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ABSTRACT
Galatea Kazantzaki (nee Galatea Alexiou) (1884–1962), one of the most prolific female authorial voices in Greek Modernism, is also one of the most understudied Greek writers in Anglophone literature. Her surname, associated with her first husband Nikos Kazantzakis, seems to have impacted on the critical reception of her oeuvre and undervalued her contribution to global modernism. The essay and accompanying translations introduce Kazantzaki first by providing a succinct timeline of her life and work as she is carving out a niche for herself in a largely male dominated, literary canon. Additionally, the essay aims at navigating her early experimentations with Decadent poetics. During the seminal decade 1906–1915, a turbulent sociopolitical era for Greece, Kazantzaki is in the process of assembling a female hermeneutic code that will offer women a voice and the rigor to fend off patriarchal rule. Her version of “Salome” in the homonymous 1909 prose poem and the lyrical duet “To a Lady” and “The Pleureuse” from Brief Prose Portraits (1915), mark the emergence of a voice whose multifaceted, idiosyncratic, multimodal poetics, reread and transform Oscar Wilde's Decadent play generating a uniquely feminine discourse, conceived during the period enclosing decadent aestheticism and modernism.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Drs. Urmila Seshagiri, Sara Dunton and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos for their generous help, unflinching enthusiasm, their acute remarks, inspiration as well as their ample encouragement in the processes of research, drafting and editing. I would also like to thank E.L.I.A. (Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive) for their help, especially Mr. G. Tsaknias for all the archival work he collected for me, the long string of emails and scanned pages and Mrs. Mathildi Pyrli for granting permission to reprint the two archival photographs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Galatea Kazantzaki's oeuvre as well as translations of the cited secondary sources are my own.
2 Bristow, “How Decadent Poems Die,” 28.
3 Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, 34.
4 Tziovas, “Residual Orality and Belated Textuality in Greek Literature and Culture.” The author addresses the ambivalent relationship between the long-standing tradition of the oral poetic form and the reservations of Greek modernists to endorse the alien to the culture interiority and self-referentiality of the written text. See esp. 332–35.
5 Hext and Murray, “Introduction,” 7.
6 The ideological premises of Romanticism fostered, according to Greek high modernist authors, weakness, sickliness and a sentimentalist disposition. To Nikos Kazantzakis's understanding, “Romanticisms” are too artificial and too effeminate and, therefore, they act as deterrents to renewal (Glytzouris 10).
7 In recent decades, the Athenian publishing house Kastaniotis republished several of her later prose and non-fiction works, including some of her earlier short prose in the compilations Turning Points (2008) and The World that Dies and the World that is Born (2009).
8 It took a long while until Greek women authors were deemed reference-worthy: D.C Hesseling's Histoire de la Litterature Grecque Modern (1924), mentions only five Greek women authors; Aristos Kambanis's 1925 edition of Modern Greek Literature includes no women writers. The latter publication was revised in 1948, this time including twelve women's names, among them, that of Galatea Kazantzaki (Kontoeidi 6).
9 In Α History of Modern Greek Literature (Athens: 1973, and Μ.Ι.Ε.Τ., 272, n8. 2009), for instance, the eminent Greek literary historian Linos Politis, refers to Galatea Kazantzaki only in the context of Nikos Kazantzakis’ biography.
10 Her sonnets “Hamartolo” [Sinful] and “Ergatis” [Laborer] seem to be the only translations in English to date. See Rae Dalven's anthology Modern Greek Poetry (1949). To my knowledge, only limited pieces of her short prose work have been translated in French.
11 Originally an interview authored by Kostas Thrakiotis for the magazine Modern Greek Letters, the essay-interview was later edited and republished as “Autobiographical Note” in the tributary volume In Memoriam (1964) two years after her death.
12 The last Turkish troops abandoned Crete in 1898 but the island did not join Greece officially until 1913.
13 Among the numerous magazine and newspaper titles published by the Greek community in Alexandria, Egypt, Noumas, a journal of the small press also published in Alexandria (1903–31) and Letters, (later renamed New Letters), hosted the early works of major Greek thinkers, poets and novelists amongst whom prominent names including C. P. Cavafy, Galatea and Nikos Kazantzakis (E.L.I.A webpage).
