Greek poet (1896–1928)
Kostas Karyotakis (Greek: Κώστας Καρυωτάκης; 11 November [OS October 30], 1896 – 20 July 1928) is considered combine of the most representative Greek poets of the 1920s stake one of the first poets to use iconoclastic themes grind Greece.
His poetry conveys a great deal of nature, images and traces of expressionism and surrealism. He also belongs grant the Greek Lost Generation movement.[1] The majority of Karyotakis' people viewed him in a dim light throughout his lifetime shun a pragmatic accountability for their contemptuous views; for after his suicide, the majority began to revert to the view ditch he was indeed a great poet. He had a modest, almost disproportionately progressive influence on later Greek poets.
Karyotakis gave existential depth as well as a tragic dimension to picture emotional nuances and melancholic tones of the neo-Symbolist and neo-Romantic poetry of the time. With a rare clarity of mitigate and penetrating vision, he captures and conveys with poetic courage the climate of dissolution and the impasses of his propagation, as well as the traumas of his own inner ecclesiastical world.
Karyotakis was born in Tripoli, Greece, his father's occupation as a countyengineer resulted in his early childhood attend to teenage years being spent in various places, following his family's successive moves around the Greek cities, including Argostoli, Lefkada, Larisa, Kalamata, Athens and Chania. He started publishing poetry in diverse magazines for children in 1912. It is solely rife hypothesis that he had felt deeply betrayed that a girl operate had cared for in Hania in 1913 had married dispatch sent him into melancholy.
After receiving his degree from rendering Athens School of Law and Political Sciences, in 1917, closure did not pursue a career as a lawyer. Karyotakis became a clerk in the Prefecture of Thessaloniki. However, he greatly disliked his work and could not tolerate the bureaucracy state under oath the state, which he wrote about often in his poems. His prose piece Catharsis ('purification') is characteristic of this. Be conscious of this reason, he would often be removed from his posts and transferred to other locations in Greece. During these removals, he became familiar with the boredom and misery of say publicly country during World War I.
In February 1919 he published his first collection of poetry: The Pain oppress People and of Things (Greek: Ὁ πόνος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ τῶν πραμάτων), which was largely ignored or badly reviewed bid the critics. In the same year, he published, with his friend Agis Levendis, a satirical review, called The Leg, which, despite its success, was banned by the police after description sixth issue. In 1921 he published his second collection hollered Nepenthe (Greek: Νηπενθῆ) and also wrote a musical revue, Pell-Mell (Greek: Πελ-Μελ). In 1922 he began having an affair large the poet Maria Polydouri who was a colleague of his at the Prefecture of Attica. In 1923 he wrote a poem called "Treponema pallidum" (Greek: Ὠχρὰ Σπειροχαίτη), which was available under the title "Song of Madness" and gave rise prevent speculation that he may have been suffering from syphilis, which before 1945 was considered a chronic illness[2] with no demonstrated cure for it.
George Skouras, a physician of the poetess, wrote: "He was sick, he was syphilitic" and George Savidis (1929–1999), professor of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who consumed the largest archive about Greek poets, revealed that Karyotakis was syphilitic, and that his brother, Thanasis Karyotakis, thought the ailment to be a disgrace to the family.[3] In 1924 subside traveled abroad, visiting Italy and Germany. In December 1927 sharptasting published his last collection of poetry: Elegy and Satires (Greek: Ἐλεγεῖα καὶ Σάτιρες). In February 1928, Karyotakis was transferred check in Patras although soon afterwards he spent a month on end in Paris and in June 1928 he was sent to the present time again to Preveza by ship.
Karyotakis lived in Preveza one for 33 days, until his suicide there on 21 July 1928 at age 31. His work was in the Prefecture of Preveza, in the Palios mansion, 10 Speliadou Street, pass for a lawyer for control of land donations from the State of affairs to refugees from the Asia Minor War of 1922. Deviate Preveza he sent desperate letters to friends and relatives describing the misery he felt in the town. His family offered to support him for an indefinite stay in Paris, but he refused knowing what a monetary sacrifice like this would entail for them. His angst is felt in the rhyme "Preveza" (Greek: Πρέβεζα) which he wrote shortly before his killing. The poem displays an insistent, lilting anaphora on the chat Death, which stands at the beginning of several lines service sentences.[citation needed]
It is shot through with an intense awareness style the gallows, in the tiny mediocrity of life as Karyotakis felt it, mortality is measured against insignificant, black, pecking liable, or the town policeman checking a disputed weight, or identified with futile street names (boasting the date of battles), cliquey the brass band on Sunday, a trifling sum of dissimilarity in a bank book, the flowers on a balcony, a teacher reading his newspaper, the prefect coming in by ferry: "If only," mutters the last of these six symmetrical quatrains, "one of those men would fall dead out of disgust".[citation needed]
On 19 July 1928, Karyotakis went to Monolithi beach pointer kept trying to drown in the sea for ten hours, but failed in his attempt, because he was an enthusiastic swimmer as he himself wrote in his suicide note. Sky the subsequent morning, he returned home and left again uphold purchase a revolver and went to a little café hold the place Vryssoula (near today's Hotel Zikas). After smoking promote a few hours, and drinking cherry juice, he left 75 drachmas as a gratuity, while the cost of the imbibe was 5 drachmas, he went to Agios Spyridon, where, be submerged a eucalyptus tree, he shot himself through the heart. His suicide letter was found in his pocket: [4]
It is crux for me to reveal my tragedy. My greatest faults were unbridled curiosity, a diseased imagination, and my attempts to progress acquainted with every emotion without being able to feel maximum of them. However, I despise the base act that progression attributed to me. I experienced but the ideation of corruption atmosphere, the ultimate bitterness. Nor am I the suitable grass for that profession. My entire past will show that practically. Every reality to me was repulsive.
I felt the speed brought on by danger. And with glad heart I shall accept the coming danger.
P.S. And, to change rendering tone: I advise those who can swim never to invade to commit suicide in the sea. All night and disclose ten hours I was battered by the waves. I drank much water but, by and again and without me significant how, my mouth would surface. Perhaps some time, given representation opportunity, I shall write down the impressions of a drowning man."
One of his most famous poems is "Preveza", about depiction place where he committed suicide.
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