[ Written in 1972, during Greece’s military junta, leftist
Marios Chakkas’s recently translated novel The Commune is a mournful
testament from a world where the stakes of politics were communism or
fascism, democracy or dictatorship.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A NEWLY TRANSLATED NOVEL CAPTURES THE TRAGEDY OF GREEK COMMUNISM  
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Tadhg Larabee
October 2, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Written in 1972, during Greece’s military junta, leftist Marios
Chakkas’s recently translated novel The Commune is a mournful
testament from a world where the stakes of politics were communism or
fascism, democracy or dictatorship. _

Almost 50,000 communist partisans were imprisoned after British
troops entered Athens in 1944., photo: Agence France-Presse (AFP) //
Jacobin

 

Greece’s communists began the mid-twentieth century on the
battlefield, moved from there to the prisons and then, if they were
lucky, exile. The less fortunate found themselves in front of firing
squads.

During World War II, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) led the
resistance against the Nazis, and at the end of the war, it controlled
most of the country. Yet when the British-backed government in exile
returned, it launched an anti-communist purge, imprisoning almost
fifty thousand partisans and empowering right-wing death squads to act
as police.

By 1946, when the communists revolted against this White Terror, the
Cold War had begun. They thus found themselves facing not just the
king’s government, but also the United Kingdom and the United
States, in the West’s first test of the Truman Doctrine. After the
communists’ defeat in 1949, the government passed Emergency Law 509,
outlawing the KKE. Then, on April 21, 1967 — after two long decades
of anti-communist collaboration between the CIA and the Greek state
— a group of far-right military officers staged the coup that
installed the Regime of the Colonels, which would exile the last
fragments of the Greek left to remote islands in the Aegean.

 

The Commune
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by Marios Chakkas, translated by Chloe Tsolakoglou
Inpatient Press; 138 pages
Trade Paperback:  $15.00
Published:  2023

 

Inpatient Press
The left-wing Greek novelist and poet Marios Chakkas — whose final
novel, _The Commune_
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came out in English translation this year with Inpatient Press — saw
it all. Born in 1931, he grew up alongside refugees in the
working-class Athenian suburb of Kesarianí, where the Nazis executed
two hundred members of the communist resistance in 1944. Chakkas’s
political convictions prevented him from finding regular work in the
reactionary climate that followed the civil war, and his poverty
forced him to drop out of university. By 1954, he was in prison,
sentenced to four years under the emergency law. Thirteen years later,
the day after the junta took power, Chakkas would face jail once
again.

During his incarceration, Chakkas read and wrote frantically under the
influence of Romantic and absurdist writers such as Mikhail Lermontov,
Percy Shelley, Eugène Ionesco, and Luigi Pirandello. Outside of
prison, he became an important local figure in the United Democratic
Left (EDA), a stand-in for the banned KKE that moved toward democratic
socialism after the death of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s
thaw.

As an EDA municipal counselor and the cofounder of its Progressive
Youth Union (FEN), Chakkas often clashed with the party’s old guard.
He saw their emphasis on party discipline as antithetical to one of
the FEN’s main political activities — planning exuberant arts
festivals in the same working-class Athenian neighborhoods where
Chakkas found inspiration for his writing and activism.

_The Commune_ takes place amid the ruins of this political and
artistic world. Written in 1972 — under the shadow of prison, the
junta, and the terminal cancer that would claim his life later that
year — it is the first of Chakkas’s works to be translated into
English, despite his status as a cult writer of the Greek left. _The
Commune _is a difficult text, admirable as a novel yet in some ways
richer as a historical document. What it captures is an experience
common to many twentieth- and twenty-first-century left-wing
movements: the struggle to see new opportunities for transformation
when the ghosts of past defeats feel inescapable.

