Panaït Istrati – Portrait of a Rebel

One mid-October evening in 1927, three friends were dining at the Casenave Restaurant in the Rue Boissy-d’Anglas in Paris. They were Christian Rakovsky, the Soviet ambassador to France, Panait Istrati, the Rumanian who wrote in French and had been a house painter, hobo, and wandering photographer before turning storyteller and winning fame with his first novel, Kyra Kyralina, and myself. In the following pages I want to set down my memories of these vanished friends, and tell the unknown story behind Istrati’s three volumes about Soviet communism: the first, Vers l’autre fiamme: apres seize mois dans l’URSS; the second, Soviets 1929; the third, La Russie nue (all Paris, Editions Rieder,...