Stratis Myrivilis's Life in the Tomb(1923): Affective Tropes of Modernist Resilience

In Stratis Myrivilis's semiautobiographical anti-war 1923 novel Life in the Tomb, the fictional protagonist Kostoulas writes letters to his fiancée, describing his physical and emotional state as a soldier at the Macedonian front of World War I. In this article I read Myrivilis's novel as an illuminating test case for the complications and resonance of the concept of "resilience" both as core affect and a generative mode of historical witnessing. Myrivilis's exemplary modernist text reveals the close formal and structural affinities between affective modernism and tropes of narrative resilience. In order to showcase the formal mechanisms of resilience, I close-read Life in the Tomb to trace instances of physical and emotional resilience, while arguing that Myrivilis's "accidental modernism," as it has been termed by Peter Bien, (1990, 1523: 56–60) is intentionally formalist in an effort to depict modernist endurance to war trauma. Opting to tell the story of what history, and the war, feels like, Myrivilis (through Kostoulas) employs the formalist tropes of defamiliarization and the grotesque to narrate resilience as affective interpenetration between individual and collective states of being.