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A book I have been waiting for in English translation.
Angel Classics description
Konstantinos Theotokis
Slaves in their Chains
Translated by J.M.Q. Davies
"Publication of this first English translation of a classic Modern Greek novel coincides with the 150th anniversary, on 21 May, of the union of the Ionian Islands with mainland Greece.
Konstantinos Theotokis, a Corfiot aristocrat turned socialist, writing on the threshold of the modern era as Corfu emerged from centuries of Venetian and British rule, chronicled the decline of the local italianized nobility and the loves and honour killings of their peasants with matchless power and compassion. His masterpiece Slaves in their Chains (1922) is the tragicomic saga of a noble family’s descent into poverty, dishonour, suicide and madness on the eve of Greece’s entry into the Great War.
Old Count Ophiomachos in the clutches of a wily money-lender, his daughter blackmailed into abandoning her idealistic but chronically ailing lover for a crude but wealthy doctor, and her idle brother in thrall to a vindictive mistress all come dramatically to life in scenes of great intensity and passion. And from the deftly caricatured supporting cast of bankers, poetasters, impoverished aristocrats, loose wives, young radicals and nepotistic politicians, a satirical picture of decadent, fin-de-siècle Corfu emerges for which Theotokis was never quite forgiven by his fellow islanders.
The ambiguities of Theotokis’s own complex personality and the classical structure and symbolic leitmotifs of this remarkable novel, here available in English for the first time, are absorbingly explored in the translator’s introduction".
‘I am delighted that this last and most ambitious novel by one of modern Greece’s leading and most interesting authors is appearing in English.’
– Peter Mackridge, Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek, University of Oxford
Angel Classics description
Konstantinos Theotokis
Slaves in their Chains
Translated by J.M.Q. Davies
"Publication of this first English translation of a classic Modern Greek novel coincides with the 150th anniversary, on 21 May, of the union of the Ionian Islands with mainland Greece.
Konstantinos Theotokis, a Corfiot aristocrat turned socialist, writing on the threshold of the modern era as Corfu emerged from centuries of Venetian and British rule, chronicled the decline of the local italianized nobility and the loves and honour killings of their peasants with matchless power and compassion. His masterpiece Slaves in their Chains (1922) is the tragicomic saga of a noble family’s descent into poverty, dishonour, suicide and madness on the eve of Greece’s entry into the Great War.
Old Count Ophiomachos in the clutches of a wily money-lender, his daughter blackmailed into abandoning her idealistic but chronically ailing lover for a crude but wealthy doctor, and her idle brother in thrall to a vindictive mistress all come dramatically to life in scenes of great intensity and passion. And from the deftly caricatured supporting cast of bankers, poetasters, impoverished aristocrats, loose wives, young radicals and nepotistic politicians, a satirical picture of decadent, fin-de-siècle Corfu emerges for which Theotokis was never quite forgiven by his fellow islanders.
The ambiguities of Theotokis’s own complex personality and the classical structure and symbolic leitmotifs of this remarkable novel, here available in English for the first time, are absorbingly explored in the translator’s introduction".
‘I am delighted that this last and most ambitious novel by one of modern Greece’s leading and most interesting authors is appearing in English.’
– Peter Mackridge, Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek, University of Oxford
KONSTANTINOS THEOTOKIS (1872–1923) came from an ancient family which fled to Corfu after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. As a student in Paris he lived extravagantly, neglected his studies and without taking his degree moved to Venice. At the age of nineteen he married a Catholic Bohemian baroness considerably older than himself, from whom ten years later he became estranged. On the dilapidated Theotokis country estate in Corfu he immersed himself for two decades in philosophy, Sanskrit and European literature, wrote powerful Naturalist short fiction about Corfiot aristocratic and peasant life, and produced a distinguished body of translations of classic European literature.
In 1897 Theotokis took part in the Cretan insurrection against the Turks, after which he turned towards marxism and helped found a socialist club. In the lead-up to the Great War he endorsed the pro-Entente policies of Greece’s liberal Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. The novel Slaves in their Chains (1922) is his most personal work and artistically his finest. He died of stomach cancer at the age of fifty-one.
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