Influences from all parts of Europe and Asia converge in this land:3Venice occupies the islands along the Ionian sea as well as Crete and brings its culture to them; many islands of the
Trang 1by Dr Philip D Dracodaidis
Author
The fall of Constantinople in 1453
marks the collapse and death of the
Byzantine Empire, a state that
last-ed for 1,200 years and extendlast-ed, in
the period of its greater expansion,
from Asia to the Atlantic and from
the Russian south to the sands of
Northern Africa.1This event
consti-tutes a historical milestone as it
cre-ates once and for all a clear
sepa-ration between two totally opposed
systems of social and political
or-ganization, between two different
civilizations and cultures:
Chris-tendom in Western Europe on the
one side, the Ottoman Turks, true
believers of Mohammed and rulers
of the Islamic world, on the other side These two systems tend to move in the same direction: to the West, Columbus leaves the shores
of the Iberian peninsula to reach the Indies navigating westwards; the Turkish sultans and armies move to the Northwest through the Balkans
to the Hungarian open fields and to the outskirts of Vienna: the Ot-toman Empire’ s dominions include the remote areas close to China, the infertile lands of Arabia, part of Africa, the Crimean peninsula, the Dalmatian cost south of Trieste.2
Trang 2Greece, due to its geographical
position, is, as from the 12th
centu-ry, a land of “passage”, a
thorough-fare that links Europe to Asia, the
Aegean sea to the Mediterranean,
the south of Europe to the Holy
Land and from there to the north of
Africa Influences from all parts of
Europe and Asia converge in this
land:3Venice occupies the islands
along the Ionian sea as well as
Crete and brings its culture to
them; many islands of the Aegean
sea remain under the rule of Italian
noblemen that had privileges on
them dating back to the Byzantine
emperors; Rhodes is governed by
the Knights of Saint-John; the
peninsula is under the Turks, while
places like Mani in the south of the
Peloponnese remain free and other
areas live under a
quasi-au-tonomous government headed by
local Greek rulers These disparities
will wither away in the second half
of 17thcentury as the Turkish
Cres-cent dismantles the Venetian
out-posts in the Mediterranean and the
European diplomacy recognizes
the supremacy ofle Grand Turc
These historical events and
polit-ical changes leave layers of cultural
marks in all areas inhabited by
Greek populations Some
exam-ples amongst a variety of others
prove that these marks have been
the seeds for the growing up of the
Greek cultural identity: the theatre
in the Ionian islands, in Zakynthos
mainly, is an adaptation of the
Ital-iancomedia del’ arte; poetry in
Cyprus follows the stereotypes of
the Renaissance poets, such as
Pe-trarca, succeeding however to
pro-mote a genuine love poems
tradi-tion; in Crete, the Italian (and
quite often the French) heritage is
molded within the local fabric
giv-ing birth to original literary works such as the tragedy ofErofili by Georgios Hortatzis (1637), the love, hate and war epic ofErotokritos by Vitsentzos Kornaros (written prob-ably in 1646 and published in 1713), the comedies and dramas of anonymous masters whose iden-tity is slowly emerging through arduous research that underlines the value of a “Cretan literary school” that goes strong well into the 18thcentury
If the cultural influences are suc-cessfully adapted and reworked to fit the Greek vision of the world and
of life as well as the aspirations of the people to shake off the Turkish rule, the Orthodox Church whose headquarters remain in Istanbul and the Patriarch of Constantino-ple is considered the spiritual leader of all orthodox laymen
with-in and outside the Ottoman Em-pire, tries to fix the dogma, to make it flexible in order to avoid clashes with the authorities, to clarify points of the Holy Scriptures that refute the arguments of the Catholic Church, suspected to work for the conversion of the masses to the papal rule If this standing strengthens the opposi-tion between the two Churches, it promotes at the same time the conservatism of the Orthodox priests and their strong desire to educate the “enslaved brothers”
so that by “science and knowl-edge” they serve their true faith The longing for education will be-come a standard feature during the whole period of the Ottoman rule: the Patriarch of Constantinople will invest in printing machines as early as the 17thcentury, an action that infuriated the Sultan who or-dered his killing
Trang 3Printing moved to Venice and later
on to Vienna and Paris Religious
books, historical memoirs, books
of comments on Ancient Greek
authors, propaganda material and
pamphlets on social and political
issues, manuals of conduct, works
on the modern Greek grammar,
vo-cabulary and even orthography,
es-says on philosophical concepts,
translations of literary works
main-ly from Latin, Italian and French
constitute an exceptionally rich
production that allows ideas and
