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THE CATASTROPHE OF 1922 A chapter in ELIAS VENEZIS New York: Twayne CHAPTER 1 The Catastrophe of 1922 I Introduction ELIAS Venezis’ significance as a modern Greek writer may be approached in various ways. He belongs, for example, to the powerful group which successfully established the demotic as the dominant language of Greek literature. Venezis, by his practice, helped to confirm the victories already won over the purists. The purpose of such demotic writers as Aristoteles Valaorites, Kostis Palamas, and Nikos Kazantzakis (to name but a few) was not merely to use the people’s speech, but to refine and ennoble it by literary exercise. The campaign to dignify the demotic had more than literary implications. It defined the writer’s attitude toward such dynamic subjects as the monarchy, the structure of society, and the meaning of life itself. To be demotic as an artist meant to go beyond the ancient glories, myths, and memories, most of them already embalmed in lovely verbal forms, and to strike out for new literary achievement, using the common language, even though this often employed words that the purists regarded as vulgar. Venezis is also included in the Aeolian School of Greek writers who derive from Asia Minor.1 Apart from Venezis, the most prominent writers of this school are Fotis Kontoglou, Stratis Doukas, and Stratis Myrivilis. Venezis, however, occupies a most important place as the leadering chronicler of the Catastrophe, the debacle which the Greeks suffered in Asia Minor in 1922. Others have also written on this subject, but Venezis did so outstandingly in his first major work, Number 31328. This narrative relates in very realistic terms the author’s own experiences as a slave in the labor battalions organized by the Turks. The theme of social upheaval that is depicted here is to reappear both in short stories and in other novels. Venezis is very effective in dramatizing the exodus, the refugees on the road, and the fate of individuals uprooted and at the mercy of chance. Death happens as casually as suffering, and suffering is everywhere. But if the evil, as in Number 31328, results from the deeds of a human enemy, Venezis does not urge the reader to hate this enemy. One never knows in this precarious life how soon it will be the enemy’s turn to be the poor devil whose grief must demand our pity. Venezis also figures in the literature of modern Greece as a member of the “generation of 1930,” a group of twenty or more writers who came into prominence in or about that year.2 The two books which qualified Venezis for inclusion were Manolis Lekas (1928), a collection of short stories, and Number 31328, which was published in 1931. Within this very vital group are the Nobel Prize winner George Seferis, George Theotokas, Stratis Myrivilis, and Nikephoros Vrettakos. They are not bound together by any ideological affinity; yet they do form an identifiable group, and no other such coterie has come as close as this one to dominating the Greek literature of our time.3 Elias Venezis is a genuine man of letters. He has produced in every major genre except poetry. Still quite prolific, he has published sixteen books and hundreds of articles in magazines and newspapers. The wide range of interest in the journalistic articles shows his curiosity and sophistication. Of the sixteen books, five are novels; and three of them, Number 31328, Serenity, and Beyond the Aegean are undoubted masterpieces. Next in literary importance are his five collections of short stories. They begin with his very first book, Manolis Lekas, and end, as of this date, with The Defeated. Venezis has also written several radio dramas. His one full length play, Block C (1946), reflects the agonizing days of his imprisonment and near execution by the Germans in October, 1943. The play survived its initial and disappointing performance by the National Theater and has since enjoyed regular production in the Greek provinces and on Cyprus.4 Block C is an important part of his extensive literary reaction to the Second World War; and war, as we shall see, is one of his major themes. In the five remaining books Venezis emerges as a traveler and historian. His three travelogues prove once again that this genre is popular in Greece. Some of the best writing of Nikos Kazantzakis, for example, is in his books of travel, such as Japan: China, a lively record of his adventures in the Orient.5 In this category Venezis wrote Autumn in Italy, America, and The Argonauts. Besides depicting the urbane tourist making visits to exciting places, these books reveal deeper aspects of his thought which have a bearing on his more significant fiction. Both in 1952 and in 1955 Venezis published histories, Archbishop Damaskinos and Chronicle of the Bank of Greece. The term “chronicle” may best describe them since they are not based on the kind of