La littérature comme expérience personnelle : la Macédoine et Stratis Myrivilis

Abstract

This article examines the relationship of Stratos myrivilis, -a Greek writer, who was born on Lesbos in 1890 and died in Athens in 1967- with Macedonia, which he knew as a soldier during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, and then during the First World War from 1917-1919. It is based on myrivilis’s novel Life in the Tomb, which was published in 1923-1924 and reprinted several times. The article underscores the narrator’s distress as expressed in the chapter “The Ghost Town”, when he participated, in 1919,in the clash between the Greeks and the French, in the face of the complexity of the situation in Macedonia when the borders are constantly in flux, where one war follows another, and where the alliances are made and unmade at the population’s expense. On the one hand it shows how Myrivilis, in the chapters “In the House of Kindnes” and “Zavali Maïko—Poor Mother” comments on the feelings of the members of the family where, wounded, he spends his convalescence, how he analyses the cultural identity of these people who regard themselves as neither Bulgarians, Serbs, nor Greeks but simply Macedonian Orthodox, and finally how the inhabitants fall into the trap of the Greco-Bulgarian rivalry between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the independent Bulgarian Church, the Exarchate. On the other hand, it presents the stance of the writer, who seems to distance himself from the northern neighbours when they use the term “Macedonia” to describe a political entity rather than a geographical one. In conclusion, the article underlines the humanism of Myrivilis, who described the catastrophies of war and human vanity and advocated the need to surmount their differences and live together in peace.

Keywords

• macedonian identity
• war novels
• nationalistic propaganda
• pacifism
• greek-bulgarian conflict
• Macedonia