innovative theories to circulate
widely This production relies on a
broad basis of “wise” or
“knowl-edgeable” persons, educated in
Padua, Paris, Mount Athos and the
Greek diaspora educational
cen-ters supported by the Orthodox
Church providing teachers and
curricula and by rich benefactors
providing lavish financial
contribu-tions As a consequence, this
ed-ucated elite will develop and
con-solidate two main lines of thought,
e.g that Orthodox Greeks are the
descendants of Ancient Greece
and that this glorious heritage
will be recovered and flourish
once the Greek “nation” is
liberat-ed from the Turkish slavery
In the second half of the 18th
cen-tury the message for the liberation
of the country will spread
through-out Europe thanks to this elite In
the first quarter of the 19thcentury
the “philhellenic” movement,
spreading from France and England
as far as the U.S.A., will give
polit-ical leverage to the aspiration for a
liberation war against the Turkish
domination The main centers for
the planning and the organization
of the national rebirth are the
Balkan territories governed by
Greeks under special status
initiat-ed and implementinitiat-ed by the Sultan
In these territories will be active Rigas Ferraios (1757-1798), preach-ing the revolt against the Turks, drawing up the map of Greece and inviting the Balkan brothers to unite and participate in the liber-ation cause for the creliber-ation of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural state Rigas will compose the famous Anthem asking “brave men not to live any longer under the oppres-sion” The activity of Rigas, trans-lator at the same time from Italian and French, will displease the Turk-ish and European establTurk-ishment:
he will be arrested in Vienna and given back to the Turkish authori-ties in Belgrade which preferred to strangle him together with some of his supporters
Adamantios Korais (1748-1833) has been luckier: born in Smyrna from
a family of merchants having their roots in the island of Chios, he lived
in Amsterdam, studied in Montpel-lier, but established in Paris and has been the witness of the French
Rigas Feraios
Trang 4Revolution He was 73 when the
War of Liberation of Greece started
in 1821, a breakthrough he helped
to shape, give it a coherent
projec-tion, a sense of conceptual
continu-ity and a realistic configuration His
contribution, always in the spirit of
a pragmatic liberalism, is still
appar-ent, whether one looks at the
Mod-ern Greek language development,
the philological comments and
ex-planations concerning the
publica-tion of Ancient Greek texts, the
political priorities, the survival and
expectations of a reborn Greek
state His prestige has been
enor-mous all over Europe; he lived
long enough to see the liberation of
his beloved country (officially
pro-claimed independent in 1830), the
“resurrection of the Nation” and the
first uncertain steps of the modern
Greek state whose territory included
the Peloponnese and a part of the
peninsula, the frontier traced 200
kilometers north of Athens
These developments would have
never materialize, if there were
not a strong and recurrent moral
support from the Greek minority liv-ing in Constantinople around the Patriarchate in the area of Fanari (presently Fener) and, at the same time, offering its services to the Ot-toman Empire Occupying diplo-matic and government highly re-garded posts, in close relation with Europe, eager to maintain and develop its privileges, this minority called “the Fanariots” has been in fact a mini-state within the Empire, a close collaborator of the authorities and simultaneously an independent group, open to ideals coming from Europe, adapting them to the reality of the Empire, giving them a Greek content that helped in putting them quickly into practice By amalgamating these inputs, the Fanariots lived dangerously: from time to time, the Empire disgraced some them, sent them to exile or decapitated others The Fanariots, many of them mer-chants established in Trieste, Livorno, Genova, Vienna, Marseille, even India, land owners in
Bulgar-ia, RomanBulgar-ia, Moldova and the south of Russia, ship-owners sail-ing as far as Montevideo under British, French or Russian flags, capital providers to the Ottoman Empire have not been only the supporters, backers and bankers
of the idea of the return to life of the fatherland Adopting the bour-geois class life-style and priorities, they have been mainly the promot-ers of culture Thanks to the prolif-eration of newspapers and maga-zines (some of them with a real feminist orientation), the develop-ment of amateur and later on pro-fessional theatrical groups, the spreading of social events related
to art manifestations, Constan-tinople and Smyrna became
cultur-Adamantios Korais
Trang 5al centers of excellence European
literary movements and schools
found disciples (or enemies) in
these places A “Fanariotic literary
school” was born that introduced
romanticism in prose and verses,
in epics and feuilleton story telling
