Bogowie na scenie tragedii greckiej

Author(s): Sylwester Dworacki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2015

The gods as characters in Greek literature are to be seen in it from the very the beginning, and in the shape known from mythology. The playwrights while following tradition introduced them on the stage, and made them interact with mortals. In the present article the gods as dramatic figures are showed in selected dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The attention is drowned to the places of their appearance in drama, to the way of coming them into contact with people, and to their influence on scenic action and its ending. In conclusion, the author mentions differences in using gods to the ideology of plays: Aeschylus made them a part of his program of strengthening democratic structures in Athens, Sophocles treated them more theologically, Euripides criticized the traditional anthropomorphism of gods. Some points are also made to questions going beyond treating the gods only as figures known from mythology.

Przyjaźń i jej źródła w Platońskim Lizysie

Author(s): Magdalena Jaworska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2015

Lysis is the first and the only one among Plato’s writings which concerns the subject of philia as a main aim of the issues being discussed. Friendship in Lysis does not only embrace intensive and elusive desire for love but also all other types of passions that people have towards something or somebody. This dialogue is unique because it initiates a problem of philia, which appears in the following Plato’s writings. But what is more, is the fact that this Greek philosoper uncovers various ideas and opinions as far as philia is concerned. And as a result it becomes an outline of numerous Plato’s inquiries concerning the matter of philia.

DE L’AUTOBIOGRAPHIE A LA FICTION CHEZ VASSILIS ALEXAKIS

Author(s): Florica Mateoc / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2017

A francophone writer of Greek origin, exiled in France after 1968 and the beginning of the colonels’ dictatorship in his country, Vassilis Alexakis is concerned with the issues of identity and exile, the choice of language in which to write and with self-translation. These issues are present in his book Paris-Athenes, a remarkable autobiographic text. Our intention is to identify autobiographical elements in his novel La langue maternelle and to present various features of his Greek space of origin as well as of his mother tongue which the exiled author wants to regain.

The Alcmene Myth

Author(s): Ludwik Stomma / Language(s): English Issue: 5/2014

TRAGJEDIA GRATË TROJANE NGA SENEKA, NJË KËNDVËSHTRIM I PËRGJITHSHËM

Author(s): Emine Shabani / Language(s): Albanian Issue: 13-14/2020

Sikur të mos i kishte recituar vargjet epike të Luftës së Trojës, Homeri, sot nuk do të kishim as dhe këto vepra dhe mijëra të tjera intertekstuale e intermediale. Letërsia, por edhe historia e shkencat e tjera ruhen kur shkruhen! Ngjarje shumë e rëndësishme dhe tronditëse, për kohën kur u zhvillua, së cilës nuk i është zbehur lavdia edhe sot, madje mund të thuhet se është rikthyer më i fuqishëm debati për të kohëve të fundit, falë zhvillimeve teknologjike, që zbulojnë artefakte të reja që kanë të bëjnë me këtë periudhë dhe ngjarjet e implikuara, drejtpërdrejt ose tërthorazi. Punimi synon zbërthimin e disa elementeve që lidhen fuqishëm me të kaluarën e shqiptarëve dhe popujve tjerë të ish gadishullit Ilirik, fiseve ilire, pellazge, e të tjerëve që jetonin në Azinë e Vogël. “Gërmimi” nën sipërfaqen e historisë nxjerr në pah shumë elemente interesante dhe me vlerë që me ndihmën e teknologjisë qoftë asaj digjitale (bibliotekave), ose eksploruese në sitet arkeologjike dhe krahasimet e simboleve fetare, totemike, kulturore e shkencore që kanë ekzistuar në lashtësi dhe vazhdimësia e tyre që arrin deri në kohët tona.

Oidipus és Sókratés: Tudás és tudatlanság, tragikus és filozófiai katarzis

Author(s): Emese Mogyoródi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2021

This paper is a comparative study on the iconic Greek heroes, Oedipus and Socrates. In particular, it contrasts their responses to the Delphic oracle and argues that Oedipus’ hamartia, his hubris consists in “double ignorance”, a state of which the Socratic elenchos is meant to purge citizens of Athens. In contrast with Oedipus, Socrates evades tragedy, for he takes the Delphic admonition (“Know thyself!”) to heart. Socratic philosophy is a cathartic procedure meant to preclude tragic catharsis. Sophoclean tragedy and the Socratic-Platonic philosophy respond to the same, perennial human hubris of “double ignorance”, and their lesson is similar. Wavering between appearance and reality, opinion and knowledge – as 5th century Greeks were – our choice is the same today: that between tragic and philosophical catharsis.

