Istrati with the spontaneity of oriental storyteller, hopes that his novels as a heart throb for it combines the best sources Balkan folklore with anecdotes and characters of his adventurous life. As Claudio Magris noted in The Danube, "is the poet of promiscuity and the ambivalence of the East, of that disorder which seems to expect a time of redemption and violence."

Tramp and largely self-taught Romanian writer Panait Istrati born in Braila port -city the Danube in 1884, illegitimate son of a Romanian laundress and a Greek smuggler, only attended the school for four years and did all kinds of jobs to make a lifetime. His restless and adventurous spirit led him from the Middle East in 1906 with no money or passport. In 1921, after settling in France, and desperate for tuberculosis, poverty and the death of his mother, he attempted suicide. He was found dying with a letter to the writer Romain Rolland, who would help him become the "Gorky of the Balkans". Invited in 1927 to visit the Soviet Union, its fierce collectivization cost review the rejection of French intellectuals, so he decided to return to Romania, where he died in 1935 plunged into oblivion.