Panait Istrati (1884-1935), known as the Gorky of the Balkans, a fervent communist in his youth, was among the first intellectuals to publicly denounce Stalinism. The son of a Romanian laundress and a Greek smuggler he never met, he was a precocious reader and a tireless wanderer. A friend of the writers Romain Rolland (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1915) and Nikos Kazantzakis (a perennial Nobel Prize nominee), he wrote in French and was followed in Republican Catalonia. Anna Casassas, who has already translated some of his works, now signs the translation. When the sun rises (Cal Carré publishing house), a book dated 1934, a year before his death, alone and isolated in a Bucharest sanatorium. He was 50 years old and had long been suffering from tuberculosis.