RRP:  £12.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: 2014
ISBN: 9780946162789
PAGES: 256
Paperback original

Konstantinos Theotokis

Slaves in their Chains

Translated by J.M.Q. Davies

Slaves in their Chains, set in Corfu, condenses more than fifty years of social change that began with the union of the Ionian Islands with Greece in 1864. The free-flowing thoughts and utterances of some of the characters are reminiscent of Proust or Joyce (Ulysses was published in the same year, 1922, as this pioneering Modern Greek novel). This is the first English translation.

‘Theotokis’s masterly anatomy of the old ruling class of his native island in terminal decline is as tightly constructed and claustrophobic as a tragedy by Ibsen or Strindberg.
[…]
‘Old Count Ophiomachos is broke. Every step that might save his family from ruin involves trampling on ancient notions of honour. His sons are feckless dandies. His daughter Eulalia is bullied into giving up the love of her life for a dreary marriage to a wealthy arriviste. […] These people are doomed, and the novel follows the intersecting paths of their doom with an anatomist’s precision.’
[

Roderick Beaton, TLS, 11 July 2014

KONSTANTINOS THEOTOKIS (1872–1923) came from an ancient family which fled to Corfu after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. As a student in Paris he lived extravagantly, neglected his studies and without taking his degree moved to Venice. At the age of nineteen he married a Catholic Bohemian baroness considerably older than himself, from whom ten years later he became estranged. On the dilapidated Theotokis country estate in Corfu he immersed himself for two decades in philosophy, Sanskrit and European literature, wrote powerful Naturalist short fiction about Corfiot aristocratic and peasant life, and produced a distinguished body of translations of classic European literature.

In 1897 Theotokis took part in the Cretan insurrection against the Turks, after which he turned towards marxism and helped found a socialist club. In the lead-up to the Great War he endorsed the pro-Entente policies of Greece’s liberal Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. The novel Slaves in their Chains (1922) is his most personal work and artistically his finest. He died of stomach cancer at the age of fifty-one.