KONSTANTINOS THEOTOKIS
Short stories
introduction edited by Anna Afentulidu, published by the Association for the Distribution of Useful Books, p. 430

One hundred years since his death, sir Konstantinos Theotokis he still remains one of her most imposing figures Greek prose. What fascinates us in his work? Why does the pessimistic perspective of the preface, which dominates its pages, not dissolve its texts? And why aren’t we confused by the dopiolalia idioms he often resorts to? Because the Corfu writer is a master; he combines drama with rough proposition; he brings people to the stage of prose the moment they collide; he combines love passion with the painful call of nature; it emphasizes the morality of Greek provincial society, which at the beginning of the 20th century was still archaic. The characteristics of an ethnographer, a realist, a naturalist, all together summarize the strength with which he moves his people in the bosom of the Corfiat community, where the cruelty of male rule and the cruelty of the laws of honor dominate. But what the Mother of God does has neither historical nor geographical limits, since she manages to undress the human soul during the hours of her greatest test.

“Without an excessive emphasis on space-time scenery,” Anna Afentulidu, editor of the volume, notes, “and without [ο συγγραφέας] to conduct oneself in psychological observations, in addition to transmitting to us the internal monologue of his faces, reveals to us a social world strongly characterized by injustice, depravity and cruelty, which, nevertheless, does not cease to manifest itself with very strong forces of inertia.

The stories of Korfiat consist of eleven short stories and are (together, I think, with the short story “The Life and Death of Caravel”) the best that the Mother of God gave us. One of our oldest institutions, the Association for the Distribution of Useful Books (SOB), founded in 1899 and managed by Dimitrios Vikelas and Georgios Drosini, publishes under the general direction of Yannis Papakostas all the narrative and poetic works of Konstantinos Theotokis in nine volumes. . The impetus for publication was the fact that the first publication of The Life and Death of Caravel was found in the Proodos newspaper of Volos in 1920 in 73 sequels. And the absence of a manuscript tradition, as noted by Yannis Papakostas, makes this discovery the first key evidence of the author’s approach to the work. The names of other philological curators of the series – Alexis Ziras, Euripidis Garantoudis, Olga Bezadaku, Theodosis Pilarinos, Dimitris Kokoris, Anna Katzigianni and Orestis Alexakis – attest to the importance of the project launched by the Association for the Distribution of Useful Books.

It’s a pity, however, that this good establishment hasn’t tried to modernize its publications to give SOB a new lease of life, making it modern and more attractive. In addition to the eleven Tales of Corthia, the volume also includes five Historical or Mythological Tales by Konstantinos Theotokis, inspired by mythology, Greek and Roman antiquity, and the Byzantine Middle Ages.

What is the value of the lyricism and aestheticism of this second category of texts? Recreating our roots, oh realism And naturalism The History of Corfiat has the undeniable property of changing our Greek face over time. On the other hand, in the aesthetics of “Historical or mythological stories” we enjoy the high artistic size of the Virgin when we watch how She breathes life into an old, completely alien world.