Activity: Talk or presentation types › Presentation
Description
The Greek Civil War (1947-1949) was, essentially, the Cold War - just warmed up. Kostas Varnalis, radical Marxist poet, translator, and journalist, chose its first year to write his contribution to the conversation: The Diary of Penelope (1947), a warped satirical retelling of the Odyssey that figures as an often-bizarre allegory of twentieth-century history. Lampooning Brits, Germans, and right-wing upper-class Greeks, the text is not shy in lobbing a Marxist critique of World War Two - and world politics as a whole - at thinly-veiled ancient stand-ins, before it seems to sink into yet another instance of left melancholia. It is my contention that, in his satirical classical reception in such a period, Varnalis rouses us towards action, breaking the fourth wall, the dialectical-historical-materialist cycle, and the Iron Curtain to agitate for a revolutionary effort to overcome, both violently in Greece, and in the worldwide (cold) conflict that was to follow.