Novel
Leandros
Ο Λέανδρος
Panagiotis Soutsos · 1834
Synopsis
In a Greece barely liberated, Leandros writes to his friend Charilaos the letters of a hopeless love: he has found Coralie, the friend of his childhood, and cannot hope to have her. To forget her, he leaves the town and travels the country, from Nafplio to the battlefields of the war, as far as Athens.
Context
The book appears in the year the capital moves from Nafplio to Athens, in a country in search of a shared history. Its epistolary form comes from Goethe's Werther and Foscolo's Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, but the stages of the journey carry a national discourse: every place passed through mattered in Antiquity or in the war that has just ended, and the hero stops there to draw a lesson from it. Before the ruins of Athens, he asks his correspondent whether he feels the same melancholy at walking among the ancient stones and the new buildings. The text was reissued by Nefeli in 1996. Marie-Jeanne Hobé translated it into French for L'Harmattan in 2002.
Who it is for
A short epistolary novel, written in the learned language of the educated of the time. One must accept the exalted tone of 1834 and the long digressions on ruins and battlefields.
Prizes and reception
The first novel of modern Greece and the first book of its romanticism, it fixed for a century the form in which the country told its own story to itself.
Sources for this page 2
The pages consulted to check this page.