Mid-war period Ethography: Fintanaki by Pantelis Horn

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The article below was originally written in the form of an undergraduate assignment for the Greek Open University in 2007, during a period when the author's academic skills were still under development. Although the quality of this article does not match the quality of later examples of the same author's work, it is written in a thorough manner and contains useful information to nowadays students and other readers with non-specialised knowledge; therefore, it has been proudly included on this website.

The reader needs to be warned that the original assignment, on which this article was based on, was written in Greek and was intended to be read by specialised academics. Despite the author's best intentions to present his essay in the clearest way possible, some points and arguments might still be lost in translation. The author recommends that for any unknown words or specialised vocabulary, the readers should refer to the web for additional information.

The author admits that the bibliography for this article is limited, matching the requirements of an undergraduate assignment of this level. The author did not include any additional bibliography during the translation of his work in English due to time and access limitations. It must also be noted that the original bibliography for this article was studied from translated copies in Greek; therefore, the page numbers suggested in the citations below match the page numbers of the translated copies and not the original volumes.

Introduction

This article discusses the theatrical play Fintanaki by Pantelis Horn (1881-1941), written in 1921. Fintanaki is a modern Greek diminutive for the Turkish word fidan, which translates as sapling. In the Greek urban slang of the 1920s, the word fintani (sapling) or fintanaki (little sapling) was often used to describe people of certain delinquent background or unconventional and antisocial behaviour. The play by Pantelis Horn is connected with Athenian folk-ethography, which associates with preceding literature and theatre genres, such as the comedy-romance and the drama-romance. The current paper discuses this relationship and also the connections of the above genres with European Naturalism. The conventions of Naturalism, noted in contemporary European literature, were studied by Pantelis Horn and were adapted to the urban Greek context. The play is discussed in relation to the broader developments in theatre and literature during the mid-war period, both in relation to Greece and Western Europe. The ethographic and naturalistic features employed by Pantelis Horn are examined in their contemporary social and economic context, and are also associated with the social norms and moral values of the mid-war period. A separate section examines Fintanaki as part of our own (modern Greek) context and comments on the diachronic character of the play. At the end of the paper, there is a brief summary with some basic conclusions on the relationship between Naturalism and ethography, as this is noted during a transitional period for Greek theatre and literature.

Fintanaki and the Athenian ethography

Fintanaki by Pantelis Horn was first introduced on stage on 17th September 1921 (Vafeiadi 1992, 9). The literature and theatre reviews of the time described the play as folk-ethography; however, it included other naturalistic features, which caused a debate among literature scholars and theatre commentators. On the 19th September of the same year, Fotos Politis published an article on the newspaper Politeia, where he suggested that the only genre describing the play is ethography. In his view, Fintanaki described the life and everyday reality of contemporary Athens by “presenting the local colour in full fidelity” (Vafeiadi 1992, 51-3). Of course, Fintanaki and the broader dramaturgy by Pantelis Horn is nowadays difficult to categorise. The writer studied a variety of theatrical genres and welcomed multiple influences from European literature, such as the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), Symbolism, Naturalism and psychological drama. At the same time, however, Pantelis Horn remained loyal to the Greek tradition, focusing on the Greek rural and urban environment, which he transformed according his own personal style. The main theme of Fintanaki is the relationship between love and human fate in a context of social deterioration, which he describes realistically and melodramatically (Vafeiadi 1992, 33-4).

The story takes place in the interior courtyard of a typical Athenian courtyard-house at the area of Plaka, located at the slopes of the Acropolis. It is the year 1921, a period of great social reclassifications due to the impact of World War I, while Greece is on the verge of the Asia-Minor Catastrophe. The Athenian petty bourgeois is witnessing a period of great poverty and economic insecurity. The play focuses on the gradual collapse of the protagonists’ morality, which is determined by social fate and its economic dead-ends. Due to these circumstances, Toula, who is the play’s main character, is led to prostitution, while her father, Mr Antonis, is forced to purloin government money in order to ‘buy’ his honour back. The immediate social circle of the two protagonists includes three women, Eva, Froso and Mrs Katigo, who do not recognise any form of moral or social value outside money. In this specific social environment, any manifestation of true love is meant to die. The life of the protagonists is automatically controlled by the invisible hand of poverty (Vafeiadi 1992, 11-14).