scholarly research which we associate with today’s historiography. The former book documents the activities of the Archbishop of Athens during the German Occupation, from the time he assumed the ecclesiastical throne on June 6, 1941, until the day of liberation, October 12, 1944. The latter book, which documents the history of the Bank, reflects the author’s lifelong career as one of its employees. (Perhaps no other regular bank employee in the world has written more novels, short stories, and articles than he.) When Venezis retired in 1957, he held the title of Assistant Director. In the same year he received the highest honor his country can bestow upon an author: election to the Academy of Athens.6 For several years he has been Director of the National Theater. Despite his renown in Greece, Venezis has enjoyed but a meager reputation in England and in the United States. Only one of his books has to this date been translated into English; it is Beyond the Aegean, called Aeolia in the separately translated edition published in England. He is more widely known on the continent. Beyond the Aegean has been translated into nine languages, Number 31328 into three, and Exodus into two. His works have been well received. The reason is clear: in his writings he exhibits a generally high level of talent. He has a wide emotional and intellectual capacity, and he gives of it with ample generosity. In his respect for art and love for mankind, Venezis is a faithful exponent of the best in Hellenism. II Historical Background The region of his birth and youth has greatly influenced the creative works of Venezis. He was born on March 4, 1904, in Aivali, Turkey, in the fabled Land of Quinces, not far from the equally fabled port of Smyrna. Venezis cannot forget that these were once Greek lands; they were Greek from time immemorial, at least from the days of ancient Troy. Closer at hand were the mountains of the Kimindenia. It was here, on his grandfather’s spacious estate, that the young Elias lived the events he so movingly dramatized in Beyond the Aegean. What the island of Mytilene was to Stratis Myrivilis, what Crete was to Nikos Kazantzakis, this region of Anatolia, “my lost Aeolia,” was to Elias Venezis. His father, Michael Mellos-Venezis, belonged to what in England would
be called the landed gentry. His mother, Vasiliki, was a girl from the
Bibelas family; and it is her father who emerges as an epic and legendary
character in Beyond the Aegean. In his preface to the American edition
Lawrence Durrell states that the novel evokes another Garden of Eden,
and it ends with another kind of Fall: the destruction of a boy’s
pastoral idyll by the First World War. The idyll in time would have
withered away in any case for other and more gentle reasons; but the
collapse came harshly for Venezis, with the Turks For the duration of the war the Venezis family lived on the Greek island of Mytilene, away from their holdings in Asia Minor. The education of Venezis reflects this disruption. From 1909 to 1912 he attended the Demotic School in Aivali.7 However, from 1914 to 1918 he attended the Gymnasium at Mytilene. When his family returned to Turkey after the Armistice, he attended the Gymanasium of Aivali and graduated in 1921. The very next year came the second great disruption, the Catastrophe of 1922. This time it resulted in the family’s permanent expulsion from Anatolia. Venezis took his imperishable memories into exile. His departure from the land of his birth was delayed by imprisonment in September, 1922. Until November of the following year, while his family found refuge in Greece, Venezis suffered what amounted to slavery in labor battalions dispatched eastward far into Turkey. These tragic months are graphically described in Number 31328. For a fuller understanding of this masterpiece of realism it is necessary to give a brief summary of what the Greeks still regard as the Catastrophe – the defeat of their armies in Asia Minor and the subsequent exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Even after more than forty years the Greek mind has not fully recovered from the trauma. This is especially true of those ultra-nationalists who still dream of creating a Greater Greece at the expense of Greece’s neighbors, primarily Turkey. They are obsessed with the idea that “We almost made it – and then came the Catastrophe.” Greece had been ceded the Smyrna district in Asia Minor by the Treaty of Sevres following World War I. But this important concession by Turkey apparently did not satisfy the revanchist Royalist Government which came to power in 1920 after the electoral defeat of Eleftherios Venizelos. A British historian, A.W. Gomme, aptly summarizes the events that followed.8 The government that replaced Venizelos did more than assume its commitments in the Smyrna district. It decided immediately that the forces of Mustapha Kemal, the leader who was