Between East and West: The Border Writing of Yeoryios Vizyinos

Cultural Geographies (formerly Ecumene)

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 167-180

  Peckham, Robert Shannan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

BORDER REGION; CULTURAL IDENTITY; IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION; LITERATURE ROLE; NATIONALISM; THEORETICAL STUDY; VIZYINOS,Y.;

GREECE;

EID: 0030472136     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/147447409600300203     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. n.a., Slavs and Turks: the borderlands of Islam in Europe (London, The Leisure Hour Office, 1876), p. 1.
2. On the ‘modernist primordialist’ debate, see A. D. Smith, The ethnic origins of nations (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986), pp. 6–18.
3. For a discussion of historians of nationalism who stress the engineered, imagined dimension of the nation, see A. D. Smith, ‘Nationalism and the historians’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology 23 (1992), pp. 59–80.
4. Quoted in B. Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (rev. edn, London and New York, Verso, 1991), p. 6. The emphasis is Anderson's.
5. See esp. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The invention of tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983).
6. T. Brennan, ‘The national longing for form’, in H. K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and narration (London and New York, Routledge, 1990), p. 49.
7. Anderson, Imagined communities, pp. 37–46. Quotation from p. 44.
8. Brennan, ‘The national longing for form’, p. 48.
9. H. K. Bhabha, The location of culture (London and New York, Routledge, 1994), p. 12.
10. A. Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Public Culture 2 (spring 1990), pp. 1–24.
11. M. Henderson, ed., Borders, boundaries, and frames : essays in cultural criticism and cultural studies (New York and London, Routledge, 1995), p. 2.
12. See E. Hicks, Border writing: the multidimensional text (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
13. Bhabha, The location of culture, p. 2.
14. Vizyinos’ six best known short stories were published between 1883 and 1895.
15. See, classically, M. S. Anderson, The eastern question 1774-1923: a study in international relations (London, Macmillan, 1966), pp. 178–219.
16. In his discussion of this text, Michalis Chrysanthopoulos notes that the Rio Grande represents a ‘natural frontier’ separating the US from Mexico, Yeoryios Vizyinos: metaxi fantasias ke mnimis (Athens, Estia, 1994), pp. 53–4.
17. Bhabha, The location of culture, pp. 9–18.
18. Henderson, Borders, boundaries, and frames, p. 2.
19. Bhabha, The location of culture, p. 149.
20. See G. Varouxakis, ‘The idea of “Europe” in nineteenth-century Greek political thought’, in P. Carabott, ed., Greece and Europe in the modern period: aspects of a troubled relationship (Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London, 1995), pp. 16–37.
21. As Michael Herzfeld points out, this essentialist polarity continues to characterize Greek society; see ‘Hellenism and Occidentalism: the permutations of performance in Greek bourgeois identity’, in J. G. Carrier, ed., Occidentalism: images of the West (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995), pp. 218–33.
22. P. M. Kitromilides, ’ “Imagined communities” and the origins of the national question in the Balkans’, in Enlightenment, nationalism, orthodoxy: studies in the culture and political thought of south-eastern Europe (Aldershot, Variorum, 1994), p. 160.
23. Quoted by R Clogg, A concise history of Greece (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 48.
24. See Kitromilides, ‘Imagined communities’, pp. 159–86.
25. See Gregory Jusdanis’ provocative discussion of the role of culture in the constitution of Greek nationhood, ‘Beyond national culture?’ in Boundary 2 (spring 1995), esp. pp. 33–5.
26. Cited in D. Tziovas, The nationism of the demoticists and its impact on their literary theory (1888-1939) (Amsterdam, Hakkert, 1986), p. 19. The author discusses in some detail the relationship between nation and literature in late nineteenth-century Greece.
27. The announcement of the 1883 literary competition is reprinted in P. D. Mastrodimitris, ed., O zitianos tou Karkavitsa (Athens, Kardamitsa, 1985), pp. 269–70.
28. See Tziovas, The nationism of the demoticists, p. 37.
29. Yannis Psycharis, To taxidi mou [‘My journey'], ed. A. Angelou (Athens, Ermis, 1983), p. 37.
30. See M. Herzfeld, Ours once more: folklore, ideology, and the making of modern Greece (Athens, Pella, 1986).
31. G. Jusdanis, ‘East is East - West is West: it's a matter of Greek literary history’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 5 (1987), p. 1.
32. See C. Koulouri, Dimensions idéologiques de l'historicité en Grèce (1834-1914): les manuels scolaires d'histoire et de géographie (Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 1991). Quotation from p. 443.
33. See Varouxakis, The idea of Europe, pp. 24–5, where the author quotes Kolettis’ assertion that ‘by her geographical position Greece is the centre of Europe; between East and West, she has been predestined to enlighten first the West, through her own fall, and then the East, through her own resurrection’. In a similar way, Russian nationalists assigned Russia a civilizing mission in the East and Russian identity was, likewise, defined against both Europe and Asia. As Mark Bassin observes, there was an ambiguity here, since ‘at the same time that Russia turned away from the West towards Asia, it was apparently doing so as a representative of this very West’; ‘Russian geographers in the Far East’, in D. Hooson, ed., Geography and national identity (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994), p. 115. See also M. Bassin, ‘Russia between Europe and Asia: the ideological construction of geographical space’, Slavic Review 50 (1991), pp. 1–17.
