Greek Literature

Abstract

The literature of modern Greece consists almost entirely of poetry. There is no major prose writer. To an educated Greek, poetry is a natural response to experience. The struggle for expression in vernacular, demotic (demotike) as opposed to artificial, literary Greek (katharevousa: ‘purist’ Greek introduced by Adamantios Korais, 1748–1857, who adapted the demotic to pedantic grammar and syntax, in an attempt to recreate the language of classical Athens) absorbed most of the energies of the liberal writers of the Eighties (who arose in the literatures of all the European countries). This struggle was eventually won for poetry; but it must be emphasized that the problem has not yet been solved. Greek poetry still hovers between the demotic and the purist. (Officialdom insists on the katharevousa, which is used in all public communications; but this is now being changed — unfortunately many ill-willed or stupid people equate the demotic with ‘communism’.) The demotic, while it is the living language, lacks abstract words, which frequently makes it difficult for the poet — although perhaps there is a lesson here. The problem was frequently solved, as even by Palamas (q.v.) at times, by resort to periphrasis as tedious and dead as the purist language itself.