ABSTRACT
A classic well-known in Eastern Europe, Italy, and France, Stratis Myrivilis’s Life in the Tomb (1924) is, as the translator Peter Bien remarked (in 1987), “the single most successful and most widely read serious novel in Greece in the period since the Great War, having sold 80,000 copies—an astonishing figure for that small country.” His excellent translation (a first edition appeared in 1977) could not be more welcome. Only two other books by Myrivilis (1892 1969) have been available in English, The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes (1933) and The Mermaid Madonna (1949). Along with Life in the Tomb, these two novels form a trilogy about human behavior in war. The original Greek title is drawn from a lamentation sung in the Greek Orthodox church on Good Friday: “Thou O Christ, the Life, in the tomb was laid, and armies of angels were amazed, and they glorified Thy humiliation.”
