The classic work by George Theotokas, for the first time in an abridged and monotonic edition.

"The more interesting a period is, the more responsibilities we bear towards ourselves and our nation," wrote the Constantinopolitan George Theotokas in a speech to students. And indeed, who would doubt the historical, sociological, and literary interest of the 1930s, which would require an Argo to transport the reading public of its time and make it reflect on what was happening?

George Theotokas, a writer and intellectual of urban origin with a European education, possessing deep training and extensive knowledge, was a leading figure in one of the most important literary generations of the 20th century, the generation of the '30s. On the one hand, he developed the novel in Greece, and on the other hand, he cultivated the essay, believing that these two genres represented the "new literature," or the most representative expression of modern Greek culture.

Following the Free Spirit (1929), the pioneering essay written by the twenty-four-year-old Theotokas, he came to shake up the waters of novel writing with Argo, his two-volume first novel (first volume 1933; second volume 1936). The circumstances under which he was inspired to write Argo were tumultuous. We find ourselves immediately after the catastrophe of 1922, an event that had the immediate consequence of relinquishing the grand ideas that had admirably attempted to bolster the battered Hellenism.

Literature was considered fertile ground to memorialize the historical imprint, to shape the new identity of Hellenism after the collapse of the Great Idea, and to promote the concept of Hellenicity as a form of shifting the unfulfilled territorial and national desire. In this vein, Theotokas describes the terrible period he lived through, without denigrating the nation and without succumbing to pessimism, which he tries in every way to combat and in its place to raise a vision.

(From the Afterword by Katerina Moustakatu)