Kostas Varnalis’s Papers: The Poet’s Workshop and History (Modern Greek)

Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974) was a Bulgarian-born Greek writer and member of the demoticist movement in Greece. An important contemporary of Angelos Sikelianos and Nikos Kazantzakis, Varnalis’s floruit as a poet was in the interwar period. His most important texts constitute an ingenious distortion of powerful precursors such as Aeschylus, Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Solomos, Rabelais, Goethe, and Flaubert. This issue of The New Griffon presents for the first time an in-depth view of this poet’s literary work and life through his letters and papers, given to the Gennadius Library by the poet’s daughter in 2001. Theano Michailidou provides an introductory essay on the work of Varnalis and his archives, and another (in English) on Varnalis as a poet, prose writer, and critic. The complete catalogue of the Varnalis Archives forms the core of this volume, including a useful index of personal names and a series of evocative historical photographs of Varnalis.