14 Nikos and Galatea Kazantzaki exchanged pennames (i.e., Petros and Petroula Psiloriiti), while their characters’ names sometimes overlapped in their writings. She had first used her family name, Galatea Alexiou, and then adopted the pen names Lalo de Castro and Petroula Psiloriti, the latter used as a female counterpart to Kazantzakis’ pen name Petros Psiloritis. For the name Lalo de Castro, she combined the name of the female protagonist Lalo in Kazantzakis’ first 1906 play The Dawn Glows while de Castro, “of the Castle,” stood for the suburb Castro, her birthplace, in Herakleion, Crete.
15 “A True Fairy Tale” and “Beautiful Days Long Gone” (cited in Georgopoulou 10).
16 Using archival material, this biographical documentary focuses, among other things, on Kazantzaki's contribution to the Cretan press. On more than one occasion, she stirred public outrage in the conservative society of Herakleion, especially when she openly excoriated their hypocrisy and hostile sexism that drove a young Muslim woman to public shame and untimely death. See also Andrikakis, “When Galatea Challenged”; Greek National Television Archive, Authors and Eras: Galatea Kazantzaki.
17 Letters (Alexandria, Egypt), vol. 1, issues 4–5 (1911), 103–9. Kazantzaki signed the essay as Petroula Psiloriti.” Despite its brevity, “Notes on Aesthetics” could, in part, be paralleled to a mini pre-modernist manifesto.
18 The magazine Haravgi (Dawn) in Lesbos, reported a speech she delivered on the same topic in May 1911 at the Odeon of King Herod in Athens.
19 Among Kazantzaki's other works, Pappas references her 1914 novel Sick City (Arroste Politeia), a fictional account of life on the desert island of Spinalonga off the coast of Crete that for decades hosted a community of exiles suffering from leprosy. Kazantzaki's narrative became a socio-political j’accuse exposing discrimination and hypocrisy as the real social afflictions.
20 The title was most likely inspired by a line from the libretto Paggliaccio, Ruggero Leoncavallo's 1892 opera. Kazantzaki reverses the role of jealous husband and assigns it to the woman, a figure that may have come straight from Freud's approach to the pain and pleasure principle. Her suffering and unfulfilled passion prompts her to support actively her lover's sexual infidelities. Georgopoulou contends that Kazantzaki's engagement in aestheticism and the naturalistic representations of female psyche came to an end when she began to carve out a political activist's writing in defense of women's rights and left-wing politics (11–12).
21 Georgopoulou, Female Routes: Galatea Kazantzaki and the Theater, 11.
22 Early enthusiastic respondents to Kazantzaki's Ridi, included Greek poet laureate Kostis Palamas and other eminent authors and poets such as Pavlos Nirvanas, and Petros Vlastos.
23 Angela Kastrinaki contends that Kazantzaki's work endorses Gabriele d’ Annunzio's aestheticist views, that is, a hybrid form bordering realism and social criticism (ERT Archive). Along with Ridi, Pappas had reviewed Me-All of You (1910) and Scarlet Life (1911–12), novels she had written prior to the publication of Sick City, the historiographical novel that signposted her transition to realism.
24 Kazantzaki's seminal lecture “About the Theater” was delivered at Athens Conservatory in 1925. Conceived, as Georgopoulou remarks, “in the greater context of literary historicism,” her lecture on dramatic theory represented an attempt to navigate the origins of theater and to reassess its role in Greek culture (164).
25 Such was the case in the popular, above-mentioned, 1931 sonnet “Aμαρτωλό” [“Hamartolo,” “Sinful”], one of her better-known poetic variations on the portrait of the fallen woman. The aging prostitute has come to terms with the inevitability of her nomadic, rootless life, but cannot accept the relentlessness of social hypocrisy. She lists the multiple, fake names/ identities she has adopted as she moves from town to town and then into oblivion aware of the fact that women who have fallen through the cracks of society cannot reverse the fall. The poem rounds up in a loud, accusatory apostrophic couplet: “But in my living hell I call out to you/ I am your spitting image, Society, and I look just like you” (124) (my translation).
