This edition anthologizes texts by Markos Avgeri published during the 1950s, which address topics related to aesthetic theory, folk culture, critical theory, and ideology.

The reader, through the selected texts in this volume, will engage with critiques of urban culture and its ideological foundations regarding reality, which permeate aesthetic perception as well as cultural propositions. They will examine the historicity of these changes and the cut made by the October Revolution in the direction of revolutionary socialist ideas in art. Additionally, contemporary ideologies concerning artistic freedom and elements of folkness are found within Markos Avgeri's reflections.

Among the works available to the reader in this edition are "The Moral Criterion of Culture," "Western Culture and Its Characteristics," "Urban Culture and the Plurality of Principles," as well as an interesting "Discussion with Camus," a critique of metaphysical thought with the article "The Panic of Time and the Ideological Defense of Capitalism." Also included are "From the Struggle of Ideas," "The Roads of Freedom," "Lenin and the October Revolution," "The Independents and Sacred Lies," as well as "Crocodiles and the Love of Freedom," "Again Pasternek, Spirit and Freedom," and "Freedom is Seen in Its Fruits," among others.

AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY

MARKOS AYGIERIS (1884-1973). Son of a pharmacist in Karitsa, Epirus, Avgeri was born in Ioannina on February 18, 1884. His official name was Georgios Papadopoulos, but as Markos Avgeri he will forever "live" in Greek Literature, in the militant history of our people, and of his party, the KKE (Communist Party of Greece).

In 1901, Markos Avgeri came to Athens and enrolled at the Medical School of the Kapodistrian University, from which he graduated in 1907. The "doctor," as his friends called him until the end, also made his literary debut while still a student, publishing poems in the prominent magazine of the time, Numas.

From 1910 onward, he began investigating, publishing, studying, and writing monumental theoretical works on foreign and Greek literature, systematically establishing social criteria for its role and critique. At the same time, he translated Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Goethe, Ibsen, Latsko, Hugo, and Maeterlinck. During the second decade of this century, our nation's greatest teacher, Dimitris Glinos, entrusted him with preparing the first textbooks of the modern Greek language.

The Marxist ideas that Avgeri embraced from a young age and wove into his work “grew large” with his recruitment into EAM (National Liberation Front), where he served as General Secretary (when Nikos Karvounis left for the mountains), and of course, with his joining the KKE in 1944 (according to Elliniki Alexiou's testimony), remaining loyal to it until his death (June 8, 1973).

Nikos Eggonopoulos said that "as time passes, the name of Markos Avgeri will grow louder, and the great importance of his work in the Greek intellectual sphere will become more apparent," and Yiannis Tzarrauchis, when he was abroad during the dictatorship, wrote that "he was one of the few people who made me nostalgic for Greece, which should not only be light and sky." A fighter and creator, he will always teach with his ideological and human integrity.