If French influences are present,
Byron (who died in Greece during
the Liberation War) is imitated
more or less successfully The
names of Panayotis Soutzos
(1806-1868), who is considered the first
modern Greek romantic author,
or of Alexander Rizos Rangavis
(1809-1892), who develops an
in-tellectual-like neo-classical
ap-proach to poetry, are examples of
the Fanariotic understanding of
lit-erature as alitterature de salon
Romanticism will acquire a broader
signification and will become a
way of life as well as a school of
aes-thetics and social renewal in the
Ionian islands so close to Italy, so
long under Venetian rule, so fond of
the ideals of the French Revolution
(1789) and of social radicalism, so
dazzled by Napoleon and the
Napoleonic wars After the
occupa-tion of Venice by Napoleon, the
French army occupied the Ionian
is-lands and stayed there for almost
20 years (1797-1815) However,
ro-manticism was there before the
French A particular kind of
roman-ticism blending symbolistic
over-tones long before Charles
Baude-laire’ s concept ofcorrespondances
between sounds, colours, words
linking in a mystical and
quasi-tran-scendental way Nature to the
aspi-ration for an out-of-this-world
The leading figures of this
roman-ticism are Dionysios Solomos
(1798-1857) and Andreas Kalvos
(1792-1869), both born in the
is-land of Zakynthos Solomos, the son of a rich old count and a poor young housemaid, was educated
in Italy, a usual procedure for the children of the local aristocracy speaking Italian There he will be initiated to the romantic principles and will compose his first poems
He will continue writing in Italian after his return to Zakynthos in
1818 and a good part of this pro-duction will be published in Corfu (Rime improvvisate, 1822) It seems that at that time he has started writing in Greek, a lan-guage he has hardly studied or spoken HisHymn to Liberty, a long poem of 158 quatrains, is the first proof of his mastering the Greek language and the literarymιtier Written in 1824, when the Libera-tion War was embracing the whole
of the Greek peninsula and the Aegean islands, while the Ionian islands were, after the Vienna Congress in 1815 and the with-drawal of the French forces, a British protectorate, the Hymn was widely acclaimed and gave ex-tra strength to the “philhellenic”
Dionysios Solomos
Trang 6movement Soon, the composer
Nicolaos Mantzaros (born in Corfu)
put the poem into music and the
Greek national anthem was born
Solomos moved to Corfu in 1828
and died there in 1857 No one
knew then that Solomos did not
stop writing poems (as well as
fine-ly elaborated proses) and work
ceaselessly on vast lyrical
compo-sitions that modern scholars call
“sketches”, because they have
never got a final touch, they have
never been published during the
poet’s lifetime, but constitute a
patchwork of brilliant
inventive-ness and the best sample of the
Greek poetical language
Andreas Kalvos is the poet of just
20 lyricalOdes , half of them
pub-lished in Geneva in 1824, the rest
in Paris two years later (1826) An
introverted and sensitive person,
he lived in Italy and Switzerland,
worked as a university professor in
Corfu and then left for England,
where he married and managed a
young girls’ school with his wife
His poems are a blend of romantic
enthusiasm and melancholy, a
real commitment to the struggle for
the liberation of Greece, a call for
a moral standing under difficult
cir-cumstances Kalvos created his
own poetical language and
tech-nique, a unique phenomenon that
relates his inspiration to the
an-cient times, to an aristocratic
standing, to the rejection of any
or-namentation The dryness of his
lyrism has the monotony and the
thrill of a Walkyrie-like cavalcade
The independence of Greece and
the choice of the city of Athens as
the capital of the country drew the
literary forces from the periphery
(Constantinople or the Ionian
is-lands) to this new center so much burdened by its glorious past There is an “Athenian literary school” which promoted a late romanticism, quarreled about lit-erary styles and, more important, about the language to be used in literature: a vocabulary close to the ancient Greek? A vocabulary based
on the spoken language which had given anonymous folkloric songs (called “demotic poetry”) of high value during the centuries of Turkish occupation? A language like the one produced by Korais, a
“middle of the road path”? The so called “language problem” will plague the intellectual and political life of the country and it will be solved more than 150 years later by government decision in favor of the spoken language, the result of the evolution of Ancient Greek en-riched by foreign vocables, Turkish and French, Slavic and English, German to a lesser degree
An outstanding example of this os-mosis is the work of Yannis Makriyannis (1797-1864), a general
of the Liberation War, an illiterate soldier who, at the age of 32 learned how to write and decided
to present hisMemoirs , the text of
