Short stories
Călătórii
Not translated into English
Dmitrii Milev · 1930
Synopsis
Stories set in the Bessarabian villages attached to Romania, where gendarmes and property owners go after the peasants who protest and resist. The book includes Moș Gorițî: a former soldier of the Great War, returned to his village of Cetireni, raises a protest against the gendarmerie. In the story that gives the collection its title, students from Romania arrive in Ungheni to attack the Jewish community; other pieces, in a comic tone, show petty corruption.
Context
The book appeared in Tiraspol in 1930, in the Moldavian autonomous republic created inside Soviet Ukraine. It takes up Moș Gorițî, published in 1926 in the newspaper Plugarul, which the Soviet historian Tolochenko regarded as the first fiction of this literature; Samuil Lehtțir judged it valuable for letters as for history, and Nichita Smochină, who wrote from the other side, held these sketches to be below mediocre, while acknowledging vigour in the comic passages. The language used is the Moldavian of the grammarian Leonid Madan, which later studies have called gibberish.
Who it is for
In Moldavian, that is, Romanian written in Cyrillic and kept apart from the literary language; for those interested in interwar Bessarabia.
Prizes and reception
The Soviet Literary Encyclopaedia of 1934 regarded its author as the first Soviet Moldavian writer of the autonomous republic.
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