20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

Panait Istrati and his posterity in European dictionaries 73Republic, he has been and remains one of the most frequently translated ofRomanian writers, through the medium of French.Because Istrati was a writer engaged on the socio-political front of thetime he lived, what becomes particularly significant is the way in whichhis personality is presented in the dictionaries and encyclopaedias from theformer Soviet Union, now become Russia, a country where the perceptionon his work and especially on the writer’s life is one of the most spectacular.In the Russian culture, Istrati’s destiny continues to be capricious. Theperspective on his work (and life) reflects, until 1989, especially hisuncompromising attitude towards Soviet politics, clearly described in thesetomes. After starting by revealing his ’healthy’, proletarian descent andbiography 22 , and widely presenting his literary work, in the following yearthe ’climate’ changes drastically, with the authors affirming: ’very soonIstrati is proved to be one of the most vicious renegades, his interviews, andthen his books, becoming some stupid, cynical and counter-revolutionarycalumnies’ 23 . The treatises published in those years note that, ’returningin the West, he launched wicked calumnies against the Soviet Union andsubsequently carried out counter-revolutionary propaganda, convenientfor the international counter-revolution’ 24 . Or that, ’in collaboration withTrotskyist counter-revolutionary agents, he wrote a series of revoltingcalumnies against the Soviet Union’ 25 . Later, in 1966, I.A. Kojevnikov,the author of the dictionary 26 article about Panait Istrati, writes amongother things: ’The petit-bourgeois meaning he attached to liberty hinderedthe Romanian writer’s understanding of the new relations between manand society which were instated in the Soviet Union after the OctoberRevolution’. The sentence is repeated almost identically in The GreatSoviet Encyclopaedia of 1972. 27Things have not changed too much in contemporary times, especiallysince the publishing of the book by Viatlii Şentalinski 28 , about the ’literaryarchives of the K.G.B.’, brings up his relations with some of the Russian22Malaia Sovetskaia Enţiklopedia, 1929, Moscova.23Literaturnaia Enţiklopedia, 1930, Moscova: Izdatelisvtvo KommunisticeskoiAkademii, 643-647.24Malaia Sovetskaia Enţiklopedia, 1936, t. 5, Moskova: Oghiz, R.S.F.S.R., 58.25Bolşaia Sovetskaia Enţiklopedia, R 1937,.S.F.S.R, 103.26Kratkaia Literaturnia Enţiklopedia, 1966, t. 3, Moscova: Izdatelstvo SovetskaiaEnţiklopedia.27’He presented the Soviet reality in a distorting manner, which made many truefriends of the U.S.S.R. to disavow the author’ (Bolşaia Sovetskaia Enţiklopedia, 1972,Izdatelstvo Sovetskaia Enţiklopedia, 58328Vitalii Şentalinski 1993, La parole ressuscitée, Paris: Editura Robert Lafont.