Balkan Gorky

KYRA KYRALINA--Panait Istrati --Knopf ($2.50). Five years ago, hospital attendants in Nice found upon the person of a wretch who had cut his throat unsuccessfully, a letter addressed to Author Romain Rolland, the French pacifist-humanist. The patient lived and, encouraged by M. Rolland, wrote many stories, of which this book contains the first three to be published in English.

Born 42 years ago of a Rumanian peasant woman and a Creel smuggler, Panait Istrati is an unhappy, passionate son of the Balkans with a talent for headlong talespinning that must have come to him from across the Bosporus. He writes out of the life he has led, chiefly here around one Stavro sly peddler of drink at fairs, upon whose sensitive nature, to the point of perversion, have been wreaked the brutal inheritance of an ancient jumble of hot, primitive races Stavro relates the tragedy of his marriage, thwarted by impotence; the kidnaping of his madcap sister Kyra by a Turkish harem procurer; some of his wanderings from the Danube to Damascus, in search of love and friendship They are not stories for the general public, which takes unkindly to abnormality no matter how subtly treated, how violently and pathetically alive its exponents. A few people will read--and never forget.