20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

Panait Istrati and his posterityin European dictionariesLucian Chişu"Spiru Haret" University – BucharestI.The life and work of Panait Istrati (10 August 1984, Brăila – 15 April1935, Bucharest), has always offered grounds for constant commentary,debate and reflection for lovers of literature, as well as for researchers ofthe literary phenomenon at the beginning of the 20 th century. Fate has sealedhis short existence of only 50 years, and, as Istrati’s work is emphaticallyautobiographical in character, some of the omens foretold by the Fates echothroughout its content.In brief, we could say that the author was condemned to perpetually startall over again. Born from a perennial Romanian peasant woman and a Greeksmuggler, the future writer started from very humble origins, and the squalorof the slums of his childhood continued to haunt him. He barely completedthe four years of primary school, continuing his instruction at the harshschool of life 1 . The first phase in the Odyssey of this Wallachian Ulysses,1He was, alternatively, shop and errand boy, apprentice in the dock workshops(mechanic, locksmith, brazier), day labourer at the State Fisheries, worker in a ropefactory, than porter in the port at Giurgiu. He travelled as a stowaway on ships sailing theBlack Sea and the Mediterranean. He befriended tramps in Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon,Greece, Italy. He was a night watchman at a hotel in the Lacul Sarat resort, becoming afterwhile secretary of the workers’ trade union in the Braila port and strike organizer, and latersandwich-man, valet, internationalist socialist agitator, orderly, farmer, house painter,travelling actor, embankment worker. He worked in a ’neutral’ Swiss armament factory,which he left in order to be a tractor driver in the canton of Valois. He was a travellingphotographer and, whenever necessary, a journalist. ’Jack-of-all-trades, master of none’,as Istrati writes somewhere.