Legends of the Origin of Power

Eduard Douwes Dekker is a famous Dutch writer, about whom people in our country know far too little. For many years he lived in Asian colonies and served as a civil official in Indonesia, on the islands of Sumatra and Java. Everywhere he encountered injustice and deceit. When the natives rose up against the Dutch viceroy, the writer supported the rebels. Later, after returning to Europe, he exposed colonial policies in his books, and because of that he was received coldly in his homeland and forced to wander through the cities of France and Germany. Around then he also took the pen name Multatuli—which in Latin means “much-suffering.”

The translator of this book, Aleksandra Chebotarevskaya, wrote about the author’s stories: “His life is one continuous moral and intellectual creative surge. Like Leo Tolstoy, he belongs to those people whose ‘great thoughts come from the heart.’ His works are truly steeped in the blood of their creator—they have been lived through and endured. The simple, direct tone of his writings strongly influenced the style and turns of his native language. Many of his expressions, even while he was alive, became proverbial sayings. Multatuli possessed the astonishing ability to express clearly what others only felt vaguely. He suffered all the humiliations of petty poverty, up to even begging for a piece of bread. But he enriched his people with that very poverty. At the feet of this beggar was the whole world…”