ДАМАСКИЙ В АЛЕКСАНДРИИ (1). ИЗБРАННЫЕ ФРАГМЕНТЫ ЕГО «ФИЛОСОФСКОЙ ИСТОРИИ»

Author(s): Eugene Afonasin / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2021

In the paper, I trace the evolution of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria on the basis of select fragments from Damascius’ “Philosophical History,” translated into Russian for the first time. The fragments concern the Alexandrian intellectual scene of the first part of the fifth century. Damascius vividly presents the major philosophical figures of this period, such as Hierocles, Hermeias and his son Ammonius as well as such peculiar personalities as the philosophers Theosebius and Hierax, the sophists Ammonianus and Theo, and, last not least, Aedesia, wife of Hermeias. The fragments translated range from 46 to 57 Athanassiadi.

Eutopia and Engagement Today

Author(s): Miloš Agatonović / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

The contemporary conceptions of universal basic income (by Guy Standing), tax havens extraction (by Gabriel Zucman), and climate emergency (by Christiana Figueres) are briefly presented in the form of exposition in Massive Attack’s Eutopia EP. These conceptions address the most concerning issues of today’s world, while the concept of eutopia, proposed by Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja and Mark Donne, represents “a place of well-being, as a practical aspiration,” a realistic utopia in which those issues are resolved. The present paper discusses the conceptions presented in Eutopia, assessing the possibility of the materialisation of eutopia. As suggested by Massive Attack, the ideas of Eutopia can be traced back to More’s Utopia, being rooted in a humanistic endeavour of improving humanity, inspiring engagement and search for a better and just society. Apart from discussing Eutopia, the paper explores Another Now, the political science-fiction novel by Yanis Varoufakis. Varoufakis’ critique of capitalism and the alternative he proposes in the novel Another Now argue along the same line as Eutopia, encouraging engagement in today’s world.

Dinos Koubatis (Grecia).

Author(s): Dinos Koubatis / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 7-12/2022

Poems by Dinos Koubatis - "Uitare / Forgetting", "Vidul / Void", "Destinaţie pierdută / A list destination", "Vise răpuse / Killed dreams".

Dante Maffia (Grecia).

Author(s): Dante Maffia / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 7-12/2022

Poems by Dante Maffia - "Cine eşti? / Who are you?", "Neplăcerile depărtării / The unpleasantness of the distance", "Scrisoare a lui Eminescu către Veronica / A letter from Veronica to Eminescu", "Acel gest al lui Eminescu / That gesture of Eminescu",

Yunan Şair Georgios Zalokostas ve 1826 Mesolongi Kuşatması Hakkındaki Şiiri: “To Mesologgion”

Author(s): Bülent Akyay / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 2/2022

The Greek poet Georgios Zalokostas wrote a long poem, “To Mesologgion”, which deals with the siege of Missolonghi and the sortie of the besieged as a result of this siege and the fall of the city in 1826 as a historical event about. The poem in question is included in the First Athenian School, the first literary school of contemporary Greece, which was influential in Greece between the years 1830 and 1880. Indeed, after Greek independence, Greece’s main intellectual centers were the neighboring Ionian Islands and Athens, the capital of the new Greek Kingdom. During this period, while Greece was trying to create a new political, administrative and cultural life, the main element of the first literary school that emerged in the country was Romanticism. Some features of this school are the use of Katharevousa, the purest form of Modern Greek, the influence of French romanticism, pessimism and melancholy, rhetorical style, patriotic lyrical tone, and themes from the 1821 Greek Revolt. Georgios Zalokostas (1805-1858), born in Ioannina Syrrako, one of the poets of the First Athenian School, emigrated to Italy with his family due to the pressures during the reign of Tepedelenli Ali Pasha, where he studied Italian and Greek literature, and the law. He returned to Greece when the Greek revolt started in 1821. Zalokostas fought against the Turks and took part in the siege of Missolonghi in 1826. His participation in the siege of Missolonghi and his participation in the sortie to leave the besieged city also makes him a witness of this historical event and this testimony gives his poem a special quality. From 1851 to 1877, the intellectual life of Athens was dominated by poetry competitions, which became an important institution, proving the important place of poetry that occupied society. Zalokostas won the first prize in the “Ralleios” poetry competition organized by the University of Athens in 1851 with his poem “To Mesologgion”, which was about the Siege of Missolonghi in 1826. In this article, the Greek poet Georgios Zalokostas and his award-winning poem “To Mesologgion” will be examined within the framework of the mentioned literary school in the history of contemporary Greek literature. While the Siege of Mesolongi in 1826 is dealt with from a historical perspective, the geographical space, elements of Greek mythology, elements of Christianity, historical figures in the siege, and the “other” in the poem will be evaluated and discussed thematically.