26 Pioneers was soon renamed Neoi Protoporoi (New Pioneers). In the issue of May 1932, Kazantzaki translated Langston Hughes’ mock advertisement poem “Advertisement for Waldorf Astoria” (1931). Following the publication of an offensive review of one of her plays, she stepped down to become chief editor of the short-lived Nea Epitheorisi (New Review).
27 Her investigation was published in a series of articles in the newspaper Free Public Opinion (Eleftheri Gnome).
28 Kafetzaki, “Rebellious Women and Communist Conscription,” 64.
29 Gerolymatos, An International Civil War, 31–32.
30 Alexiou, “Greek Authors during the Resistance,” 310–13.
31 Madam Ortance in particular, the aged “chanteuse,” formerly the merry prostitute in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek, reappears in Galatea's short stories. Having participated in the resistance during the war, Kazantzaki's Madame Ortance contests the narrative dictates of the original.
32 Angela Kastrinaki suggests that Galatea Kazantzaki's Humans and Superhumans unsuccessfully –and perhaps unfairly – reconstructs his personality misrelating facts and omitting the more charming aspects of his personality (“Galatea Kazantzaki” 441). In her defense, Elli Alexiou, editor of Letters to Galatea (1920–24), attempted “to set things right” and restore the onerous and distorted views about her sister (Intro iii). Once again, one cannot help but notice the analogies between Kazantzaki's autobiographical prose with H.D.'s memoir End to Torment.
33 Barbara Georgopoulou's extensive study, Female Routes: Galatea Kazantzaki and the Theater (2011), explores the dramaturgy of a “significant representative of Greek modernism [who] made her theatrical debut in 1911.” Georgopoulou concedes that Kazantzaki's obdurate insistence on writing for the “Theater of Ideas” and not “poetic drama,” stemmed from her conviction that the theater should serve as a powerful vehicle of social critique and societal reformation (254). Her first play, titled At Any Cost (1911), was staged for the theater to critical and audience acclaim. Her radical depiction of middle-class morality was, as expected, heavily debated (Kordatos, qtd. Kontoeidi 11–12).
34 Exceptions are mostly out-of-print, short story collections and two retrospective volumes, the rare 1958 anthology of her plays Avlaia (Curtain) and the equally obscure posthumous Galatea Kazantzaki: In Memoriam.
35 Angela Kastrinaki and Eirini Gergatsouli supervised the research and compilation process.
36 The dividing line between the aesthete and the decadent is not distinctively clear in Greece at the end of the 19th century given the ambivalence with which Greek high modernists deliberated against this dissident world.
37 This “lost” generation of authors wrote about social outcasts, poverty, drugs, consumption and prostitution. Its decadence-oriented thematic concerns were frequently politically nuanced. Aiming at a rigorous critique of social ills, the authors appropriated the language of the impoverished, luben proletariat (Dounia, Literature and Politics, 43–45).
38 Kastrinaki, Our Earlier Literary Works, 427.
39 Hext and Murray, “Introduction,” 7 (italics in original).
40 I have borrowed the term from Dierkes-Thrun, but I use it as an umbrella term to encapsulate the multiple, artistic, intergeneric and interdisciplinary variations of Salome.
41 Christina Dounia locates the import of the Salome trend in 1896 and relates its impact on the literary circles of the “decadents and symbolists [who], inspired by the rhetoric of psychoanalysis, [. . .] attempt to explore the nature of sexuality” (“Versions of Salome” 204). Salome's narrative with its “openly provisional nature” (Price 328) became such a popular literary legend that “by 1912 Maurice Craft had counted 2,789 poems whose subject matter was Salome” (“Versions of Salome” 204–5).
