ABSTRACT
Although Calas could be described as a refugee, first from the Metaxas regime and then from fascism and war, it is also true that his continued expatriation was the result of his quest for intellectual freedom, his artistic identity (otherness) and his cosmopolitanism. An intellectual exile, together with a great many other anti-militaristic and well-educated writers, artists and professionals displaced by Nazi Germany, he had, in fact, already distanced himself from the narrow-minded Greek cultural milieu through his long sojourns in Paris before Metaxas took power in Greece in 1936. Calas later talked about wanting to escape the ‘suffocating atmosphere of Athens’ (Stamatiou 1977) and further claimed that he had decided to leave Greece out of a sense of dissatisfaction and disappointment following his ‘failure’ as a poet and the rejection he felt by friends in literary circles (Fostieris and Niarchos 1981: 488). In a letter to Nanos Valaoritis, dated 14 May 1960, he
revealed that, when he had left Greece in the 1930s, it had been with the intention of never living there again and that he had been very bitter at the cold reception that his first poems had received (Valaoritis 1997: 113).
