are lots of examples through history when the distribution of power, or of resources or both, especially when the abuse of the havenots is egregious, that radical events occur.
Sometimes these are political. In this story they are personal,
I dont think it will be a historical first for GR types to hear that on a small, poverty stricken Aegean island, Skiathos, sometime in theth century but from the introduction by the translator, sadly, not much has changed women were horribly oppressed.
From the time they could walk they were working, serving someone else, This is, in fact how we meet our pro or an tagonista an old woman whose name changed through life to reflect who she was serving not who she was.
“In her private thoughts, when she summed up her entire life, she saw that she had never done anything except serve others, . ”
We then learn about the increasingly impossible and absolutely extortionate, unconscionable dowry system expected of people who are barely scratching out their sustenance, Every poor family, every widow, all doing extra work, all living in misery because of the absolute necessity, the implacable need to provide increasingly large dowries, They must, must set up their daughters a house, a vineyard, an olive grove, and now money! More and more, or your daughter will be with you forever.
Why was it critical to marry your daughters off Ah! A perfect patriarchal oppressive maneuver, worthy of ath century Trump! Women who were not married could not work.
So unmarried daughters were A Burden,
This contributed to the necessary self hatred, Women who, by the way, did all the serving, all the unpaid work are too many, and too costly:
“, . meaningful shake of the head to the women and old crones, as they discussed the great superfluity of young girls, the rarity of young men, their journeys abroad, their huge demands for dowries and all the tortures a Christian woman went through to establish her weaker vessels “.
So our heroine, our demonic, inspired heroine, decides to do something about this awful situation, despite the pain,
“Then the baby daughter began to cry very softly, moaning unbearably, Frankojannou forgot all the remorse she had felt so deeply under the black wings of her dreams, Once again she was torn by the claws of reality, and began to think inside herself, ”
But those “claws of reality”, Reality. Yup, that was the reality, Was she wrong
When someone sees no way out, but pain, and a life of slavery, whose to say
This is a chilling, angry, righteous, sad and fascinating book.
A really important one. And i want to know what everyone thinks after they read it, So, please read it, and tell me, I was introduced to Papadiamantis by my Greek Professor, who called him "the Dostoevsky of Greece, " Though a lot of his earlier work is more influenced by French Romanticism, his later work like The Murderess is clearly more of a Russianinfluenced animal.
The Murderess is like a mini version of Crime and Punishment, but ruralGreek style from a woman's perspective, Substitute Raskolnikov with ayearold Greek grandmother and you'll be close to having an impression of this little novella, Σκοτεινό έργο, πραγματικό αριστούργημα. When I learned that C, P. Cavafy and Odysseus Elytis both admired the prose of Alexandros Papadiamantis, I knew I had to read some of his work, Advised that his shorter pieces are much better than his novels, I read the collection Tales From a Greek Island and then the novella The Murderess, held to be his best work.
In light of Elytis' leftist leanings, I was more than a little surprised to find that Papadiamantis was a religious reactionary, who objected to the emancipation of women and bewailed democracy and other European habits as unsuitable for the Greeks.
In one of his stories he appears to regret that Greek women no longer wore veils, which they had been obliged to do under the Ottoman occupation.
Nonetheless, he was no misogynist he was well aware of the complete lack of freedom of women inth century Greece, and he portrayed this fact in many of his stories with complete sympathy for the women, who quite often are the main characters.
And he was no elitist his stories are generally set in the lowest economic strata,
Since he was so conservative, it was not surprising to find that he wrote much of his work in the antiquarian katharevousa Greek, which harkens back to the Greek spoken in Athens in theth century BCE, though apparently he leavened it with his own idiosyncratic diction.
In his dialogues, however, he used contemporary colloquial speech, even dialect when appropriate, The translator, Elizabeth Constantinides, of Tales From a Greek Island assures us that his diction is completely unique and that a page of his prose can be immediately identified.
Unfortunately, there is nothing linguistically notable about her translations, just a very few halfhearted gestures towards slang in some of the dialogue, Nonetheless, something else does come through a combination of empathy, watchfulness, and relaxed patience which I have not encountered before,
The short stories in Tales are set on the island of Skiathos, where Papadiamantis was born and raised, and with empathetic, if sometimes sardonic humor provide a rather grim picture ofth century Greek island life.
Though Papadiamantis never married, nearly all of these stories revolve around marriage, one way or another, If not about marriage in the offing the dream of a marriage or about a marriage being lived, then about the onerous dowries families needed to pay to marry off their daughters and the extremes to which this custom forced them to go, such as marrying their daughters to extremely unsuitable men in order to reduce the dowry, or waitingyears for a son to return from America with enough money to allow his younger sister to marry.
Just two of many.
Inevitable consequences of this custom are the regret and resentment parents experienced when a daughter was born, Needless
to say, in some parents this found rather extreme expression murder or, if not murder, then murder just barely averted, stayed in the last moment, as evidenced in this collection.
But in The Murderess, one strides directly to multiple murder, With such a title I am hardly spoiling the story if I reveal that a grandmother, a herbalist and healer by trade, again on the isle of Skiathos, reviews her harsh life and the prospects of her daughter and newly born, sickly granddaughter and decides that girls would be better off dead.
Remarkably, Papadiamantis is able to make this most unappealing premise into a powerful little book by combining Raskolnikovian selflaceration with a touch of Medean madness in the idyllic setting of an Aegean island and using finely judged flashbacks to fill in background and change the pace and mood.
Very nicely done all around,
I share now Cavafy's and Elytis' admiration for Papadiamantis' work, but it is high time to leave behind the sad and claustrophobic society ofth century Skiathos.
Aποχαιρετιστήριος !
In The Murderess all the main characters are women, while the men are jokes or monsters,
At this time, in this place a small island where everyone knew everybody's business marriage was the only possibility for a man and woman to ease their passion.
With all of the narrow minded busybodies poring over other people's lives, even the innocent were in trouble, . .
In one story the parents of the bride signed over to the groom their house and furnishings and paid cash! In another, the family signed over half their property and mortgaged the rest to provide cash.
Her parents solved the dowry problem by marrying her off to a simpleton who was satisfied with a perfectly worthless dowry, . .
Rating
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