42 C.P. Cavafy's version “Salome” (1896), the first known Greek poem about Salome, remained unpublished until the posthumous collection Hidden Poems (1993). Cavafy portrays her as victim of her erotic obsession when she is shunned by a prophet turned into Sophist and devotee of Platonic philosophy.
43 Dimitrakopoulos (1864–1922), an early aesthete poet, was popular in the coteries of fin de siècle Greek symbolists. Skokou's Journal (Hemerologion Skokou) published his Salome poem in 1897 (Dounia, “Versions of Salome,” 207).
44 The “Salomes” in Cavafy and Kazantzakis die either as a result of male indifference or through a form of ritual sacrifice that will safeguard the male artist's creativity (see also Kastrinaki, “Spaces of Decadence”).
45 Denisoff, “Decadence and Aestheticism,” 32.
46 Potolsky, “Praise of Decadence,” 101.
47 Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity, 3.
48 In Greek popular folklore, the gypsy stereotypically represents the socially liminal woman with no established homeland, sometimes a thief, sometimes a charlatan; expectedly, she is also a witch and a clairvoyant (card or coffee ground reader) associated with spells, charms and, on occasion, with evil spirits.
49 Dunton, “H.D.’s Ways of Seeing,” 147.
50 Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity.
51 Spackman, “Interversions,” 38.
52 For a thorough analysis of the creative appropriation of art in modernist writing, Sara Dunton offers a challenging reading and reinterpretation of Elizabeth Prettejohn's theory of “double distancing” in the light of ekphrastic practices in high modernism. Then, focusing on Pre-Raphaelite scholarship, Dunton assesses the influence of Walter Pater on H.D.'s and Ezra Pound's development of literary ekphrasis (esp. 97–100).
53 The text is rich in allusions to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours and, once again, to paintings of Decadence (Salome Dancing before Herod and the Apparition) by Gustave Moreau. See a detailed analysis in Weir, 50–52.
54 Poulakidas, “Kazantzakis’ Serpent and Lily and its Symbolism”.
55 Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity, 3.
56 Jamison, Redefining the Relationship, 43.
57 Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity, 203.
58 Apart from its evident religious association to Virgin Mary, Despoina in Greek connotes the notion of female ruler, the Lady and the appropriate gender equivalent to the male form Despot.
59 Denisoff, “Decadence and Aestheticism,” 33.
60 The play was staged by the Greek National Theater in 1932. Its temporary commercial success drew in audiences for quite some time but it also triggered the indignation of some rigid, left-wing critics who derided it for its clumsy realism and erroneous dramatic practices. Kazantzaki's response was published in the newspaper Proia (Morning) 11/7/1932.
61 Stone, Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture, 3.
62 Galatea Kazantzaki titled the prose piece by introducing the anonymous woman as a Mourner (in French culture la Pleureuse is the Mourner, a woman wearing a black veil and hat as a token of mourning for the loss of a loved one; also, a professional mourner hired during funerals). In Greek, “pleureuse” refers solely to the hat and veil as symbols of female mourning. The intended pun acquires its Greek cultural, female referentiality to serve Kazantzaki's social critique during the early stages of her published career. Timewise, the two prose pieces signaled Kazantzaki's transition into social realism in confluence with the emerging literary dictates of left-wing political ideologies.
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Anna Fyta
Anna Fyta teaches English and American Literature at Athens College, Greece. Her doctoral and comparative literature research work center on Modernist poetry and the reception of classics. She is also interested in the interdisciplinary conversations of American women poets with classical Hellenism and Greek mythology. Her essay on H.D.'s “Translation as Mythopoesis: Helen in Egypt as Meta-Palinode” was published in The Classics in Modernist Translation (2019) by Bloomsbury Academic. In her article “Dramatic Heterotopias and Transformations of Mythic Space” which appeared in the journal ExNa (Ex-centric Narratives) (Aristotle U., 2020), she interprets Joan Jonas's post-conceptual project Lines in the Sand alongside H.D.'s Euripidean poetics.