Bolsheviser or secular son: Reading Panaït Istrati’s Towards the other flame. After sixteen months in the U.S.S.R
Bolsheviser or secular son: Reading Panaït Istrati’s Towards the other flame. After sixteen months in the U.S.S.R

Summary/Abstract: In 1928-29, Panaït Istrati, by then established as a writer in France, as well as a controversial communist fellow traveller in his native Romania, undertook a secular pilgrimage across the vast extent of the U.S.S.R. After attending the celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1927, Istrati was now searching for “the other flame”, a new social ethos and what he thought would be the historical instantiation of salvation for all humanity. His autobiographical account of this journey is a “confession” steeped in the morality of the Eastern Orthodox religious tradition against which he ostensibly positions himself as a secular idealist. As a pious “Bolsheviser” seeking humanity’s secular salvation, Istrati therefore forces us to confront the Eastern Orthodox apocalypticism latent in the Soviet experiment. The same apocalypticism can be found in a superficially different form in the fascist-adjacent early work of Emil Cioran, which he was later to repudiate as part of his wider critique of the decay of western civilisation, but also in agonised penance for his youthful (ideological) sins. Cioran therefore forms a significant counterpart to Istrati, whose own disillusionment did not, however, lead to a complete break with communist ideal, although his criticism of the Soviet Union did result in his ostracism by the international communist movement. Whereas Cioran, as an émigré to France, moved away from the “enflamed” Orthodox ethnophyletism of Romania’s inter-war fascist ideology, Istrati, “broken”, as he himself put it, by his disillusionment with what he saw as the moral failure of the Soviet experiment, returned to Romania, paradoxically moving closer to the religious traditions he had always rejected. Although never converting, the former critic of organised religion, by now in declining health, stayed in an Orthodox monastery and published articles in the right-wing Curentul. In this context, the confessional style and structure of Istrati’s Vers l’autre flamme [Towards the other flame] can ultimately be read as a secular iteration of an older and underlying Orthodox eschatological tradition of humanity’s final redemption through suffering.

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