Novel
Argo
Αργώ
Giorgos Theotokas · 1936
Synopsis
Athens after the defeat in Asia Minor. Around a circle of students, the sons of the law professor Notarás and their classmates look for a way to spend their youth: one turns to communism, another to a career, another to mysticism, while the country tends to its million refugees.
Context
The book appeared in two volumes, the first in the autumn of 1933 from Pyrsós, the second three years later, completing the work. The author explains at the head of the first that he wanted at first to bring to life a few figures that haunted him, and that the work led him to give a general picture of Greek life. He puts into it the experience of a student association in which he had been active in 1925 and 1926, and builds the Notarás family on the Hesiodic myth of the races. There is no French translation; the English, by E. M. Brooke and A. Tsatsopoulos, appeared in 1951.
Who it is for
Two volumes, many characters, a slow pace: it is a fresco rather than a plot, read in Greek or in English, nothing of it existing in French.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the great novel of the generation of 1930, it fixed the image of an Athenian youth divided after 1922 between political faiths and renunciation.