rebuilding Turkey, had to be destroyed. Greece attacked without allies; indeed, Italy and France openly helped Turkey. “In the spring of 1921, the Greek forces advanced and were successful in several actions against the enemy rearguards, driving them back into the interior. In August they advanced further, as far as the Sakharia River, less than sixty miles from Ankara. But there Kemal was ready for them.”9 The military advantages were all on Kemal’s side; the result was a Greek defeat. The proud royalists and their king had sunk very low. Worse than this: the efficiency of the troops in Asia Minor had already been weakened by the dismissal of prominent Venizelists among the officers and the appointment of others for political or personal reasons; and in consequence of a growing discontent in the army after the defeat of the Sakharia, morale grew worse. The army was kept in the highlands throughout the severe winter of 1921-22 without adequate food or clothing, for they were still far from their base and supply was ill organized. Worst of all, everybody at home was losing confidence in the outcome. The pathetic journeyings of Gounares (the Greek Premier) and others in search of money and equipment did nothing to restore confidence, and by the spring the newspapers were hinting or saying that Smyrna was not worth fighting for, and of course blaming Venizelos for the policy which had landed them there. Such depressing matter was the only reading for the troops who for a year, while Kemal was biding his time, were kept inactive, discouraged, ill-fed and ill-equipped, partly disorganized, in a hostile country. No wonder that when Kemal did attack, at the end of August 1922, they broke and fled. The disaster was complete; they were driven back to Smyrna, more and more disorganized as they retired and losing all their equipment, and then out of Smyrna itself. Only the ability of the Greek fleet and merchant marine to rescue both them and many of the Greek civil population from off the shore and to defend the islands prevented the capture of the entire army; and only the presence of forces to the north and in Thrace, which could threaten a counter-attack, saved the country from the worst consequences of the defeat. It was a sorry spectacle only two years after the triumph of 1920, a triumph due to all the hard work and courageous fighting of the previous ten years.10 III The Literary Beginning The historic disorder chronicled by Gomme and many others is deeply
reflected in the work of Venezis. Number 31328, his first novel, depicts
the aftermath of defeat as it struck the author himself. In general,
Venezis conceives of the artist’s role in the classical manner;
the writer not only helps to engineer the human soul towards its ideal
form but also to establish the broader values leading to moral and social
order. What happens to people in their manifold predicaments (to which
their moira or kismet often resigns them) becomes the substance of his
fiction. The title story of his first collection of short stories, Manolis
Lekas, is no exception.11 The character of Manolis is more tragic than
most others because he does resist his destiny. It is a remarkable tale,
also because Venezis was only twenty-four when he wrote it. “Manolis
Lekas” reappears in “Manolis Lekas” takes place in Aivali, the author’s birthplace, in the street of Hagia Triada (Holy Trinity). The name of the street may be regarded as ironic; it suggests Christian salvation, yet the grimmest kind of blind fate prevails. If there is any devine providence here, it is all dire and malevolent. Manolis once belonged to the smuggling crew of Captain Stellaras. A simple man, he has to drink himself into a stupor before he can seek the opinion of his wife, Angelica. His manly pride demands that he be solely responsible for all decisions, that he not depend upon a woman for advice. His wife girds herself for the beating she must suffer at his hands, knowing that she must pay dearly for stating her opinion. The problem at hand is whether Christos, their youngest son, should go to sea in the smuggling ships. The very idea horrifies Angelica. Her second son, Andreas, is already a smuggler and is constantly in great danger. In his later novel, Beyond the Aegean, Venezis romanticizes the lives of smugglers and makes their leaders ethnic heroes at odds with the Turkish overlords. In “Manolis Lekas,” however, the illegal activity looms as threat and domestic tragedy. It must be resisted, for it can take and destroy another son. Angelica’s eldest, Aristides, is an idiot. Not only was he born an epileptic, but he was also beaten on the head with an iron rod by his drunkenly enraged father. Courageous in every other respect, Manolis cowardly refuses to authorize the necessary operation. The head wound closes but the child’s eyes grow blank and colorless, and the great bald head seems monstrous on the small