The murderess
The murderess ( Greek Ἡ φόνισσα i fónissa ) is a modern Greek story thatfirst appeared in 1903 as a sequel . It is considered the high point in the work of the writer Alexandros Papadiamantis and one of the most important prose works of modern Greek literature.
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Chapters 1-7: The First Murder
Like most of Papadiamantis' stories, the murderess is set around the middle of the 19th century on the Aegean island of Skiathos . The protagonist of the plot is Frangojannou, also known as Chadoula, an approx. 60-year-old midwife and healer, who remembers her life while keeping vigil with her two-week-old, sick granddaughter. The pity for the weak, coughing newborn baby and her own painful memories as a woman who always had to be there for others and felt as a "slave" to her parents, her husband, her children and grandchildren merge into the realization that every birth is a Daughter means only great suffering for everyone involved and that it is best if she dies again immediately. Because the more daughters a family has, the more difficult it is to provide everyone with a handsome dowry. Eventually, Frangojannou, who is out of her mind due to lack of sleep and the impression of gloomy memories, suffocates her own granddaughter. Since the child was sick anyway, Frangojannou is not suspected. This main plot is repeatedly interrupted in the first chapters by flashbacks into the family history of Frangojannou.
Chapters 8-10: Other Sacrifices
Some time later, Frangojannou happened to pass a property while collecting herbs and saw the two young daughters of the family playing by a filled water basin. The father works in the field some distance away, the mother is sick in bed - so Frangojannou can safely approach and carry out her second murder: Following a spontaneous inspiration, she pushes the two girls into the water and makes them drown. As with the murder of her own granddaughter, she then portrays herself innocent. The fourth victim, again a girl, follows a few weeks later. This time Frangojannou doesn't lend a hand himself; however, she is in the immediate vicinity when little Xenoula falls into a well and deliberately does nothing to save her. Again she succeeds in depicting things in such a way that the girl's accident actually only appears as such and she herself remains free from suspicion. During all of the murders, Frangojannou does not appear as a cold-hearted and coldly planning murderer, but as a woman who is sometimes tender to her victims, then carries out her murders as an execution of divine will and spontaneous temptations, is haunted by feelings of guilt and prays.
Chapters 11–15: Escape from the Police
However, due to their repeated presence at the death of four girls, the authorities become suspicious and decide to put Frangojannou under pressure with an additional interrogation. She finds herself cornered by the appearance of two policemen in front of her house and flees. Frangojannou can initially stay afloat by letting a friend hide her in the cellar and then fleeing to lonely areas of the island on foot. In exchange for medical treatment with herbs and ointments, she finally finds accommodation in the house of a shepherd, whose wife recently gave birth to a girl and who has not yet heard of any suspicions against her. In the end she is found by the police there and has to flee in a rush, leaving her last belongings behind. The next day she returns to the shepherd family to pick up the basket she left behind during her escape, and uses an unobserved moment to strangle the newborn girl - her fifth and final victim.
Chapters 16-17: End
In the further course of the escape, Frangojannou only have very difficult to access and lonely hiding places such as a rock grotto by the sea. She is haunted by ever worse nightmares and feelings of guilt and sees her last hope of rescue in the escape from the island to the mainland, for which she would have to be taken by a ship. In her hopelessness she decides to visit Father Akakios, a hermit who lives in the hermitage "Holy Redeemer". There, she hopes, she will be able to confess her sins and hope that the monk will help her start a new life. The last stage of their odyssey leads Frangojannou, who is now being hunted by several pursuers, to the rocky cliff on which the hermitage is located and which can only be reached on foot at low tide , while at high tide it is separated from the coast by the sea water and becomes an island . Just as the tide comes back, Frangojannou takes the first steps on the sandstrip, which is swallowed up by the water in a very short time. Her gaze falls once more on a field on the coast, which she recognizes as her own dowry, which she received at her wedding; her last words are: “Oh! That’s my dowry! ”This closes the circle into one's own past and the central motif of the story, the problem of the dowry, is taken up again. The water finally rises higher and higher until the exhausted old woman sinks into the sea and drowns only ten paces away from the "Holy Redeemer" - as the last words of the story say, "halfway between divine and human justice".
Formalities and language
The murderess appeared between January 15 and June 15, 1903 as a sequel story in the magazine Panathínäa (Παναθήναια) in Athens . Depending on the definition, it is a story, a novella or a novel , consisting of 17 chapters and a total length of around 150 pages. It bears the subtitle social novel (κοινωνικόν μυθιστόρημα). In accordance with the customs of the time, Die Mörderin still adheres as prose to the standard language, the Katharevousa , which is based on ancient Greek , and avoids the spoken language of the people ( Dimotiki ) as the narrative language. However, Papadiamantis already lets the vernacular speak in dialogues, in which he resembles Georgios Vizyinos . Otherwise, Papadiamantis uses a very expressive and artful Katharevousa, which contains both very learned elements ( ἐν τῇ νήσῳ on the island ) and popular vocabulary ( τὸ μαχαιράκι the knife ). His stories are one of the few cases where high-level language is successfully used in an aesthetically perfect form and has high literary quality. Papadiamantis is regarded as the last great author of the Katharevousa and at the same time as the first to give it a liveliness that was otherwise only characteristic of the vernacular. The murderess is therefore a unique document in modern Greek literature, also in terms of linguistic and stylistic aspects.
background
Papadiamantis' murderess appeared at a time when the historical novel of the 19th century was already being pushed into the background by realistic or naturalistic forms of literature. It was the time of moral descriptions or ethography ( ηθογραφία ), in which increasingly socially critical and psychological substances, mostly in a rural setting, determined literary events. In the story Die Mörderin these dimensions can be found in the form of the idyllic, almost paradisiacal scenery of the island of Skiathos on the one hand and in the eerie abysses and the turmoil of the human soul on the other hand, as manifested in the main actress. The characters and landscapes in the story are mostly not fictional , but rather taken from the real local conditions of Skiathos and Papadiamanti's memories.
