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Stratis Myrivilis: Η ζωή εν τάφω (Life in the Tomb)
The foreword to the book claims that it has been the single most successful and widely read serious work of fiction in Greece since its publication in serial form in 1923-24, having sold 80,000 copies in book form despite its inclusion on the list of censored books under both Metaxas and the German occupation.. It is told in the form of a journal kept by a (fictitious) f Sergeant Anthony Kostoulas and is described as a meditative, lyrical, yet harshly realistic account of trench warfare on the Macedonian front in 1917-18, a judgement with which I can only concur.
It starts off with the narrator saying he was rummaging through an old chest when he found both hand grenades (!) but also an aging manuscript. Sergeant Anthony Kostoulas had beeen killed (we are given the unpleasant details) and he had rescued the manuscript and forgotten it. This book is the text of the manuscript.
It is addressed to an unnamed woman, clearly his lover. He states that he is writing his for her as all letters are censored so he cannot tell her what his life in the army was like. he is clearly very much in lover with her (those lovely hours we passed together, those beloved times ) and tells her that he and his comrades are fighting for the freedom of the enslaved Greeks, Greece being part of the Ottoman Empire at that time.
We follow them as they are recruited in Lesbos. They do not like their general and they get seasick as they are transported by ship. He mocks the English – We Greeks adore the English. Do you know why? Because they smile so affably as they allow us to rob them, anger being beneath an Englishman’s dignity.. The march to the trenches is gruelling as it is very hot and their officer – called Constantine Palaiologos, named after the last emperor of Byzantine is cruel.One of the soldiers say of him Bastard! Don’t worry—when the time comes, the first bullet will be reserved for you! . However they soon see the horrors of war as they pass an Italian field hospital where all the patients have been blinded by tear gas.
They are headed for Monastir (modern-day Bitola in Northern Macedonia, where they will be involved in the Battle of Monastir.
They are nominally fighting with the Serbs and other Allied forces against the Germans and Bulgarians though when they get there, the local Greeks ask them to liberate them from the brutal Serbs.
There are enough war novels out there describing the horrrs of the trenches in World War I but they tend to focus on the Western front. However the Eastern front, as this novel shows, was just as grim. Myrtilis spares us none of the details from continuous shelling to sniper fire and, of course all the horrors of living in the trenches – wet, muddy conditions, irregular food supplies, unpleasant officers. All of us kill time here; many also kill lice he comments. They see their comrades but also their animals, mainly horses, killed.
Life goes on – One gets used to anything sooner or later. I have noticed he comments. Mainly the life is very monotonous but I regard each passing day as something won at cards, and in a rather dishonest gamble at that. However they do have a topic of conversation: Millions of men everywhere, underground, sitting there in the dirt: filthy, stinking, covered with whiskers and lice . . . , and they babble about women!”
We learn of his first kill of which he is quite proud and he sends home the Turkish belt taken from his victim..
But it is hard. “morale has been reduced to a shambles by desertions, incessant casualties, and the dysentery which an unaccustomed diet of margarine and tinned meat has inflicted upon the constitutions of our men. so they are given a brief respite and sent off behind the lines for a rest. However our hero has a bad leg and falls behind the rest of his troop and has to spend the night in a gulley, from where he is rescued by a Chinese man who is with the French allies but barely speaks French. However he doe shave a horse and cart and transports our hero to his troop where he is lodged with a local family, where he also has language difficulties.
They return to the front where he muses about why they are there: Why must we kill and be killed? Why is this so unavoidable? Who can I ask about such things? When I wonder in what womb this evil was engendered and why it should have emerged so much
stronger—so very much stronger—than the good
Others seem to agree as the number of desertions has increased so much so that the authorities, when they catch, some of them, feel they have to set an example. But there are other ways. Quite a few get scabies and, initially , seek to avoid it but now try to get it to avoid having to serve in the trenches. But if they do not get it, then comes the day when filth, lice and weary disgust enter from all sides and pillage you. On that day the trench claims you as its own. Fortunately the Bulgarians also have deserters who come to the Greeks and give them valuable information.
We know our hero is a corporal but, when he dies, is a sergeant and we see the heroic deed he commits which earns him a medal and a promotion.
Beneath the hide of each of us lies a corpse. It sits there patiently in dignified silence, awaiting the opportunity to appear robed in that royal imperturbability which characterizes all things eternal. Yes they know they are going to die probably sooner rather than later, as our hero does in a big push at the end of the book. But before he des Myrivilis tells a superb tale, mixing in the good, the bad and the ugly. War can be heroic but, as in most of the book, it is normally horrible. Myrivilis manages to tell many tales of events and about the brave, the cruel, the cowardly but mainly ordinary people caught up in a vicious war.
Publishing history
First published in 1924 as a supplement to the Campana newspaper. An extended edition was published in 1930 by N. Theofanidis– S. Lampadaridis
First English translation in 1977 University Press of New England
Translated by Peter Bien