body. Having lost two sons, one to idiocy and the other to the smugglers, Angelica clings to Christos, the youngest. Though Manolis essentially agrees with his wife that the boy should not join the smugglers, he wants no one to suspect that he fears for his son. He beats Angelica then goes to the forest to purge himself of his guilt. After he tries to help a neighbor’s wife, who is beaten savagely for infidelity by her aged husband, Manolis questions his own actions. Returning home, he asks Angelica if she hates him for beating her. “No,” she replies, “I cannot hate you. You are my husband. But please don’t hit me hard. I am growing older now, and I can no longer bear the blows” (p. 141). Manolis seems constantly to battle with himself and the scheme of things. He tries to change himself and the destiny of his sons. The smuggler son, Andreas, has just escaped death on Captain Stellaras’ vessel when the Turkish coast guard gunned down the captain. Andreas says that when it is one’s time to die, he does; he asks his mother which of her three sons is most secure. Is it the smuggler, or Christos, or Aristides the idiot, for whose death she prays? Although she denies that she prays for the death of Aristides, the reader learns that she indeed does ask God to end his suffering. But she also prays for the safety of the two other boys, especially for the youngest son Christos, who finally does not go to sea. On the first Monday of Lent, Selas, an informer for the Turks, comes to the village tavern. When Selas discovers that the actor who plays the bear in the traditional Lenten Monday play is sick, he suggests that Aristides play the role. “Lekas won’t mind,” he says contemptuously. “He’ll be happy to see the play” (p. 150). Manolis, restraining his anger, agrees. However, as the sorry ineptness of Aristides becomes clear, Manolis grows furious. He insanely stabs a horse that panics and runs away. Then he begins whipping the demented boy because he is fit for nothing, not even to play the part of a bear. He insults Selas. Finally, in fury, he goes to the forest to cool off. The annual stone fight between the upper part of Aivali and the lower part begins. All the hatred between the two sections is stored for that day, then it explodes in the stone fight. Blood flows readily and sometimes serious wounds are sustained. Quite often, when the children’s stone fight ends, the men take to venting their rage with guns. Christos Lekas and his youthful companions take part in the violent stone fight. Aristides is allowed to tag along. Just as Manolis, the father, emerges from the wilderness becalmed, a man running toward the town cries out to him, “one of the Lekas sons is hurt!” Manolis rushes to his house hoping to find Aristides hurt. Instead it is Christos. He lies dead with a small red hole just over his heart. Manolis feels the hole and then caresses the boy’s face with his bloody fingers. Venezis in this and in other stories is at his best in representing the grimness of Greek village life. The only certainty, what the people can count on, is bleak and tragic: the uncertainty engendered by natural forces, by the Turks, and by the hatreds among the Greeks themselves. Manolis Lekas cannot change the way he is, his make-up, despite the fact that he pities the wife whom he beats and suffers guilt for Aristides’ idiocy. The course of events, too, is unchangeable, as if a curse long ago fastened upon man must slowly unfold to the grief of its victims. In this aspect of their lives Manolis and Angelica are the heirs of Oedipus. Although not of noble birth, and though their griefs cause no great ripples, yet like Oedipus they struggle against fate and lose. And like Oedipus they display inner flaws, especially the intemperance of Manolis, that tend to drag them toward defeat. We fear for their debacle before it happens because we sense it to be inherent in their nature, and pity them after it has occurred. The story “Manolis Lekas” is a domestic tragedy brought on in large measure by one man’s lack of self-control. The novel Number 31328, on the other hand, represents the tragedy of thousands brought on by a historic defeat of a people in the great Catastrophe.12 It is the leading epic of the modern Greek disaster. IV Number 31328 The family of Elias Venezis lost everything in the disaster; indeed, they were lucky to have escaped with their lives. Before their forced evacuation, Elias, then a youth of eighteen, was taken prisoner by the Turks and marched eastward to an unknown destination. If we are to accept Durrell’s analogy, the Fall had occurred, Eden had been lost, and suffering had commenced. If the sin were that of pride, then the guilt lay ultimately with the politicians in Athens who were not satisfied with the gains made by Greece in the peace treaties, but who wanted to conquer Turkey entirely. After the defeat, only Elias went east of their Eden; the