Romanian publishing house Rieder goes bankrupt and stop from to pay him the royalties; then he will have to earn the life as a reader of manuscripts for a publishing house. Abandoned, Panaït Istrati died of tuberculosis on April 16, 1935 at the Filaret sanatorium in Bucharest (Romania) and He was buried without religious service in the Bellu cemetery of this city. A very famous writer of interwar literature, he Fall into oblivion almost complete for decades; his work was forbidden in France during the war and in Romania during the communist regime. During the sixties his work was republished thanks to the Association of Friends of Panaït Istrati in France and in Romania from the 1990s. In 1984, a House-museum dedicated to his memory. A part of their files is found deposited in the National Library of Romania and other in the Institute Mémoires de The Édition Contemporaine (IMEC) in Caen. They have been realized various films of some of his works. Panaït Istrati is one of the highest representatives of the denunciation of the "revolution betrayed.”