L’opera narrativa di Panaït Istrati, scrittore francofono e «conteur» rumeno

An autodidact writer, with an adventurous and wandering life, enriched by a vivid imagination, Panaït Istrati belongs to the large group of Romanian authors that during the 19th century have improved and embellished the literature written in the French language with exotic themes and original experiences, contributing to its new vigour. The linguistic exile, both freely chosen or imposed by external social pressures, it has implied for the writers of the Romanian diaspora a deep redefinition or their identity. For the “Gorki des Balkans”, the leaving from his own country was originally voluntary, even if it was an expatriation marked by enormous difficulties, in order first of all to satisfy his desire to escape and the need of new adventures along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea; subsequently, the stay in Switzerland was for Istrati the great opportunity to learn the French language. Finally, his arrival in France allowed the writer from Braïla to crown with success the dream of his adolescence, that is to say his aspiration to arrive in the country that has spread the great ideals of freedom and social justice of the French Revolution. The difficult beginning of his literary career received the fundamental support of Romain Rolland. In the narrations of Adrien Zograffi (Les récits d’Adrien Zograffi, La Jeunesse d’Adrien Zograffi, Vie d’Adrien Zograffi), a novelistic cycle constituting his main literary achievement, made up of twelve autobiographic tales, Istrati offers a kind of bildungsroman characterized by an autobiographic and picaresque realism related to the oral tradition from the Balkan region that anticipates in some ways the narrative techniques of the autofiction.