rest of his family went west, to sanctuary in Greece. And for more than a year, while he worked deep in Anatolia, Elias was unaware of their fate. Number 31328 begins in October, 1922. In the sweetness of the Anatolian autumn the women, children, and aged of Aivali are disembarking for Greece. The men from eighteen to forty-five must remain to work in the labor battalions. Elias, concealed in a storeroom in his own house, watches the departure of the third ship. He sees distressing farewells. He also sees the humiliation of Lelekas, a one-eyed consumptive violinist, who is made to play from a high rock off which he tumbles. The next day a rumor spreads that the Turks have slaughtered the first shipment on the plain of St. George. News of the atrocity causes many people to go into hiding. A Greek who tries to bribe a Turkish sentry is killed on the spot. Elias, hearing of these events, silently ponders his fate. Gradually the Venezis household empties. Elias cannot remain for long in the dark bin with its tiny window opening to the street. At night the rats scurry about and frighten him; he complains to his parents for not having brought him up to be unafraid of them. As the danger of detection grows, the family decides that Elias must surrender voluntarily to the Turks. The decision shakes the boy, but it has to be. Elias is prepared for the departure. During the last night at home, he huddles in the bin. He watches the Turkish patrols outside, hears the boat horns in the bay, and listens to the rats romping in the cellar. After a while his worried mother comes to keep vigil with him, to talk and to pray. “Much later,” writes Venezis, “when she thought I had fallen asleep, I heard her begin to murmur to herself, as if she were speaking with God.”13 In the jail where Elias goes, the cellar of a house, the Turks have crowded about forty men and three horses. The jail smells. It contains mainly Greek seafarers, men bronzed by the sun and wind; the author describes several of these men and gives their history and their fate. The nights in jail are full of musty air, snores, and moans inside, with tramping feet and other ominous sounds outside. By the third night, Elias learns that Aivali is almost empty. Just before the prisoners depart from Aivali, the Turks bring in the boy Argyris, for whom Elias’s sister, Agape (Love), has great affection. The Turks also bring in the watch repairman, Nicola, with his wife and three year old son. Guarded by bayonets, the detachment of Greek prisoners leaves Aivali. All day under the hot sun they walk on the road toward Agiasmat. At the end of the day Elias and Argyris feel lucky: they have remained alive. “We shall endure” begins to be a theme that is repeated throughout the book. The prisoners and their guards spend the night in a barn in Agiasmat. At about eleven the Turks remove the struggling woman. Three Turks overpower her outside while other prisoners try to calm Nicola, who is helpless to prevent the rape. Elias watches the deed. “Comrade, it is not a shame,” one of the Greeks tells Nicola. “We can all affirm one day that you were powerless to do anything” (p. 55). Next morning the detachment, joined by a girl of about twenty, proceeds toward Pergamon. Elias and Argyris feel sorry for the two women who are so often raped; yet while the women last to satisfy the Turks, the boys will be relatively safe from perverted assault. New emotions beset Elias as they pass the region of the Kimindenia Mountains; in their peace and beauty he had spent the summers of his youth. He remembers his grandfather, who was buried that spring. The day’s journey, as Venezis relates it, becomes a grim recital of hardships and peril. The captives trudge through fields where thorns pierce their feet. They cross a swamp where typhus lurks; they eat grass; they boil in the sun. In a vineyard the column of prisoners pauses briefly while the Turks rape both Nicola’s wife and the girl. Their cries fail to bring help. The prevailing thought now becomes, “They will not endure.” As the detachment nears Pergamon, Nicola’s terror grows for another reason. Earlier in the war, when the Royal Greek Army overran the region, he had participated in bloody reprisals against the Turks. Pergamon means certain recognition and death for Nicola. The hard journey resumes after dawn. Behind the mountain of Tsambioi, they find a Greek woman who has miscarried and has been left to die. Nothing is done for her. One of the captives drops because of an attack of dysentery, and the guards promptly kill him. Then they kill another captive. “We drew ahead and waited below for the soldiers who remained behind to finish him off to catch up with us. How good it was to sit! The corpses (the prisoners) breathed deeply, they gathered strength” (p. 71). On this day of death they reach the town of Pergamon where more death awaits; Nicola is readily recognized and