Politika ir teologija homeriniame Himne Hermiui

Author(s): Benediktas Vachninas / Language(s): Lithuanian Issue: 3/2022

The Homeric Hymn to Hermes depicts integration of newborn Hermes to Olympus and is devoted to his worship. However the glorifying character of the hymn conflicts with shameful acts of Hermes – the theft of Apollo’s cattles and the deception of Apollo and Zeus. That implies complexity of hymn’s glorified object. The article suggests to analyse the figure of Hermes in Hymn to Hermes by asking how it unrolls and what relation establishes with Apollo. This angle will not only locate connection between Hymn to Hermes and Hesiod’s Theogony, but also it will let unfold interaction amid Apollo and Hermes as relation of politics and theology in the order of Zeus.

În jurul unui poem: To Axion Esti

Author(s): Mircea Muthu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 12/2014

The lyric universe of Odysseas Elytis remains exemplary as stratification of Greek culture. Beyond its inherited epic breath, also found in the literature of Seferis, Solomos, Papadiamantis etc., Elytis’s world, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979, is placed by himself between the “North Pole” (Solomos) and the “South Pole” (Cavafy), in the very place where “the sun and Hades meet”, as the poet suggested in an interview in 1975. The vast poem To Axion Esti (1959) holds a privileged place not because its creation took several years of creative reclusion and its critical decoding took the same amount of time to be correctly understood, but because it is the summa of a vision “with a greater historical and ethical awareness, yet without impairing the cosmic vision.”

Překotný hlas, truchlivé čtení

Author(s): Jakub Čechvala / Language(s): Czech Issue: 67/2023

Nicole Loraux’s book The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy focuses in its main part on the ways of expressing mourning in Greek tragedy, and understands mourning in tragedy as a borderline between (in)articulated words and music. This approach appears to be useful in interpreting some lyrical passages in which the contemporary reader may easily miss the semantic role of the acoustic dimension of the passage. However, my review essay discusses in detail how, apart from some interesting partial observations, the author fails in all the main ways, turning a partial interpretation into a general statement about the genre of tragedy as a whole. The author’s general thesis is modelled on the artificial oppositions of aulos — lyre, Apollo — Dionysos, which point to another artificial scheme, created by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, rather than to the poetic-performative culture of classical Greece. The author’s following of this scheme leads in the end to a misinterpretation of the specific passages from the tragedies on which she builds her interpretation.

National peculiarities in approaching the Classics: The case of Catullus with Hungarian modernism

Author(s): Péter Hajdu / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

The Greco-Roman Classics form a body of texts that belong indisputably to world literature, yet they are often left outside the scope of comparative literature because of their ambiguous relationship to the concept of national literature. This article describes the current situation of academia in which the comparative approach to the Classics is limited and tests the possibility of regarding them as a code or a language of comparison. The attitudes of various national literatures towards the Classics in different historical periods are revealing not only of ancient literary traditions but also about modern ones, and provide a solid basis for comparison. The second part of the article discusses the presence of Catullan poetry in Hungarian modernist literature as a case study. Roman poetry was invoked mostly by some progressive circles of the interwar literary field to promote the development of various linguistic facets of the modernist poetic discourse. This example shows how the Classics enter the world literary space through national literatures’ active involvement with them.

ГРЕЧЕСКАЯ АНТОЛОГИЯ НА СТРАНИЦАХ ЖУРНАЛА «СОВРЕМЕННИК» (1836–1866)

Author(s): Evgeniya Petrovna Litinskaya / Language(s): Russian Issue: 7/2023

The article studies the reception of Greek lyric poetry in the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), which followed Pushkin’s tradition. The author focuses on the critical article by V. S. Pecherin “On the Greek Epigram”, which reviews the Greek anthology from antiquity to its modern translations into European and Russian languages, on the poems by E. A. Baratynsky, Ya. Grot and D. I. Koptev, combined by the editor P. A. Pletnev into anthological cycles, and on the anonymous review of the Greek Poems by N. Shcherbina. It is concluded that critical texts on anthological poetry address its genre and thematic aspects. Pecherin writes about the anthological epigram as a genre and gives examples of philological translations. The anonymous author of the review of Shcherbina’s collection of poems considers his imitations of the Greek anthology and discusses the thematic unity of the texts. The poetic variations by Baratynsky and Koptev from anthological collections, while formally limited to iambic verses and elegiac distich, are characterized by mixing genres and themes as a distinctive feature of the reform of lyrical genres.