Left-Wing Melancholia

In each of _The Commune_’s four sections, Chakkas returns to one of
his life’s central traumas. The first is set in a spectral version
of Kesarianí, with a feeble narrator who wanders through the
ramshackle “commune” his broken and persecuted former comrades
have built in a park. The second follows this narrator to his sickbed,
as a fist-sized tumor grows inside his chest and a mysterious woman
attempts to treat him by pumping him full of helium. The third,
partially in the form of an absurdist play, drops him into a sterile
prison intake room, where three bureaucrats interrogate him about his
childhood complicity in the death of his younger brother. And the
fourth confronts, in the novel’s most direct, lacerating prose, the
original horror of Chakkas’s life: the mass execution whose
aftermath he witnessed as a thirteen-year-old.

Binding these disjointed scenes together is Chakkas’s dreamlike yet
forceful voice, brought to us in a graceful translation by Chloe
Tsolakoglou. The narrator is overwhelmed with desire — for a girl he
once met with “warm feet,” for the friends with whom he talked
literature and dreamed of revolution, for one final chance to free
Greece from right-wing paramilitary rule. Yet his prose lurches from
extreme highs to extreme lows, and every object of the narrator’s
desire seems to crumble into dust right before he can grasp it.
Chakkas is at his most lucid in these low moments, when he reminds us
that the narrator’s world is a shattered recreation of the past.
After recalling his town’s resistance against the Nazis and
momentarily vowing to “fight and then fall” against the junta, he
writes:

It was futile. Those days were the last thunder of a storm that has
long since passed. It’s raining elsewhere now. Some thought that the
storm cloud would come back. . . . Only a memory remains, a continual
elegy for those who were killed, for the youth that was lived with no
fruitful outcome. How did the nostalgia of reminiscence win me over?
Why am I submitting myself to the cycle of repetition?

There’s a word for this cycle — “melancholia,” defined by
Sigmund Freud as a pathological variant of mourning in which the
sufferer continues to identify with the lost object of his love even
when he comes to hate it, severing himself from both the outside world
and the ability to love again. In a 1931 review of Erich Kästner’s
poems, Walter Benjamin diagnosed certain segments of the Left with
this condition.

“Left-wing melancholy,” he argued, is a conservative pose through
which middle-class writers turn revolutionary ideas into lifeless
playthings for their middle-class readers, permitting them to
“absentmindedly caress” alternatives to capitalism without doing
anything to revive them. “What is left,” for Benjamin, “is the
empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings
— nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity — once rested.”

The moments of political pessimism, the barren, dried-out spaces, are
never final in _The Commune_.

_The Commune_’s world can sometimes feel empty and desiccated. In
the prison section, the narrator pliantly confesses and accepts the
electric chair on a platform that floats in a vast, featureless void.
The improvised commune has some joy to it, but it feels unreal in
comparison to the hillside where it sits, scarred by “obituaries,”
the “wounds” of quarrying, and “castrated pine trees.” Even
the FEN, which Chakkas kept alive throughout decades of harassment
from the police and conservative EDA members alike, appears in the
text as “F.E.N., M.E.N, and D.E.N.,” just three meaningless
characters he can bitterly rearrange. “I was forced to pay for
dreaming,” Chakkas explains. “I was so blindsided that I swore
never to hope again.”

Yet to interpret Chakkas’s work as conservative would be to miss the
social dimension of Benjamin’s critique. The left-wing melancholics
Benjamin attacked were successful New Objectivity poets, and in their
popularity lay their ability to commodify the Left’s tragedies.
Chakkas, by contrast, was barely published in his lifetime, seldom
materially secure, and constantly active on the revolutionary margins
of Greek politics. A better way to understand his novel might be
through the lens provided by the historian Enzo Traverso, who has
reinterpreted the concept of left-wing melancholia for our present
times.

 

Melencholia, Traverso argues, is a way for defeated revolutionaries to
refuse integration into a futureless, capitalist present. If, for
Freud, the work of mourning is complete when the subject has separated
itself from the lost object, then, for Traverso, “a successful
mourning could also mean identification with the enemy: lost socialism
replaced by accepted capitalism.”

Traverso’s subject was the condition of the Left after the fall of
Eastern European communism, but his point applies even more strongly
to Greece in the early 1970s. For Chakkas and other Greek leftists, a
successful mourning would not just mean accommodating neoliberalism
— it would mean accepting a military system that had suspended civil
liberties, rehabilitated Nazi collaborators, and imprisoned or exiled
most of the opposition.