34. See Tziovas, Nationism of the demoticists, pp. 293–414.
35. On the ‘multifaceted’ identity of Ottoman Greeks in the nineteenth century, see G. Augustinos, The Greeks of Asia Minor: confession, community, and ethnicity in the nineteenth century (Kent, OH, Kent State University Press, 1992), p. 205. With the expansion of Russian power in the Balkans and the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate - or independent Bulgarian church - in 1870, the terms Rosos, Slavos, and Voulgaros were increasingly employed as defining categories. Allegiance to a church authority was replaced by allegiance to the nation-state and the designation Hellenas, for a Greek, was increasingly favoured over Romios. On these shifting terms of self-designation, see Herzfeld, Ours once more, pp. 124–8.
36. T. Cave, ‘Fictional identities’, in H. Harris, ed., Identity (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 103.
37. Kâmil is a softa, or religious student, in a dervish lodge.
38. Bhabha, The location of culture, p. 12.
39. All references are to W. F. Wyatt, ed., My mother's sin and other stories by Georgios Vizyinos (Hanover and London, PA, University Press of New England, 1988). Page numbers are included in the main text.
40. See S. J. Shaw and E. Shaw, History of the Ottoman empire and modern Turkey II: Reform, revolution. and republic: the rise of modern Turkey, 1808-1975 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 259–63.
41. The theme of disrupted communications is a recurrent one in Vizyinos’ text. For a brief but witty account of the relations between the post and the nation, see G. Bennington, ‘Postal politics and the institution of the nation’, in Bhabha, ed., Nation and narration, pp. 121–37. In Who was my brother's killer? it is the separation between the narrator in Europe and his family in Thrace which leads to his sending letters and to his brother, Christakis, taking on the job of postman and eventually being murdered.
42. In fact, the Greek widow describes Kâmil as ‘a Turk’ and a ‘sick man’ (enas Tourkos… arrostos a)nthropos (p. 67).
43. E. W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), p. 55.
44. This is the central theme of Vizyinos’ best-known short story, My mother's sin, which focuses on the adoption of a daughter into the family home. The importance of family structure in Vizyinos’ texts and its relationship with national affiliation supports Anderson's insight that nationalism belongs with ’ “kinship” and “religion”, rather than with “liberalism” or “fascism” ‘; see Imagined Communities, p. 5.
45. The representations of Turks in modern Greek literature generally have only cursorily been touched upon and deserve closer attention. See H. Tonnet, ‘Les premiers romans grecs à sujet turc’, Revue des Études Néo-Helléniques 1 (1992), pp. 5–19.
46. See Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman empire and modern Turkey, pp. 259–63. The Russian penetration of the Caucasus and the eventual occupation of Circassia in the 1860s, as well as the war in the Balkans, led to the mass immigration of Muslim Turks and non-Turks to Anatolia. See Augustinos, The Greeks of Asia Minor, pp. 23–6. Following the Crimean War, Russian support of pan-Slavism in the Balkans also gave rise to strong anti-Russian feelings in Greece.
47. A similar hybridized landscape, at once German and Greek, is described in Vizyinos’ text The consequences of the old story. See R. S. Peckham, ‘Memories and homelands: Vizyinos, Papadiamantis, and geographical imagination’, Kambos: Cambridge Modern Greek Papers 3 (1995), pp. 95–123.
48. Anderson, Imagined communities, p. 5. See also the volume of essays edited by A. Parker et al. which takes Anderson's formulation as its point of departure, Nationalisms and sexualities (New York and London, Routledge, 1992).
49. M. Douglas, Purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (London, Routledge, 1966), pp. 114–28. Quotation from p. 115.
50. See P. Sant Cassia, The making of the modern Greek family: marriage and exchange in nineteenthcentury Athens (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 183.
51. See F. Hartog, The mirror of Herodotus: the representation of the other in the writing of history, trans. J. Lloyd (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988). Hartog's discussion of the royal tombs which the Scythians erected in the eschatia, or border zone, of Scythian territory (pp. 138–41), sheds light on the ancient mounds, or toumbes, which mark the ambiguous borderlands of the grandfather's world in Vizyinos’ text (pp. 180–1).
52. The grandfather's hybrid creatures clearly belong to the world of exotika, the spirits that dwell beyond the boundaries of the village in Greek folklore. For an interesting discussion of the ‘internalising’ of the exotika in Greek culture, see M. Herzfeld, Anthropology through the looking-glass: critical ethnography in the margins of Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 197. See also C. Stewart, Demons and the devil: moral imagination in modern Greek culture (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991).
53. Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference’, p. 14.
54. Anderson, Imagined communities, p. 7.
55. See Chrysanthopoulos, Yeoryios Vizyinos, p. 18. A distinction is also drawn in Moskov-Selim to the different ‘European’ and ‘Eastern’ ways of telling a story (p. 67).