Meaning and interpretation
Papadiamantis, a master of describing simple people and their habitat, takes up a socio-cultural problem in his narrative that had great consequences in 19th century Greece: the poverty of the rural population combined with the tradition of dowry. This increasingly developed into a compulsive state institution that often drove less affluent families with several daughters to ruin and forced many men to emigrate. The killing of newborn girls was a not unknown phenomenon during this period. Many attempts at interpretation want to see a parallel in Papadiamantis' most famous story with his own life, since he was the first-born pastor's son in a family with four daughters; other interpretations go so far as to identify Papadiamantis with Frangojannou himself.
The murderess is a work that can be understood on different levels: As a realistic novel that is based on a rational consideration - that of the unjust position of women in society - it is at the same time a credible reflection of a historical epoch and social criticism, it is psychological Novella and at the same time criminological thriller, but above all it is a linguistic document of simple beauty. Without being feminist or glorifying women, Die Mörderin is the “book of a woman” - men only play a subordinate role in the plot and take a back seat in the face of the many central female characters. The few men that appear mostly have comical features (gendarmes) or are portrayed as extremely naive and simple-minded (fathers of victims 1, 2, 3 and 5) or as repulsive monsters (Mitros, the son of Frangojannou, himself a murderer) .
References
- ↑ In secondary literature, the work is usually referred to as a story, but also as a novella (Coulmas) or a novel ( Saunier ).
- ↑ In the German edition the story has 140 pages, in the Greek edition 151.
- ↑ Cf. Elytis, Odysseas in: Mitsou, Marie-Elisabeth ; Oikonomou, Maria (Ed.): Reflections. Essays by modern Greek authors , Neuried 2005. pp. 281f. and 287f.
- ↑ See Coulmas 1995, p. 155
- ↑ See Kokolis 1993, p. 23ff.
- ↑ See Coulmas 1995, p. 158 and Kokolis 1993, p. 12f., 17ff.
expenditure
- Παπαδιαμάντης, Αλέξανδρος: Η φόνισσα . From the series Η πεζογραφική μας παράδοση. Εκδόσεις Νεφέλη, Athens 1988. ISBN 960-211-028-7
- ders .: Η φόνισσα . Introduction by Γιώργος Αριστήνος. Athens 2006. ISBN 960-406-788-5
- Papadiamantis, Alexandros: The murderess . With an afterword by Danae Coulmas. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1st edition 1995. Revisited: Elfenbein Verlag , Berlin 2015. ISBN 978-3-941184-50-3
- ders .: The Murderess . National Book Network, 1987. ISBN 0-906495-72-5
Secondary literature
In German language
- Coulmas, Danae : “... between divine and human justice”, epilogue in: Papadiamantis, Alexandros: The murderess . Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 1st ed. 1995, pp. 148-165
- Elytis, Odysseas: The Magic of Papadiamantis. Who is dressed in white. In: Mitsou, Marie-Elisabeth; Oikonomou, Maria (Ed.): Reflections. Essays by Modern Greek Authors , Neuried 2005. pp. 249-291
In Greek language
- Ασλανίδης, Ε.Γ .: Το μητρικό στοιχείο στη «φόνισσα» του Παπαδιαμάντη. Ψυχαναλυτικό δοκίμιο . Athens 1988
- Βλαχογιάννης, Γιάννης: Ένας άγραφος γυναικείος νόμος και η “Φόνισσα” του Παπαδιαμάντη. In: Νέα Εστία 23 (1938), pp. 9-12
- Καλταμπάνος, Ν .: Υφολογική προσέγγιση στη “Φόνισσα” του Αλέξανδρου Παπαδιαμάντη . 1983
- Καργάκος, Σαράντος Ι .: Ξαναδιαβάζοντας τη “Φόνισσα” . 1987
- Κοκόλης, Ξενοφών Α .: Για τη “φόνισσα” του Παπαδιαμάντη. Δυο μελετήματα . Thessaloniki 1993. ISBN 960-12-0360-5
- Μικρομάτης, Άκις: Η Φόνισσα Αλέξανδρου Παπαδιαμάντη. Δραματολογική ερμηνεία . Lefkosia, 1973
- Μουλλάς, Παναγιώτης (Ed.): Αλέξανδρος Παπαδιαμάντης Αυτοβιογραφούμενος . Athens 1974, pp. 15-65
- Πρωτοπαπά, Γλυκ .: Η “Φόνισσα” του Παπαδιαμάντη, in: Ελληνική Δημιουργία 10 (1952), pp. 747-750
- Ρηγάτος, Γεράσιμος Α .: Τα ιατρικά στη “Φόνισσα” του Παπαδιαμάντη . 1996
Many books and articles that deal with Alexandros Papadiamantis in general also contain explanations about the murderess ; see the literature given there .