Alexandrovodas the Unscrupulous (1785) by Georgios N. Soutsos, intro. and translated by Anna Stavrakopoulou (review)

The title of Georgios N. Soutsos’s 1785 play, Alexandrovodas the Unscrupulous, refers to a historical figure who lived during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth. The name is a composite of a first name, Alexandros (Mavrokordatos Firari), and the title Voevod, or ruler of the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. These two positions, alongside those of Grand Dragoman and Dragoman of the Fleet, were by the eighteenth century occupied by members of an elite group of Orthodox Christians known as the Phanariots, named after their district of Phanari (Turkish Fener) in Constantinople. Both the author and the protagonist of the play, which was never performed but circulated in manuscript in Constantinople and the Danubian principalities, were eminent Phanariots, and the work provides a fascinating and intimate glimpse into the interrelated domestic and political worlds of the Phanariots.

The text of the play, collated from several manuscripts and supported by extensive archival research, was first published in Greek by Dimitris Spathis in 1995. The translator of this edition, Anna Stavrakopoulou, assistant professor of theater studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, builds her introduction on Spathis’s research to stress the unusual and paradoxical nature of this “eponymous libel set in an exotic setting” (12) and to make it available to non-Greek literature and history scholars. The play is unique in its overt reference to a powerful historical contemporary, and in the realism with which it portrays him as a corrupt philanderer, intent on plotting the murder of his highborn wife in order to enjoy the services of a plebeian mistress. The playwright Soutsos, who also wrote a number of more traditional, brief allegorical dramas, portrays Alexandrovodas in a domestic context steeped in profanity and explicit sexual jokes, surrounded by scheming relatives and associates, all keen to profit from the positive turn in their master’s fortunes. The play is poised at the moment, replete with machinations and avarice, between Alexandrovodas’s investiture and his preparations for moving to the Danubian principality, and the reversal of his fortunes triggered by the dismissal of the Grand Vizier (his protector) and the changing landscape of the Ottoman Court. While politics determines the plot, its motor is Alexandrovodas’s lust; Soutsos defames Alexandrovodas by dwelling on his sexual infidelity within the network of venality and corruption that surrounds him.

Although Soutsos’s libel is fuelled by the competing interests of the Phanariot clans in which he and Alexandros Mavrokordatos belonged, Stavrakopoulou, agreeing with Spathis, also ascribes the playwright’s enmity to the difference between Soutsos’s conservative religious and moral outlook and the cosmopolitanism of Mavrokordatos, who had spent time in Russia and who was fluent in Greek, Ottoman, Russian, French, and German. Exposure to European ideas is portrayed as self-avowed “Machiavellianism.” Acquaintance with “Europe” in this play is effected through Alexandrovodas’s sojourn in Russia; in the long soliloquy that ends the second act, he notes that he abandoned his “superstitions ... upon visiting Russia” and that he has resolved to embrace pleasure and self-preservation as his sole divinities before disintegrating “to nothing, from which we sprouted.” The play concludes that his attachment to “Europe and then again Europe” has transformed Alexandrovodas into an “ingrate, a philanderer, a wrongdoer, and an atheist” (76). The displacement of the European centre to Russia is a reminder that the play’s location is not the European periphery but an alternative imperial context, that is, cosmopolitan, diverse, polyglot, and subject to elaborate structures of governance that included the Christian Orthodox Phanariot elite.

The Phanariots were distinguished by nothing more than the international networks in which they moved or with which they were in frequent communication. This movement was facilitated by their multilingual prowess, which they put to the service of Ottoman diplomacy. The language of the play is the vernacular of these polyglots, a hybrid Greek...