seized. To everyone’s relief his wife and son, who has had to be carried a lot, remain behind as the captives move on. Added to the detachment, however, are a group of starving priests and two new girls, one of them practically a child. This makes no difference to the soldiers who rape the girls repeatedly during the day’s march. On the following day, the little girl dies, bleeding badly. For Elias a more personal tragedy is the death of his friend Argyris. Several Turks looking for an escaped Armenian notice Argyris’ gold tooth. In a grim bit of horse-play they hit the boy on the head with a hammer and drag his lifeless body off to one side. Ragged and weary, the captives march eastward for several days until they reach Kirkagatz. There the Turks divide the prisoners according to trades. Because so many buildings were destroyed in the war there is a critical need for masons. Elias volunteers to help build an oven for a bakery, though he knows nothing about masonry. With the first rains, the oven crumbles, yet he is not punished. On various jobs Elias becomes acquainted with the other slaves, both the good and the bad. There is the smart operator, Glaros, who claims he can do anything. There is also Zack, a pianist, who initially works with Elias in the woods cutting logs. He becomes the piano teacher for the colonel’s daughter. However, in time the girl wants him for her lover. Infuriated when Zack refuses her, she cuts his face and has him sent back to the logs with Elias. Not long after, in the town of Bakir, Zack dies, presumably of pneumonia. At Bakir Elias works in a warehouse along with the boy Yiannis, who believes that his family embarked for safety in Greece. They had not. In one of several instances of Turkish compassion for the Greek slaves, a mother brings Elias warm bread and a quince. Later, when he has an attack of fever, he receives quinine from a doctor, who eventually finds employment for him as a translator. In another phase of his enslavement, Elias and two others leave by
train for Aksar where he is placed among Turkish deserters and malcontents.
A week later, however, he goes to Magnissa where he cheerfully receives
the official proof of his identity, the tin plate with the number 31328.
Now he cannot be lost in the postwar upheaval. The killing of Greeks
has about ended, but typhus still takes its regular toll, and the chronicle
of sorrows continues. Leaving the army camp at Magnissa, Elias is put
to work in a Summer arrives. While some of the Greek slaves go even farther eastward for more punishment, twenty high personages of the Greek armed forces are permitted to return home to Greece. This rank preferment generates hatred in Elias and the others. At the camp the old Turkish guards also want to pack and go home. When they request their freedom, they are beaten by their commanders. The fates of the guards and of the captives mingle: they are all foukarades, poor devils, victims of forces beyond their control. Elias learns of the forthcoming visit of an international fact-finding delegation led by a Spaniard named Dellara. The commission’s coming creates intense work for the slave laborers. In a ravine near Sipulo, the skeletons of forty thousand victims of Turkish brutality are still piled in the open. Elias and the others must bury these skeletons to conceal them from Dellara’s investigation. On the morning of the delegation’s visit, the camp officials stage an impressive review. The Greek captives, who are kept out of sight, return to the camp late that evening. In August the heat is intense, but the big exhausting jobs are over. Elias and his comrades sit around more often and entertain themselves with stories. The first anniversary of Elias’s captivity comes and goes. Turkish refugees repatriated from Greece in the population exchange arrive in the camp. At first they are hostile to the prisoners, but their attitude changes when the Greeks give them food and play with their children. The Greeks and Turks alike, more and more at ease with each other, have been victims of a similar fate. Events now rapidly draw to a conclusion. In November Elias receives his freedom. He is no longer a captive; he is no longer number 31328. Nor is he a boy who fears rats; he is a man. During the last night in the camp at Magnissa, he goes around bidding farewell to old friends. He stows away a dog to take with him. When Yiannis talks of rejoining his family, Elias tells him the truth about their loss. Together the two boys await the dawn in the dark of night, in the dark of their lives. Elias looks at the line on the horizon where the sun will soon rise. “Yes, in a little while” (p.222). Critical Evaluation Number 31328 firmly established Venezis both as a chronicler of the Catastrophe of 1922 and as a member of the literary “generation of 1930.” The critic Andreas Karandonis believes it to be one of his immortal works.14 Of all