ABSTRACT
Translations of works such as the six stories by Georgios Vizyenos (1849-1896) that are included in My Mother’s Sin and Other Stories remind us that the history of modern prose should not be viewed as it is often taught: as a linear progression of forms invented by a select group of writers. Vizyenos, like his contemporary Alexandros Papadiamantis, is an innovative author who deserves a chapter in any history of European fiction. As Roderick Beaton remarks in his foreword, Vizyenos’s stories have been “dramatically” re-evaluated in recent years. (He is writing in 1988.) Indeed, adds Beaton, “compromise over the language question has encouraged a new look at the katharevousa [purist Greek] writers of the last century, and twentieth-century modernism and radical critical approaches to literature have placed a new emphasis on the complexity and intellectual subtlety that distinguish [Vizyenos’s] work.” The language question has also made a writer such as Vizyenos of particular interest to contemporary poets.
