Ion Drutse

Born Sept. 13, 1928, in the village of Khorodishte in what is now Dondiushany Raion. Soviet Moldavian writer.

Drutse worked as the secretary of a village soviet and as a journalist. He completed the higher literary courses of the Union of Writers of the USSR in 1956, but his works had been appearing in print since 1950. He has published the collections of short stories In Our Village (1953) and A Longing for People (1959), among others. He is the author of the novellas Leaves of Sorrow (1957; Russian translation, 1958), The Last Month of Autumn (1964), and Returning to One’s Own Circles (1972); the plays Kasa mare (1960; staged in 1961), Doina (1971), and Birds of Our Youth (1972); and the novel The Burden of Our Goodness (1968). Drutse lovingly reveals the spiritual richness of the common people and the character traits of his people, and he makes extensive use of the expressive means of folk idiom. Many of Drutse’s works have been translated into languages of the peoples of the USSR and several foreign languages. The film entitled The Last Month of Autumn (based on the novella of that name) won the Grand Prize for Films for Youth at the Cannes International Film Festival (1967). Drutse also won the State Prize of the Moldavian SSR in 1967.