A similar story to the Fintanaki had been previously played in the Greek theatres in 1891: it was the Lyre of Old-Nicholas (Η Λύρα του Γερονικόλα), written by Demetrius Koromilas (1850-1898). The writer had focused on the upheaval and discord caused by money to an Athenian poor working-class family at the area of Plaka. In his play, Koromilas introduced elements of comedy-romance and drama-romance, which were later passed on to contemporary revues and ethographic dramas (Mauromoustakos 1999, 292). The neighbourhood of Plaka, together with poverty and the corrosive power of money, are all common features between the plays by Pantelis Horn and Demetrius Koromilas.

The development of comedy-romance and drama-romance in Greece associates with the first publications of ethographic literature in the 1880s and the establishment of folk studies as a distinct module in Greek academia. During that time, there was a shift of interest from the urban environments to the rural areas and the life of the countryside, which led to the development of a rural-folk, or perhaps ‘couleur locale’, drama. In theatre, there was the first appearance of plays written in local dialects, actors dressed in folk-traditional costumes, and the use of folk music and folk songs during the play. The milieu of the rural countryside was described in a populist manner, which led to the development of standardised and stereotypical theatrical characters, defined by their lineage, origin, profession, accent and various other identification marks of their external appearance. Of course, the development of such stereotypical characters in comedy-romance and drama-romance was mostly due to the impact of Realism instead of Naturalism. This is true in relation to the ‘scenic reality’ of the plays, which was still heavily idealised (Pouchner 2002, 334-5). As it will be explained further on, the relationship between Naturalism and the works of Pantelis Horn is defined by various factors, which do not necessarily depend on the developments of drama.

The ethographic approach followed by Horn in Fintanaki, as well as its relationship with comedy-romance and drama-romance, are noted in relation to the standardised everyday characters of the Athenian 1921 petty bourgeois, which dominate the play. Aggelos Terzakis (1907-1979) identified these characters as “η μεσίτρα, ο παραλής, το τσόκαρο, ο κουτσαβάκης, ο νοικοκύρης-άνθρωπος, η ‘προκομμένη’ (1)”, while the so-called Fintanaki (the sapling) was a typical young working class girl of the 1920s (Vafeiadi 1992, 16).

All of the play’s characters speak the daily folk language of the Athenian working-class neighbourhoods. This is the demotiki (2), which was enriched with elements of urban slang. This preference to the demotiki was not only due to the popular conventions of ethography, but also due to the demoticism movement of the early 20th century. The reader should bear in mind that theatre and the production of drama in modern Greece was the intellectual battle ground, were the demoticism debate started during the late 19th century. Strong supporters of the demotiki language such as Argyris Eftaliotis (1849-1923), Yiannis Psycharis (1854-1929), Demetrius Tagopoulos (1867-1926), Elias Voutieridis (1874-1941), Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) and Pantelis Horn (1881-1941), established the demotiki as the official language of modern Greek drama (Spathis 1981, 39-40).

In Fintanaki, the play’s characters perform stereotypical mannerism which repeat in ethographic Realism; for example, when Efi asks Yiagos in a mincing manner if he is just passing his time with her (Horn 1992 [1921], 88). There is a characteristic way of talking by some of the protagonists, such as the working-class slang by the ‘koutsavakis’ Yiagos, who notes: “if luck pulls you down and smashes you in such way, and strikes you down like an octopus...you get to become hard as rock and you say to her (to luck): ‘strike again you bitch’” (Horn 1992 [1921], 97). The local colour, theatrically know as the ‘couleur locale’ of the comedy-romance, is noted in relation to the lyrics of folk songs. In one of the scenes, Mr Antonis recaps Toulas childhood and after having been carried away by his emotions, he mumbles the lyrics of a know lullaby: “Go to sleep, I ordered your dowry gifts from Constantinople, your clothes and your golden jewellery from Venice (3)” (Horn 1992 [1921], 135).