his books only Beyond the Aegean has enjoyed more foreign translation. Number 31328 has appeared in French, Italian, and Portuguese. Other books in Greek have been inspired by the tragic events in Anatolia, notably Story of a Prisoner by Stratis Loukas.15 Nevertheless, it is still Number 31328 that most completely reflects the deeds and emotions of the historic defeat. Venezis provides a panorama, while Loukas is limited by the stratagem of his hero’s assuming the identity of a Turk. Brilliant as Loukas’ brief work is, it hardly begins to explore the magnitude of the tragedy. In Number 31328 the author employs several major themes that recur as underlying patterns in his novels and short stories. More significantly than in Manolis Lekas, Venezis emerges in this book as a poet of social disorder. He places people in collision with hostile forces that have spun out of control; his characters, most of them simple and earthy, act and react to a fate that is usually blind. A major concern of Venezis is the impact of war on the lives of such people. In later novels like Serenity and Exodus he movingly describes what it means to be a refugee, to be alienated from every comforting tradition one has known, to be cast into grim wastelands where one can merely grub, sicken, and die; or, only with very great difficulty, manage to take root. Another theme, strongly visible in Number 31328, is the fate of those in the hands of the enemy. The relationship between Greek and Turk is very subtle; hate and love are historically intertwined. Because of the centuries of enslavement of the one by the other, strong bonds developed as complicated as those between the white and the Negro in the American South. An added problem is the difference in religion: the Greek is Christian, while the Turk is Moslem. Thus when a scholar mentions the theme, “in the hands of the enemy,” he must be conscious of the fact that in Number 31328 today’s enemy was yesterday’s respected neighbor and friend. Yet friend or not, once the sword was drawn, no two people ever fought with more envenomed ferocity than did the Greek and the Turk. They both employed an ethnic mystique of cruelty which verged on the genocidal. Venezis depicts death, torture, and evidence of man’s inhumanity to man with the compassion of one who believes that all men are poor devils in the hands of a pitiless fate. A further general theme in Number 31328 is the anguish of uprooted masses on the move. The protagonist is often the mass itself, differentiated by strong, unusual, or typical characters whose main problem is elementary existence. In Number 31328 the hero is the author himself, but the book is not about himself alone; he is the focal point of a group, a large group sharing a similar status, slavery, and a similar purpose, survival. They are “on the road,” victims of many kinds of evil, most, but not all, caused by other human beings. Ironically enough, these events occur for Venezis in the land of his youth, in beloved Anatolia, in the Eden that has turned him out. This theme of expulsion gives the author many opportunities for characterization, drama, symbolism, and analogies with ancient myths. Furthermore, the extended period of slavery becomes for the youth of eighteen the transition to manhood, a theme of universal significance. The critical commentaries on Number 31328 reflect these and lesser themes. They estimate the book’s importance as a social and historical document. They praise Venezis as a humanist who hates war and injustice. They also praise his talents as a writer and chronicler of savage events; they compare him with other European masters of disorder and debacle. The fact that these commentaries on Venezis are primarily general and impressionistic indicates the need for further critical evaluation of his achievement. Reprinted in the fourth Greek edition of Number 31328 (1959) are a dozen excerpts from typical reviews in the European press. They refer to the French translation of the second edition that Venezis had reworked in the summer of 1945. Among them are comments by members of both the French and Belgian Academies. In the Prologue the author explained that he returned to the story because of the new trials and misfortunes of Greece. Venezis also stated what several reviewers had noted: the timelessness of the book as a chronicle of terror, written after the first great war but reflecting so well the suffering of the second. As Jena Blanzot said in Le Monde Francaise, contemporary writing about the horrors of the concentration camps had its precedent, without doubt also its masterpiece, in Venezis’ Number 31328.16 Most of the European critics represented revealed a feeling of great sympathy and friendship for the book, for the author, and for Greece herself. “The same happened to us,” wrote the Belgian academician Henri Liebrecht, “and thus, the more our reading of the book