Vers l'autre flame

Vers l'autre flamme is a political travelogue by the Romanian writer Panait Istrati (1884–1935), which was published in 1929 in French. The German translation is on the wrong track .

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In 1927, as one of the most prominent communist authors in France, Istrati was invited to the Soviet Union for the ten-year celebrations of the Russian October Revolution . He starts the trip full of enthusiasm and takes part in numerous official celebrations in various cities in Russia. In doing so, however, he has to recognize that the (mind you communist) opposition is not able to express itself in any public way. Adolf Abramowitsch Joffe commits suicide, Victor Serge is expelled from the party in 1928. Apart from the official events, Istrati seeks contact with ordinary people. He listens around, speaks to people. After the end of the official tour, Istrati stays and, together with the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis , undertakes further trips on their own from the far north of Russia to Moldova , the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the south. His disillusionment finally culminated in the Russakov affair in 1929. This old revolutionary is attacked on the basis of slander by the newspaper Leningradskaya Pravda . Istrati lets all of his excellent contacts play, goes as far as President Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin and can reconstruct the origins of the attacks. Russakov is initially acquitted in a court case, but then convicted in a second hearing.

After Istrati returned to France, he wrote this travelogue after a while. His intention, however, is not a detailed description of the trip, but a passionate political appeal to his comrades, to whom he still feels connected, but whose authoritarian Stalinist forms of organization, their loyalty to the line and their belief in authority, he strongly denounces. It is the time of the incipient Stalinism and the elimination of Trotsky . Until then, only reports about the Soviet Union had appeared in the West that were full of praise. Istrati's book breaks a taboo and dares to criticize her publicly. All of his previous friends suddenly distance themselves from him, above all his previous mentor Romain Rolland . He is slandered and a smear campaign against him starts. On the other hand, Istrati was captured by the Trotskyists, from whom he was otherwise remote.

Istrati's book was the first of three volumes published under his name. The other two volumes were not written by him, but protect their true authors through his name. Volume 2 is by Victor Serge and is called Soviets (German So it doesn't work! The Soviets of today ), Volume 3 is by Boris Souvarine and bears the title La Russie nue (German Russia naked. Numbers prove ).

On the wrong track impressed by Istrati's passion and love for truth, but ultimately also by his ruthlessness towards himself. In the end, a "defeated" remains, as he himself put it, a lonely fighter beyond ideologies, a sick and broken person.

expenditure

• Panaït Istrati: Vers l'autre flamme. Confessions pour vaincus . Paris: Rieder, 1929

German translation

• Panaït Istrati: On the wrong track. 16 months in Russia . Piper, Munich 1930 (translation: Karl Stransky)
• Panaït Istrati: On the wrong track. Sixteen months in the Soviet Union. Confessions of a vanquished . Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1989 (translation: Karl Stransky)