From a technical perspective, Fintanaki is classified as an urban ethography because it describes an urban milieu; this contrasts with the typical ethography of the time, as well as with the comic-romance and the drama-romance, which usually describe the rural milieu. It represents a theatrical shift from the ethography of the countryside to the ethography of the big cities, which can be attributed to the peculiar social conditions of 1920s Greece. The movement of folk-Athenian ethography and Neo-Urban Realism had already began in the early 20th century with the works of Spyros Melas (1882-1966), and continued during the mid-war period, initially with the play Renoula (Ρηνούλα) by Aemilios Veakis (1884-1951) and then with the Fintanaki by Pantelis Horn (1881-1941). The latter play introduced a total shift of interest to the urban environment, probably due to the internal migration towards the urban centres of the time. This migration was due to the devastation after World War I and the Asia-Minor Catastrophe, which produced poverty and social unrest to the lower social strata throughout Greece. The urban ethography noted in Fintanaki offers a realistic description of the urban environment of the Plakan neighbourhood at the eve of the Asia-Minor Catastrophe; however, there are no similarities with the absolute misery noted in the Vaudeville Woman (Γυναίκα του Βαριτέ), written in 1924 by Georgios Sokos (1892-1937), or the extreme prostitution described in the Neighbours (Γειτόνισσες), written by Pantelis Horn in 1924 (Vasileiou 2005, 96-9). In European literature, the shift of inetest from the countryside-life to the city-life coincided with Naturalism, which took place a lot earlier compared to Greece due to the Industrial Revolution and the following urbanisation of the 19th century (Vasileiou 2005, 104). In his Fintanaki, Horn shows no intention to copy the characters of European Naturalistic urban dramaturgy; by contrast, he presents typically local folk characters (Vasileiou 2005, 100), which are likely to associate with the Greek comic-romance.

The impact of Naturalism

The discovery of Naturalistic features in Fintanaki arrived late due to the transitional stage of the mid-war period, which affected Greek dramaturgy and the philological analysis of its plays. In 1983, Demetrius Stathis characterised Horn’s play as “a delayed imitation of Naturalism...‘moulded’ into ethography” (Vafeiadi 1992, 59). According to Spathis, the play is closer to Naturalism compared to any other play of the same period. Despite its structure as a capital-city’s ethography, the play promotes a social critique and denounces the system’s extortionate mechanisms through the moral decay of the protagonists’ family. Still, Spathis agrees that the essential features of Naturalistic drama are absent in Fintanaki. These are the ultimate determinism in the play’s plot, the feeling of complete wretchedness in relation to the protagonists, and the impact of heredity on the protagonists’ behaviours (Vafeiadi 1992, 59).

In relation to the latter point, Kostas Georgousopoulos confirms the Naturalistic origin of Fintanaki, as the feature of heredity is promoted strongly through the relationship between father and daughter. In the play, Mr Antonis says to Toula “you look just like me” (Vafeiadi 1992, 17), yet at the same time he knows this might not be true. In reality, Mr Antonis wishes to prove to himself that despite the climate of money-worship noted among the inhabitants of the Plakan courtyard, his daughter maintains a level of honesty and integrity, which originates from his own personality. In the author’s personal view, at the end of the play heredity manifests in a different way compared to how Mr Antonis belies. Both characters are gradually dragged down towards illegality and moral decay. Mr Antonis dies from sorrow, and before him dies Toula’s love for Yiagos. A few months after its theatrical premiere in 1921, the play was re-published as a novel. In Horn’s own introduction to his novel, Froso (Toula’s mother) is described as a woman brought up in Athens’ red-light district (Vafeiadi 1992, 12-13). In that sense, when Toula decides to become a prostitute, heredity is confirmed by relation to her mother.

The play’s relationship with Naturalism can be clearly seen in the photographic description of the Plakan daily life and economic reality. This is stripped from its popular myths, beautifications and idealisations, which are by contrast noted in drama-romance. Horn describes the impacts of heredity and social context on its characters with absolute fidelity, and he experiments enough to conclude to the total nullification of their personalities. On the other hand, Horn’s intention does not follow the typical conventions of European Naturalism, probably due to the trends of the transitional phase from ethography to Naturalism that was noted in Greece during the early 1920s. For example, although the characters are dragged down to immorality due to their actions, at the same time, their esoteric ethos remains intact, an element that descends from the conventions of Romanticism. As Toula ends up in prostitution, her act receives the form of a human sacrifice, and at the same time, the death of Mr Antonis receives the form of a redemptive purification (Vafeiadi 1992 17-18).