proceeded, the more did our own agony overwhelm us and would not leave.”17 The Germans in their use of slave labor matched and surpassed the earlier brutality of the Turks in Asia Minor. An interesting thought was expressed by Andre Bay, who wrote in La Gazette des Lettres that truly good books scorn contemporaneity, “and when they appear it is as if they were being awaited by the status they had to assume.”18 Such was the case with Number 31328. In trying to establish the importance of Venezis in world literature Marcel Arland in Gavroche compared him with Knut Hamsun; Marcel Augagneur in Mondes compared him with Maxim Gorky and suggested that Number 31328 was another Anabasis; and Pierre Fauchery, in Actions, compared it not only with Xenophon’s Anabasis but also with Tolstoy’s War and Peace.19 That the novel is so patently autobiographical impressed several reviewers. “Venezis lived the book before he wrote it,” commented Liebrecht. This fact invited estimates of the character of Venezis as both protagonist of the story and author of the book. Atrocities against the Greeks occur in Number 31328, but it is not an atrocity tale calculated to arouse hatred of the Turk. Rather the opposite. Ilo de Franceshi in Revue du Monaco, who found no trace of bitterness, declared the book to be a powerful hymn for the ability of man to love, to understand, to unite.20 The lack of malice toward the conqueror was noted also by Robert Levesque in Domaine Grec. Although Venezis has no illusions about man, he does not believe that evil alone rules the earth.21 Other critics also praised him as a lover of mankind, of life, and of universal peace. His compassion comes through most clearly, as indicated in Number 31328, when the Greek labor slaves sympathize with those other poor devils, the Turkish guards, and when they play with the children of the Turkish refugees from Greece. A book capable of moving so many readers for so many reasons cannot help but elicit praise for the more formal aspects of its excellence. Its sense of organic unity stems not from a casual plot (to superimpose one on reality would have risked being mere artifice) but from the compelling reality itself: the hero’s odyssey into the perils of slavery and his search for freedom. “The whole book,” wrote the French academician George Lecompte, “reveals the art of a great novelist.” The characters, he said, are amazingly wrought in relief; and the scenes succeed one another with a rhythm which continually becomes faster.22 Liebrecht, too, praised its artistic quality. “The beginning of the book, the panting march of the slaves, men and women, is a Dantesque vision.”23 He regarded it as a model narrative which moves with frugality and richness of detail. One critic, Albert Maquet in Forces Nouvelles, wrote on the difficult art of staging, of rendering through significant details the necessary rhythm of a narrative.24 The language, including the dialogue, was a prime example of demotic Greek. Here and throughout his later work, it may be noted, Venezis makes very effective use of the sentence fragment. He does so usually for emphasis, repetition, and dramatic pause. In general, his art depends on atmosphere and realism; only when he falters does it depend on sentimentality and abstraction. The random references above to the style of Number 31328 do not, of course, exhaust the range of critical comment. They do, however, suggest the exceptional value of the book to the career of Venezis. In the Prologue to the 1945 edition, Venezis rejects an unnamed critic’s stress on the book’s alleged sublimity, on its having transcendental and metaphysical meanings that involve the supreme suffering of the soul. Venezis speaks instead of the “hot matter,” the tortured flesh whose blood drowns the book’s pages. The book deals, not with the soul, but with the human heart that writhes in pain. Here there is no soul, in the religious sense; here there is no place for metaphysics. Only philosophers and writers of books say that spiritual pain surpasses the physical. “But if you go out and ask someone on whose back death has walked (our epoch makes it easy to find one, there are so many) you will find that no pain is deeper than that of a body being tortured.”25 Number 31328, the author states, is a testament of such a pain. The critic Apostolos Sahinis calls it “a naked and unadorned chronicle of horrid and blood-splattered incidents in which the dominant element is the particular episode itself.”26 The novel is a sensitive young writer’s personal account of what happened to him, and to thousands of other Greeks like him, in the Catastrophe of 1922. The Eden he had known as a boy was lost forever in the great upheaval. Two other great novels stem directly from Venezis’ boyhood in Anatolia and its bitter aftermath – the exile of his family and of all Greeks from their ancestral home in the lovely land of Asia Minor. |
