Alexandrovodas the Unscrupulous by Georgios N. Soutsos (review)

The recent publication of Georgios Soutsos’s satirical comedy Alexandrovodas the Unscrupulous, translated into English and prefaced by Anna Stavrakopoulou, introduces a fascinating yet little-known work of the Modern Greek repertoire to a broader international audience. The fact that the present edition appears in Istanbul, where the work was orginally composed and read, constitutes in itself an important event. On the one hand, Soutsos’s Alexandrovodas is a testimony to the vitality of the Phanariot literary activities in the late-eighteenth century. On the other, however, the circumstances of its composition and original circulation underscore the relative precariousness of Phanariot letters at the time, which partly accounts for the fact that important works like Alexandrovodas only truly became an object of study for scholars of Modern Greek literature in the last few decades. Soutsos’s play, written in 1785, was never performed and only existed in manuscript form until Dimitris Spathes’s edition (1995), to which the publication reviewed here is much indebted.

As noted by Stavrakopoulou, while the work retains many of the formal elements that define eighteenth-century European theatrical satire, it nevertheless constitutes a rather puzzling anomaly within that genre, due to the virulence of its attacks on a prominent political figure of the time, whose identity is never concealed by the use of coded language or allusion but, on the contrary, explicitly stated in the title, as well as throughout the play. In short, the extent of Soutsos’ satire never seeks the safety of what could be called théâtre à clef, providing instead a very frank denunciation of well-known members of Phanariot society in the 1780s.

Set in the Ottoman capital immediately before and after the departure for Jassy of Alexandros Mavrokordatos Firari, appointed ruler of Moldavia by the Ottomans in 1785, the three acts of the play describe the climate of generalized corruption of the Greek-Ottoman elite and the schemes of various figures in Alexandrovodas’ entourage who plot to secure their own position of power and to fradulently obtain monetary benefits from Mavrokordatos’s new position. Following a well-known trope of European theater, the title character is absent for an important portion of the action while Alexandrovodas’s semi-illiterate brother-in-law, his conniving sister, his debauched mistress, and several other characters occupy the forefront of the play. Perhaps with the exception of Domna Zapheira, Alexandrovodas’s abused wife, a character vaguely reminiscent of Elvira in Molière’s Don Juan, all the dramatis personae, are characterized by hypocrisy, greed, and lust and through their interactions emerges a rather sinister image of Phanariot politics. Even the Church (represented here by the Bishop of Komnitza) is not exempt from Soutsos’s attacks and, even though it is clearly apprehended as a moral failure by the author, Alexandrovodas’s atheist “profession of faith” in a lenghty tirade toward the end of the play is one of the most memorable passages in the work, underlining, albeit negatively, the exposure of the Phanariot intelligentsia to contemporary philosophical discussions in Western Europe.

To convey this grim picture of Phanariot circles, the author relies on an astonishingly blunt and occasionally scabrous language which reveals the profound vulgarity of the characters, hidden more or less effectively under a veneer of dignity. It is precisly her commitment to render the vivacity of Soutsos’s language that constitutes the greatest virtue of Stavrakopoulou’s often astute translation. At no point does she feel obligated to approach the original text with an overly antiquarian respect and she never downplays the often coarse virulence of the dialogue. The translator is particularly efficient at conveying in English the heteroglossic nature of the text and the specific Phanariot idiom, a demotic insterspersed loan words from both Turkish and Western languages. The most spectacular achievement of Stavrakopoulou’s excellent rendition lies in the fact that the work seems, in many instances, to escape the limits of “armchair comedy” and feels like it could sustain the test of stage...