ИНТЕРМЕДИАЛЬНЫЙ ДИСКУРС В РУССКО-НЕМЕЦКИХ ДРАМАТУРГИЧЕСКИХ ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЯХ СЮЖЕТА О МЕДЕЕ XX–XXI ВЕКОВ

Author(s): Olga Igorevna Savinykh,Tatiana Aleksandrovna Sharypina / Language(s): Russian Issue: 7/2023

Intermedial discourse within the transformations of the plot about Medea in the XX–XXI centuries is examined from the point of its functioning in the process of the binary Russian-German dramaturgical parallels, which provides productive understanding of the reception of the constant components of the myth by certain national mentality. Numerous manifestations of intermediality in literature, cinema and painting of the second half of the XX and the early XXI centuries take various forms and confirm the signifi cance of the phenomenon for the entire cultural process of this period. In this regard, it is relevant to analyze the ancient story of Medea from the intermedial point of view in the works of such twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century authors as H. Jann, H. Muller, T. Lanoy, V. Klimenko and L. Razumovskaya. The conclusions of the study and the proposed methods of analysis contribute to a deeper understanding of the transformation of the story of Medea in the diachronic and synchronic aspects. This methodology can also be used for analyzing the reception of other ancient plots and images in the literary consciousness of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Thanks to the authors’ myth-making, we are dealing with a special worldview paradigm that combines well-known mythological motifs and images, repeatedly demonstrating their timelessness and relevance through the prism of modern confl icts. The novelty of the research topic is connected with the fact that the example of one mythological plot transformation in the diachronic and synchronic contexts demonstrates the productivity of analyzing a special type of intratextual interrelations in a literary work based on the interaction of the artistic codes of different types of art. The emergence of new synthetic types of media art and new forms of their interaction requires new methodological approaches to investigating them within different national world picture models in the era of multiculturalism.

Alkéstis anodosa

Author(s): Vera Schiller / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2024

This paper deals with the voluntary death of Euripides’s heroine, Alcestis, who saves her husband’s life by accepting death for herself and then succeeds in returning to life. The study compares similar myths which replicate Orpheus’s journey in the underworld and in which husbands try to get back their spouses from death with more or less success. The study deals with the mythical perils with which the Underworld threatens those who dare enter, and also with the hazards that beset those who help the deceased back to life (e.g. the madness of Hercules or the death of Asclepius). The discussion demonstrates that mythical variants in which reemergence ends with complete success (like in Alcestis’s story) are extremely rare.

Xenia as a Rite of Passage in the Odyssey

Author(s): Tyler Creer / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The primary focus of this paper, then, is the examination of several of the Odyssey’s xenia scenes and their connection with divine justice within the social and literary context of the rite of passage. In the course of this survey, we will see that the xenia rite serves as a means of identifying recipients of divine punishment in the Odyssey—that is, those who fail to abide by the proper norms of behavior in the course of a hospitality episode soon meet with a significant reversal of fortune or (most commonly) with a violent death. There are several possible reasons for the importance of the xenia rite in the poem, ranging from the abstract importance of modeling and reinforcing behavioral norms, which are crucial to a functioning society, to the more practical need for an institution like xenia in a place like Iron Age Greece, the predominant historical setting for the Homeric poems,4 where communities were small and scattered, travel difficult and uncertain, and the safety of travelers far from guaranteed. In both of these respects, xenia scenes in the Odyssey serve a significant social function, and their blending of the mundane with the fantastical would have made the poem both more relatable and entertaining to its ancient Greek audience while also communicating ideals about the nature of social custom and divine law. But within the context of the Odyssey itself, the formulaic nature of the xenia rite in the poem helps to establish consistent expectations for behavior from guests and hosts, and the violation of those expectations is met with similarly consistent punishment, which means that much of the poem’s internal logic for the application of divine justice seems to center around the behavioral norms of xenia.

A Novel by Nikos Kazantzakis in the Context of Impact on Social Memory

Author(s): Tülin Arseven / Language(s): English Issue: 117/2024

The renowned Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion (Kandiye) in 1883. During that period, Heraklion was part of the Ottoman State. Nikos Kazantzakis gained acclaim as a novelist with his work “Zorba” (1946). “Jesus Crucified Again” (O Christos Xanastavronete / Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται) (1953), translated into Turkish as “Yeniden Çarmıha Gerilen İsa,” is considered his masterpiece in the art of the novel. Kazantzakis’ works reflect the cultural heritage of the lands of his birth, his education, and his life. In “Jesus Crucified Again,” the setting is an Anatolian village during the years of the Turkish Independence War. The author explores themes such as Hellenism, Bolshevism, and Christian teachings, weaving them together. In this analysis, focusing on the impact of the literary work on the formation of social memory, I examined the novel’s time and place elements for the accuracy of the message it conveys. The study employed document analysis, a qualitative research method.