ABSTRACT
It was during the period when Athens had ceased to be an intellectual backwater and before it became one again that Andreas Embirikos happened to live. There was the prehistory of the virtues is of interest; particularly in cases like that of Andreas Embirikos, where a mystically- minded Russian woman and a ship-owner from Andros came to share the “given” half of their selves. Andreas published The Blast Furnace, Hinterland and The Writings, at the same time becoming the first Greek psychoanalyst to practise his profession as a member of the International Psychoanalysis Association, and for fifteen consecutive years; that is, from 1936 to 1951. He possesses, who can say how, the secret of being able, throughout the whole of his erotic diatribe, to maintain an almost child-like innocence, rather like the astonishment of the youth who first discovers the female body and its mysterious worlds.
