Stratis Myrivilis was a pioneer novelist in Modern Greek Literature.
He was also the author of a famous antiwar novel based upon his experiences fighting
the First World War, “Life in the Tomb”.
I’m Indy Neidell, welcome to a Great War special episode about Stratis Myrivilis and
“Life in the Tomb”.
That name- Stratis Myrivilis- is a pen name.
He was born Efstratios Stamatopoulos in 1890 in the village of Sykamia on the island of
Lesbos.
Now, Lesbos was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, and indeed had been since 1462.
Efstratios was the first of five children and in 1905, he moved to Mytilene, the island
capital, to attend high school.
There, he showed an aptitude for literature right from the start.
Lesbos has a long, even ancient, and very rich artistic tradition in literature, poetry,
and music, dating back to Arion and Sappho over two millennia ago, and in the early 20th
century, the Northeastern Aegean islands and the nearby section of the Anatolian coast
had a vibrant cultural life, the “Aeolian School.”.
Efstratios finished school in 1910 and got work as a teacher.
In 1912, he moved to Athens to study Philosophy and Law.
He dropped out because of financial problems, and worked writing for various Athenian newspapers
and magazines, but when the First Balkan War began in 1912, he volunteered for the Greek
Army- remember, he was still an Ottoman citizen.
He was wounded in the leg by a Bulgarian machine gun at the Battle of Kilkis-Lachanas, but
survived the war and returned to a Lesbos that had been liberated by the Greek navy.
Over the next few years, he built his reputation as a columnist and novelist on Lesbos (can
I call him a lesbian novelist?), publishing “Red Stories”, his first novel, in 1915.
It was during this time that he took his pen name; Stratis is a diminutive of his first
name, and Myrivilis is the folk name for Lepetimnos, the tallest mountain on Lesbos.
During the World War and the National Schism between pro-Entente Venizelists and the Royalists,
loyal to King Constantine, who was married to the Kaiser’s sister- which we talked
all about in our Greek specials- Myrivilis was a volunteer in the Venizelist Salonika
government army.
He would eventually make Second Lieutenant, survive the war and fight on the losing side
in the Greco-Turkish War.
After that, he returned to Lesbos, married and had children, and continued to write.
He would move to Athens in the 30s, and in 1936, the same year new Prime Minister Ioannis
Metaxas established his fascist regime in Greece, “Life in the Tomb”, Myrivilis’
most famous novel, was banned and would remain banned until after World War Two.
The first edition of I zoe en tafo, it’s Greek name, was published April Fools Day,
1924.
That name was pretty familiar to his audience, being the title of a Byzantine hymn that laments
Jesus’ descent into the Underworld, but also expresses the imminent joy of his Resurrection.
Even while he was in the trenches near Monastir in 1917, Myrivilis was thinking of publishing
his experiences in novel form.
In fact, a chapter of the future book was published already that year, and the stories
that make up the novel appeared in 1923 and 1924 in a local Lesbos newspaper before they
all came out together in novel form.
He chose to write about the Great War and not the other two conflicts in which he fought
because it was a war of stagnation, of trenches, unlike the other two that were wars of motion.
In fact, in Tomb, a captain says to the soldiers, “This is not the Balkan Wars.
You do not need bravery, enthusiasm, and craze.
This war is subterranean.
The better you hide, the better soldier you are.”
The book is an interesting construction.
It’s biographical, using Sergeant Antonis Kostoulas as Myrivilis, a soldier on the Macedonian
Front.
Now, Kostoulas dies, right?
A French soldier is stabbed and killed by a Bulgarian while clearing a trench with a
flamethrower.
Kostoulas is right beside the Frenchman and becomes a human torch.
He is buried on the spot, but in his “tomb” with the Frenchman and three fallen Bulgarians,
his staff sergeant finds a bunch of his letters, still intact, that he’d written to his fiancée,
but couldn’t post because of censorship.
The Staff Sergeant decides to publish them, to show the horror of the war, and this is
the book.
Each chapter of the book is a letter dealing with a different subject.
Kostoulas is an ardent patriot and ready for the fight initially, but the reality of war
in the trenches, the death and destruction that comes to citizens of all nations, and
the “false chivalry and villainy” of modern war soon disgusts him.
He reminisces about life in prewar Lesbos and plans for his future- especially his marriage.
All other characters in the novel are auxiliary, since the letters, being personal, can’t
have anyone else’s point of view.
Life in the Tomb does not depict any heroic deeds, but rather all the misery and adversity
of war.
We see endless, exhausting marches, the destruction of Monastir, artillery barrages, the use and
effects of poison gas, and the inability to bury a blasted corpse on an active battlefield.
Disease, the hardships of the soldiers’ families back home, how soldiers from both
sides deserted to escape service, the courts martial and the executions, often done to
instill fear and create discipline and not to punish actual crimes.
We read of Kostoulas’ feelings of revulsion upon killing a Bulgarian with his bayonet-
his first kill, and his shame, not pride, when being awarded the War Cross, and really
the whole concept of a generations’ youth wasted.
A big problem is that soldiers have too much time to think during trench warfare and “thought
is bad for a soldier, for it affects his morale”.
There are consequently many discussions between Kostoulas and his men about life, death, politics,
women- it’s at times like a long philosophical essay.
And unlike other antiwar novels, it does not have the themes of how war changes men or
bring out primitive survival instincts, but rather emphasizes the value of peace, the
value of life, and how we recognize those values when we lose them.
The novel also presents all the more pleasant distractions of the soldiers that give them
the strength to carry on- the blossoming of the spring, a sweet-voiced Bulgarian song
coming from the enemy trench, a pornographic magazine.
The most famous chapter is “The Secret Poppy”, in which Kostoulas recovers from a leg wound
in a muddy trench.
One might under the full moon he finds a red poppy that had germinated in a sandbag.
This makes him realize that life and hope can turn up in the grimmest of places, even
a trench full of death.
Both his mental and physical conditions improve; he thinks of his childhood and even sings
an old children’s song to keep the feeling alive.
The poppy is soon destroyed by an artillery barrage, but you really see that “Life in
the Tomb” is an ode to hope, life, and beauty, and not just a chronicle of war and death.
Myrivilis’ life outside the war and the novel is not really within the scope of this
channel, but he was a three-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He died at the age of 79, in 1969.
We want to thank Valantis Athanasiou for the research on this episode.
If you want to check out Life in the Tomb, you can buy it via the link in the video description
through which we get a small percentage of the checkout price.
If you want to learn more about the political background of Greece in and before WW1, check
out our special episode right here.
See you next time.