ABSTRACT
The Greek poet and prose writer Manolis Xexakis was born in Rethymno, Crete, in 1948. Besides writing The Death of the Cavalry, which includes the sequence Captain Super Priovolos, Xexakis has published three volumes of poetry and two other books of poetic prose. Yet more pertinent than these etymological echoes to the significance of the main character is the communist guerilla leader "Captain Priovolos", who fought in the Civil War. Another leftist leader, Aris Velouhiotis, stands out even more prominently. Velouhiotis was the legendary Resistance hero "Captain Aris", one of the original leaders of the National Popular Liberation Army. In the second text, "Night Everywhere", the sentence "the country is tiny, the dance immense" refers to the geopolitical situation of Greece, to the strategic interests at stake in the country, and thus simultaneously to the involvement of the United States in the postwar political affairs of the country, to that of Great Britain during the Civil War.