an eye-witness that goes to the heart of the events, a kind ofmise
`a nu where the best and the worse
of human behavior are given equal chances, the general keeping the role of the story-teller and of hon-est commentator and judge This text remained unknown up to
1907 Its publication did not arise the interest of the intellectuals or the scholars It is Giorgos Seferis (poet and Nobel Prize laureate) that 60 years later, revealed the im-portance of Makryiannis, the “illit-erate master” as he called him
Trang 7By 1880, a “new” Athenian literary
school will emerge Emmanuel
Roidis (1836-1904) is its prominent
representative Born in the island
of Syros, educated in Genova and
established in Athens after 1863,
he is a unique figure in Greek
let-ters as he combines a
cosmopol-itan spirit with a deep
understand-ing of daily life in the small Greek
kingdom HisPapess Johanna is
the narration of a medieval story
relating the life and adventures of
Johanna, a young and pretty
woman which succeeds in
occupy-ing Saint Peter’ s throne in Rome,
becoming a “papess” Alfred Jarry
in France and Laurence Durrell in
England have been those who
gave publicity to this novel outside
Greece forgetting on the way to
re-mind the name of the author This
work must not put aside the short
stories written by Roidis, excellent
samples of realism and social
satire
In the “new” Athenian literary school belongs Kostis Palamas (1859-1943), an extremely produc-tive poet, fiction writer, critic and playwright His inspiration is em-bracing national, personal and re-ligious themes, his versatility allows him to pass from the one genre to the other in a kind of mystique that reminds Victor Hugo, in a melancholical sotto voce close to Lamartine, in a patriotic enthusiasm where Antiquity, the opposition to the Turkish occupation and the
“Great Idea” of Greece pushed by its duty to reconquer the Byzantine
glo-ry and recover lost territories, are closely related This outline must not hide the great contribution of Pala-mas to the foundation of a real na-tional literary environment, away form a sterile and complacent ro-manticism, very close to the devel-opment of moral values and of the idea that the writer has a mission within society: to help it improve
Kostis Palamas’ statue
Trang 8The same high value attributed to
literature is visible in Georgios
Vizyinos (1849-1896) prose
Vizyi-nos who studied philosophy and
psychology in Germany is the
rep-resentative of a new trend in Greek
literature that gives consistence
and physiological depth to the
characters created by the author’ s
imagination He is known today for
his fictions that have a real
“mod-ernistic” touch and they are written
in a concise but staccato style that
leaves romanticism aside
privileg-ing the meanders of the soul
In the same context, Alexander
Papadiamantis (1851-1911) is a
true explorer of the provincial and
Athenian life, a personality that
suf-fers watching the human
medioc-rity but has enough stamina to
de-scribe it in all details, without
for-getting that “the beast is not away
from the angel” and that life is a
kaleidoscope allowing bright
im-ages to form In all his fictions and
novels, Papadiamantis puts
for-ward Freudian problems (before
Freud) either concealed or exposed
in full view, a psychoanalytic
ap-proach that makes acts and words
seem natural, the light of the Greek climate not allowing things to settle
in gloominess and rust in darkness There is a thirst for life that revig-orates the reader and a sense of unstable but manageable peace that gives a unique touch to the writer’s art Papadiamantis lived with little money writing for news-papers and magazines His Com-plete Works in a critical edition ap-peared in 1981-1985 Since then, many scholars and authors (in-cluding Milan Kundera) tend to put Papadiamantis in the tradition
of the great Europeanromanciers Poetry recovers a new start with Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), a poet born in Alexandria (Egypt) where he lived making a living as
a low level public servant He used to work meticulously on his verses and print periodically at his own expenses the so-called “loose leaves” introducing some of his poems to an audience he selected himself These publications form
a kind of chronological (and some-times thematic) units Their reprints present notable changes
as some poems are re-worked, others are eliminated and replaced
by new ones The canon of Cavafy’
s works includes 107 poems com-posed in the course of more than
35 years Scholars divide them in three categories: philosophical, historical and sensual, where the homosexuality of the poet emerges
in the middle of melancholic over-tones and a wording that reveals while it conceals This parallel game of introverted-extroverted approach is a constant parameter
in Cavafy’ s style His poems bring
in mind Fernando Pessoa’s (a Cavafy’s contemporary) works full
ofdesasosiego (disillusionment)
Constantine Cavafy
Trang 9Cavafy belongs to a particular
lit-erary category that emerged in