In must be noted that the “transitional phase from ethography to Naturalism” is a conventional term that is meant to describe the confusion of literature scholars and theatre commentators of the time in relation to Pantelis Horn’s play. In reality, the problem lies in the broader confusion between the two genres noted in Greek theatrical reviews due to the impact of 1880s prose literature, where ethography and Naturalism were conventionally perceived to be the same. Greek prose of the 1880s is connected with a literature shift towards realistic scene descriptions, customs and habits of the Greek rural areas, which are different compared to the conventions of the preceding Romanticism. The unification of Naturalism and ethography in Greece took place under peculiar conditions. The milieu of European Naturalism was restricted to the ‘couleur locale’ of the Greek countryside due to the nature of the Greek society. Furthermore, the main focus of European Naturalism was the poverty and misery of the urban working classes, which was projected in the form of social critique, strongly influenced by Marxism and Darwinism. The latter was employed to stress the impact of heredity at a social level: the social environment was projected as an almighty living organism, which powerfully subdued the consciousness of the petty bourgeois. By contrast, Greek literature never developed a similar movement and deflected from the European norm of the time. With Fintanaki, however, there was the first appearance of a European-style urban milieu in Greece, which again did not resemble the typical European milieu of Naturalism. The Athenian society of 1921 had not reached the level of industrialisation and urbanisation noted in other European capitals; therefore, Fintanaki maintained strong features from the traditional agricultural society of the Greek countryside, which consisted of the rural milieu. One could argue that the country’s population was semi-urbanised and the theatrical audience was still charmed by the folklore features of comedy-romance and drama-romance of previous periods (Pouchner 1984, 322-6).

Pantelis Horn probably represents the beginning of pure Naturalism in Greek theatre. Together with Modernism in the fine arts, Naturalism appeared in Greek literature and theatre right at the same time as ethography. All three movements began in Northern Europe a lot earlier, but arrived in Greece with significant delay due to the peculiar social conditions of the time. This situation generated two broader tendencies: on one hand there was a traditional ethography that was still attached to the thematology of the previous century, and on the other hand, there was a modernist ethography, that was influenced by the works of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), August Strindberg (1849-1912), Leon Tolstoy (1828-1910), Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann (1862-1946) and the philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Ibsen’s Vampires, for example, were played for the first time in Athens in 1894, and were introduced to the audience by the novelist and dramatist Gregorios Xenopoulos (1867-1951), who was one of the pioneers of Greek urban Realism. In later years, the consolidation of ‘Ibsenism’ in Greece was due to the contributions of Konstantinos Christomanou (1867-1911) and Thomas Oikonomou (1864-1927). The early phase of Greek Naturalism began with the plays The Secret Wedding (Ο Μυστικός Γάμος) and The Prank of Life (Η Φάρσα της Ζωής) by Yiannis Kambysis (1872-1901), both written in 1896. From 1907 onwards, there appeared major Greek play writers, who assimilated the ideas of Naturalism and Symbolism in their works, and funded the Greek Theatre of Ideas. These were Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), Spyros Melas (1882-1966), Demetrius Tagopoulos (1867-1926) and Paulos Nirvanas (1866-1937). Fintanaki by Pantelis Horn was initially classified as a ‘Plakan ethography’ instead of a Naturalist drama, even though it described the social traps constructed by the urban milieu (Pouchner 1984, 368-70.)

Fintanaki follows the Naturalistic recipe due to Horn’s devotion to Ibsen’s Symbolisms and his productive interaction with various theatrical genres, which focused on the lives of both foreign and domestic urban working classes. His broader interest in the social decay and poverty of the Greek petty bourgeois is highly unlikely to have been triggered by the economic uncertainty of the mid-war period, not even the events of the Aria-Minor Catastrophe, which took place after Fintanaki was first presented on stage in 1921. In that sense, Horn’s motive is likely to have been external, and to a certain extent related to the social reflections of the October Revolution of 1917, which aimed in the practical establishment of Marxist ideology. During the time of Pantelis Horn, the so-called ‘20s Generation’ of Greek intellectuals consisted of many Communists and Socialists, while at the same time, there was a strong leftward shift in the country’s artistic production. This leftward shift affected Greek drama and imposed a change focus to the lower social strata and the problems inflicted to them by money and capitalism (Vasileiou 2005, 104-5). There are, of course, objections to whether Horn had assimilated Marxist ideas in his plays, firstly due to his family background, and secondly due to his profession: he was a naval officer during the climax period of Greek Nationalism (Vafeiadi 1992, 23). On the other hand, it is likely that Horn’s critique to the urban milieu was strongly influenced by the anti-military and anti-capitalist views of other contemporary writers.

