Idrus

Born Sept. 21, 1921, in Padang. Indonesian author. Member of the Group of 1945; pioneer of realism in contemporary Indonesian prose.

In 1949, Idrus directed the literary journal Indonesia. His works of the early 1940’s bear a romantic character, as in Ave Maria, The Suromo Family, and Doctor Bisma (some of these works were collected in From “Ave Maria” to “The Other Way to Rome,” 1948). Idrus’ innovation became apparent in his es-sayistic short stories Sketches in the Underground, which tell about the life and aspirations of common people during the Japanese occupation. These sketches are realistic and extremely simple stylistically. Russian literature has influenced Idrus’ creative work. Psychologism and indifference to politics are characteristic of his later works: Surabaja (1947), Woman and Nation (1949), and Aki (1950). In the early 1960’s, Idrus emigrated to Malaysia, where he published a collection of psychological stories With an Open View (1961) and the novella The Depth of the Human Heart (1963). Since 1966, he has lived in Australia. Idrus translated stories by A. P. Chekhov and the novella Armored Train No. 14–69 by Vs. Ivanov.