the first quarter of the 20th century
and had no continuation: this is a
“stand alone” category in which
one could put Kafka and Joyce,
Kavafy and Pessoa
Kavafy’ s poetry is in full contrast
with that of Angelos Sikelianos
(1884-1951), another lyrical poet
of the same period that succeeded
in moving romanticism beyond
tra-ditional boundaries thanks to his
recreation of ancient Greek myths
and legends in elegies, long poetical
compositions and theatrical plays
that he liked to call “tragedies” A
visionary that brought back to life
the Delphic celebrations (1927), an
effort that has been acclaimed but
collapsed financially
After the Paris Commune (1871)
and the emergence of socialism,
the vision of a just, moral and
equalitarian society took a literary
shape This is the canvas for the
poems and the fiction works of
Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974) who
faithful to the communist ideals
has been rewarded with the Lenin
Prize Varnalis is the representative
of a literary movement that brings
to the forefront the social injustice,
the bourgeois ideology decline, the
expectations nourished by
social-ism and the revolution In the
same framework, Konstantinos
Theotokis (1872-1923) born in
Cor-fu in a wealthy and aristocratic
family, an admirer of Nietzsche, is
a true believer and a systematic
promoter of socialism (and
com-munism) His novels describe in a
realistic way and in a vigorous
style that reminds Tolstoi or
Dos-toievsky the ups and downs of
ex-emplary characters whether they
belong to the upper social strata or
to a particular Greek proletariat liv-ing mainly in the country
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), a prolific and versatile writer, traveler and poet, a follower of Henri Berg-son’ s theories on the ΄elan vital, is sensitive to the social problems and hails the Bolshevik Revolution, but turns soon to a metaphysical and existentialistic search of a spiritual apotheosis, the result of a contin-uous struggle to overcome the
“earthy” bonds Although Kazantza-kis tries to give a solid form to a philosophical system out of these ideas (his bookSalvatores Dei pub-lished in 1927 encompasses his philosophy), he has been interna-tionally recognised thanks to his novels,Zorba the Greek (1946) be-ing the most widely known
Howev-er, all his novels (and in fact all his books) are supposed to be a by-work of a huge epic of 33,333 verses
Nikos Kazantzakis
Trang 10entitled Odyssey a “remake” of
the Homeric epic, Ulysses being a
desesperado that leaves Ithaca
af-ter his return and continues his
peregrinations that bring him to
complete loneliness climaxing in
his death in the South Pole
Away from this kind of intellectual
constructions, Kostas Karyotakis
(1896-1928), an obscure public
servant who committed suicide in
strict obedience to his pessimism
and his visceral rejection of social
rules that degrade the individual
and lead him to despair, is the link
between the declining romanticism
and the modernistic trends A
gen-uine representative of intimism
and d ΄ecadence, a follower of Jean
Morιas and Jules Laforgue, he
cre-ated a poetic fashion that survived
for a long time and is perceptible
even in contemporary poets’ works
Greek literature enters modernism
with the so-called “generation of
1930” The traumatic experiences of
the First World War, of the defeat of
the Greek army in the war with Turkey in 1922 that pushed more than 1,5 million refugees from Asia Minor into the Greek peninsula in-habited then by 6 million inhabi-tants, the emergence of a liberal bourgeois class influenced by West-ern Europe’ s cultural and civilisation developments, the formation of an urban proletariat, these are the main drivers that opened new hori-zons to literature Giorgos Seferis (1900-1971) is the leading figure of this generation A career diplomat, very demanding for himself, crafting with patience and accuracy his
vers-es, he was awarded the Nobel Prize
in 1963 Carefully studying and put-ting forward the Greek historical and literary heritage, he is aware of the contribution of high caliber au-thors of his time An admirer and translator of T S Elliot and Pound, Val ΄ery and Michaux, he adapted and incorporated new literary trends in his poetry collections published in
1961 in a final edition under the sim-ple title Poems Seferis declared in
an interview that his ultimate goal was to write simply and he kept this promise If the first contact gives the impression that he is a difficult poet, hisclart΄e pops up quickly This
is the reason why many of his poems put in music by leading song com-posers like Manos Hadjidakis, Mikis Theodorakis, Stavros Xarchakos and others have become and remain popular
If in a way Seferis is close to the sur-realists, Andreas Embirikos (1901-1975) is the emblematic figure of sur-realism in Greece Belonging to a wealthy family of ship-owners, he studied in France and introduced psychoanalysis in Greece His first collection of poems, Furnace, ap-peared in 1935 (the same year
Se-Odysseus Elytis