All right, then, I've mentioned Istrati (1884-1935) in a post on the Romanian literature thread, but I think the very recent English retranslation (April 2010) of his first novel, Kyra Kyralina, deserves a thread of its own. The previous translation, from the 1920s, was all but inaccessible, so, for once, the new translation was justified.
Istrati was a forty-year-old Romanian vagabond who was found lying in a park in Nice with his throat cut. He had tried to kill himself. In the hospital doctors found a letter addressed to Romain Rolland, a French Nobel laureate. Rolland, impressed by the letter, visited Istrati in the hospital, encouraged him to write. The result was Kyra Kyralina, a tale of a young boy who--in the late years of the Ottoman Empire--is forced by father's violence to leave his home--in which he had lived almost exclusively in the company of women. His sister Kyra disappears, almost certainly into the sex trade, and in his search for her he ends up in Istanbul, kept by a young and sensual bey.
Kyra Kyralina was an immediate success, and in the next ten or twelve years Istrati went on to write a dozen or so more books, all of them worth reading, though none perhaps with the freshness of Kyra Kyralina and Pr?sentation des ha?doucs (The Bandits). None, certainly, was as much of a surprise as this first novel from an entirely self-taught Romanian idler.
In the late 1920s Istrati, a committed communist, spent a year and a half in the Soviet Union. The book he wrote on his return (his two co-authors, Boris Souvarine and Victor Serge, were not credited) would be his downfall: his disillusionment with the Bolshevik regime is total, and he is especially critical of Western writers who take expenses-paid tours of the Soviet Union and then, once back in Paris or London, write pieces extolling the Soviet system.
Istrati either underestimated the virulence these Stalinist Western writers--many of them his original champions--would subject him to or he knew what he was in for and decided to say his piece anyway. Even Rolland, though more moderate, urged Istrati not to publish the book--Vers l'autre flamme; Rolland argued that exposing the Bolshevik regime as broken, corrupt, as he believed it was, would discredit revolution in general. This time, Istrati paid no heed to Rolland's urgings, and Rolland too abandoned him, leaving him to fend off alone attacks by the likes of the craven Henri Barbusse--author of the most well known French novel of the First World War--in his communist paper L'Humanit?. Istrati, ill and friendless, having lost most of the money his sudden success had earned him, retreated to Romania, where, before dying of tuberculosis, he managed to write three or four more novels.
I'm going on for too long here, but of possible interest to those who read Spanish or Portuguese is the reception of Istrati's work in Latin America. A Brazilian writer, Rachel de Queiroz, for example, has a book called D?ra Doralina; I haven't read it, but I imagine the title is an homage to Istrati's Kyra. C?sar Vallejo, the sometimes excellent Peruvian poet--and a revered figure throughout Latin America and in academe--was also invited to the Soviet Union in the 1920s; unlike Istrati, he wrote, on his return, a book of propaganda. In a later book, El arte y la revoluci?n, Vallejo attacked Istrati viciously. Vallejo can perhaps be forgiven: not long after Istrati, he too died ill and poor. Another figure revered in academic and leftist intellectual circles, again a Peruvian, the Marxist essayist Jos? Carlos Mari?tegui, published Spanish translations of Istrati's work in a magazine he edited; later, though, after Istrati's return from the Soviet Union, Mari?tegui would write in an almost despairing tone of Istrati's turn away from the revolution.
Okay, the perfidy of literary types is interesting, but politics is a bore. And Kyra Kyralina is hardly political. It's just a good story--not heavy intellectual fare--that will take you to places you are unlikely to have been. I recommend it heartily.
Istrati was a forty-year-old Romanian vagabond who was found lying in a park in Nice with his throat cut. He had tried to kill himself. In the hospital doctors found a letter addressed to Romain Rolland, a French Nobel laureate. Rolland, impressed by the letter, visited Istrati in the hospital, encouraged him to write. The result was Kyra Kyralina, a tale of a young boy who--in the late years of the Ottoman Empire--is forced by father's violence to leave his home--in which he had lived almost exclusively in the company of women. His sister Kyra disappears, almost certainly into the sex trade, and in his search for her he ends up in Istanbul, kept by a young and sensual bey.
Kyra Kyralina was an immediate success, and in the next ten or twelve years Istrati went on to write a dozen or so more books, all of them worth reading, though none perhaps with the freshness of Kyra Kyralina and Pr?sentation des ha?doucs (The Bandits). None, certainly, was as much of a surprise as this first novel from an entirely self-taught Romanian idler.
In the late 1920s Istrati, a committed communist, spent a year and a half in the Soviet Union. The book he wrote on his return (his two co-authors, Boris Souvarine and Victor Serge, were not credited) would be his downfall: his disillusionment with the Bolshevik regime is total, and he is especially critical of Western writers who take expenses-paid tours of the Soviet Union and then, once back in Paris or London, write pieces extolling the Soviet system.
Istrati either underestimated the virulence these Stalinist Western writers--many of them his original champions--would subject him to or he knew what he was in for and decided to say his piece anyway. Even Rolland, though more moderate, urged Istrati not to publish the book--Vers l'autre flamme; Rolland argued that exposing the Bolshevik regime as broken, corrupt, as he believed it was, would discredit revolution in general. This time, Istrati paid no heed to Rolland's urgings, and Rolland too abandoned him, leaving him to fend off alone attacks by the likes of the craven Henri Barbusse--author of the most well known French novel of the First World War--in his communist paper L'Humanit?. Istrati, ill and friendless, having lost most of the money his sudden success had earned him, retreated to Romania, where, before dying of tuberculosis, he managed to write three or four more novels.
I'm going on for too long here, but of possible interest to those who read Spanish or Portuguese is the reception of Istrati's work in Latin America. A Brazilian writer, Rachel de Queiroz, for example, has a book called D?ra Doralina; I haven't read it, but I imagine the title is an homage to Istrati's Kyra. C?sar Vallejo, the sometimes excellent Peruvian poet--and a revered figure throughout Latin America and in academe--was also invited to the Soviet Union in the 1920s; unlike Istrati, he wrote, on his return, a book of propaganda. In a later book, El arte y la revoluci?n, Vallejo attacked Istrati viciously. Vallejo can perhaps be forgiven: not long after Istrati, he too died ill and poor. Another figure revered in academic and leftist intellectual circles, again a Peruvian, the Marxist essayist Jos? Carlos Mari?tegui, published Spanish translations of Istrati's work in a magazine he edited; later, though, after Istrati's return from the Soviet Union, Mari?tegui would write in an almost despairing tone of Istrati's turn away from the revolution.
Okay, the perfidy of literary types is interesting, but politics is a bore. And Kyra Kyralina is hardly political. It's just a good story--not heavy intellectual fare--that will take you to places you are unlikely to have been. I recommend it heartily.
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