Fintanaki in the modern Greek context

The previous two sections focused on the relationship between Fintanaki and ethography, Naturalism, Symbolism and the broader tendencies in Greek literature during the 1920s. This section focuses on something totally different: the play’s features, which connect it with modern social reflections, and therefore, allow the play to be examined as part of the modern Greek context and mind-setting.

The almighty powers of the social environment and the way in which poverty manipulates the lives of people, can also be seen as a contemporary social reflection. Of course, the psychological dead ends, in which Horn’s protagonists are trapped in, have been partially overcome by today's standards and social practices (Vafeiadi 1992, 21) (4). Still, they generate interesting questions in terms of Greek social history and the relationship between past and present customs.

In the play, Toula falls in love with the wrong man during a vulnerable age and feels disappointed. Based on the 1920s standards and social practices, her abortion is an extremely immoral act, which carries social criticism and public stigma. Is this stigma the same for women having abortions today? Her social circle consists of women who do not hesitate to prostitute themselves in order to avoid their economic condemnation. On the other hand, though, is this not the case nowadays, for many poor migrant women in Western societies? According to Mrs Katigo, for the women, abortion, prostitution, illegal money and fast success bear no moral constraints. This is even true for the men: Giagos ‘sells himself off’ for a job in the public sector. Are these situations extremely different compared to modern Greek examples? Mr Antonis, who is presented as a moral male figure, purloins public money to buy back his lost family-honour. His wife disagrees and criticises his actions; however, it is the same woman who, earlier in the play, had no objections if Mr Antonis was prone to steal the money and spend them for himself and his own family. According to her exact words: “who has honey on his fingertips and does to taste it”? In modern Greece, where corruption seems to be leading our society, how different is for some people this specific way of thinking? Finally, the play describes the character of the middle-aged rich ‘uncle’ Giavousis, who can buy love and attention with his money. How unfamiliar is this type of man in our modern societies?

The answers to the above questions are not as obvious as one might think. As noted earlier, Fintanaki is an urban-folk ethography with Naturalistic elements. Horn describes and criticises the social reality of his time, which is not entirely different to ours; in fact, to a certain extent this type of reality is timeless for most of the poor working classes. The features of ethographic Realism in Fintanaki are not necessarily time-specific and do not only describe the social conditions of the mid-war period; they extend to deeply-rooted social habits, which are still present in modern Greek society. It is the author’s personal view that Pantelis Horn wishes to expose the reality of his time, based on the economic conditions and the broader poverty of the mid-war period. In the play, the viewer notes that money has the power to corrupt all moral values; however, it is more that obvious that money is the only mean to guarantee the protagonists’ survival. With a sense of Romanticism, Horn is likely to recollect the times when money could not touch the moral integrity of the ‘good-old’ people, such as Mr Antonis. In a tragic way, Horn redeems his protagonist and introduces the moral reality of ‘modern times’, which is still present today. The main difference between past and present is perhaps the following: the relationship between money, corruption and society is not oriented towards survival, but towards satisfying an on-growing demand for luxury.