And indeed, the moments of political pessimism, the barren, dried-out
spaces, are never final in _The Commune_. Always the narrator slips
back into the past, where Chakkas’s surrealist turns and insatiable
longing make us feel as if the fragments of the EDA and socialist
Kesarianí are open to a still-unimagined reassembly. The book’s
poignancy comes from the fact that Chakkas — his movement smashed,
his death a certainty — knows he will not be there to reassemble
them.

Remembrance and Hope

_The Commune_ does not advance a definable political program, and it
is neither a pessimistic nor an optimistic work. It is an attempt to
grasp a formless hope from within an all-too-concrete hopelessness.
There is one place, however, where Chakkas sees the past as a
political force that is already capable of inspiring resistance and
escaping his melancholic cycles of desire, frustration, and despair:
in the novel’s final section, which returns to Chakkas’s political
birthplace, the Kesarianí shooting range.

_The Commune_ is an attempt to grasp a formless hope from within an
all-too-concrete hopelessness.

Here, in 1944, the Germans shot two hundred communists in groups of
ten, while those at the concentration camp awaiting the firing squad
sang resistance songs. “They say that the blood running from the car
was covered by the arm of some patriot holding carnations,” Chakkas
writes. “Years later, legends will emerge that the asphalt sprouted
flowers, the same ones that might have been placed on those dark
spots.”

This is the sort of dream that gives Chakkas fragile solace when his
narrator sees the commune in the park or imagines floating into the
sky from his deathbed. Yet at the shooting range in Kesarianí,
Chakkas rejects this neat, romantic fantasy, and not just out of
despair. “All these are fictions and transgressions. The truth is
that the blood was left to dry all over the place, until [it] became
one with the dust and left no trace,” he writes.

No trace, that is, to most. The scene shifts to a Kesarianí
government meeting, where Chakkas, then a municipal counselor, is
ejected for mocking his colleagues’ proposals to commemorate the
dead. A memorial already exists, he writes, in “certain secret
symbols,” in yellowed scraps of paper that swirl around in the wind,
getting tangled up in pedestrians’ legs and whispering, to those who
can hear:

I was executed. I decomposed in a mass grave, they poured asbestos,
they buried others on top of me, I became nutritious soil, I became
only a memory that slowly faded alongside my mother’s life, but that
piece of paper I tossed onto the street needs to be picked up sometime
so that it doesn’t wander around like a stray. Justice.

Next to whatever monument the council builds, developers will
inevitably divide up the land to construct workers’ housing and a
shabby school, Chakkas writes. He never makes the point explicit, but
we might infer that in these apartment blocks will grow up kids like
Chakkas and the resistance fighters, “tough kids whose council
member was hunger” and who carry forward the struggle against
dictatorship, even though all political ideals may seem remote to
them. These, perhaps, are the kinds of people that can make out what
the trash is whispering as it blows through streets the government
doesn’t bother to clean.

Yet exactly because of this upbringing, Chakkas cannot escape one
political ideal, which he speaks of with the melancholic’s signature
mixture of attraction and repulsion. “When you grow up in Kesarianí
during the German Occupation and you’ve got a tremendous hatred for
paramilitarism,” he writes, “the possibility of leaving socialism
is slim.” Although the junta fell in 1974, two years after
Chakkas’s death, what replaced it was not socialism, but
center-right neoliberalism under the New Democracy party, which is
again in power in Greece today. _The Commune_ is a strange, elusive
book, but it is invaluable as a voice from a generation of Greek
leftists that was once on the verge of extinction, still dreaming of a
different future.

_[TADHG LARABEE is an assistant editor at Jacobin.]_

_Our new issue, “Aging,” is out now. Follow this link for $20
introductory print subscriptions!
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* Greece
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* Greek left
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* World War II
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* KKE
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* Communist Party of Greece
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* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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* dictatorship
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* Marxist literature
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* poets
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* Poetry
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