Summary and Conclusions

Fintanaki by Pantelis Horn was performed for the first time in 1921 and produced a scholarly debate in relation to its typological classification. This debate was due to the confusion among the theatrical reviewers of the time, as this was a transitional period towards the amalgamation of Naturalism and urban ethography. Horn had studied different theatrical plays and literature genres; therefore, he had assimilated the latest theatrical developments in Europe through the works of Ibsen, Naturalism, Symbolism and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Fintanaki there is strong presence of stereotypical characters noted in the Athenian urban context, which descend from the preceding comedy-romance plays by Demetrius Koromilas. The connection with ethography is noted in relation to the play’s focus on the Plakan courtyard, the descriptions of the characters, particularly in relation to the expressions and use of language, which also coincides with the broader demoticism movement of the early 20th century. The play’s social environment is described through a combination of Naturalistic and ethographic conventions; in fact, it is a semi-urbanised milieu, which exerts strong influence on the protagonists according to the prototypes of European Naturalism. Another interesting feature is the presence of Determinism in the play, though not necessarily in its Darwinian sense, but more at a social level. The critique against the society and capitalism complies with the poverty and other economic problems following World War I, as well as with the ideology of the October Revolution; however, Horn avoids any political remarks on the subject. He uses poverty to present the moral corruption and esoteric collapse of his protagonists in a way that seems experimental. Finally, it is the authors personal view that the play carries a feeling of romantic nostalgia; this is likely to follow Horn’s own nostalgia for the ‘good-old days’, the time when people were morally intact. During the play, Horn’s ‘good-old days’ die together with his protagonists, opening way to the new immoral values of social survival, which are still present in the modern Greek society.

Bibliography

Horn, P., 1992 [1921], To Fintanaki, introduction and comments by E. Vafeiadi (ed.), Modern Greek Theatre Library Series, Athens: Dodoni.
Mauromoustakos, Pl., 1999, ‘Comedy-romance and drama-romance’, in Greek Education Encyclopaedia, Volume 28, Theatre – Cinema – Music – Dance, Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon, 292.
Puchner, W., 1984, ‘Fintanaki and the ethographic legacy’, in Puchner, W. (ed.) European Theatrology. Eleven Studies, Athens: Goulandris-Horn Institution.
Pouchner, W., 2002, ‘The post-revolutionary theatre until the Asia-Minor catastrophe’, n Puchner, W. (ed.) Modern Greek Theatre (1600-1940) – Cinema, Volume I, The Modern Greek Theatre until World War II, Patra: Greek Open University, 77-299.
Spathis, D., 1983, ‘The Greek Theatre’, Greece: History and Culture (10) 29-33.
Vasileiou, A., 2005, Modernisation or Tradition: Prose Theatre in Mid-War Athens, Athens: Metaichmio.
Vafeiadi, E., 1992, ‘Introduction’, in Horn, P., To Fintanaki, introduction and comments by E. Vafeiadi, Modern Greek Theatre Library Series, Athens: Dodoni, 9-63.

Notes

1. Such characters are difficult to translate in English, and can even be more difficult to describe in detail. The mesitra (μεσίτρα) is a sort of female agent, mediator, or middle-woman, who mediates in order to arrange a casual date or marriage between youths. The paralis (παραλής) refers to rich male, who is also likely to think that his money can buy everything. The tsokaro (τσόκαρο), which literally means clog, was an improvisational type of shoe for poor people; however, in the play’s context and in the 1920s urban slang, tsokaro was used to describe a woman of low moral standards. The koutsavakis (κουτσαβάκης) literally means a person who is limping or has a peculiar walking style, often humpback, with spinal deformations; however, in the play’s context and also in the popular folk shadow-theatre of the early 20th century, koutsavakis relates to a person who pretends to be tough by imitating cripple-walking. The noikokyris anthropos (νοικοκύρης άνθρωπος) is still used nowadays and literally means a good family-man. Finally, the prokommeni (προκομμένη) is an ironic nickname. Although it literally means a lady with remarkable achievements throughout her life, in the play’s context, the word is used to describe a female that has no life achievements at all.
2. For the language debate and the division between demotiki and kathareuousa in the early-modern Greek state, there in more information in the articles “Romans, Greeks, Hellenes: Pre-revolutionary notions of national identity” and “Archaic dialects, the Hellenistic Koine and the modern Greek language”.
3. The lullaby in Greek goes like this: “Κοιμήσου και παράγγειλα, στην Πόλη τα προικιά σου, στη Βενετιά τα ρούχα σου, και τα χρυσαφικά σου”.
4. This is currently not the case. In fact, when the original paper was written back in 2007, there used be no signs of bankruptcy and economic recession on the horizon, which have been troubling Greece since 2010. Over the last decade, in particular, the lower and middle working classes in Greece have witnessed a significant loss of income, which is often likely to resemble the working class poverty described in Fintanaki.