Alexandros Soutsos

Alexandros Soutsos was a Greek poet and satirist of the generation that followed independence, and the most persistent literary critic of the state it produced. Born in Constantinople in 1803 into a Phanariot family — the Greek elite of the Ottoman capital that supplied dragomans and princes of the Danubian principalities — he was educated in Chios and then in Paris, where he absorbed French Romanticism and liberal politics. He returned during the Greek War of Independence and settled in the new kingdom, where his career consisted largely of attacking whoever was governing it. He wrote against Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first head of state, whom he regarded as an autocrat, and after Kapodistrias's assassination he turned on the Bavarian regency and on King Otto with equal vigour. He was prosecuted, fined and imprisoned repeatedly for his satires, and at one point exiled. His verse satires — the Panorama of Greece, the Wanderer, and the Turkey-Hunter — attack corruption, the importation of foreign officials, the neglect of the fighters of the revolution, and the gap between the classical Greece Europe admired and the impoverished state that had emerged. He wrote in an archaising register, and with his brother Panagiotis he led what became known as the Old Athenian school, which favoured a purified language against the demotic — a position that placed him on the losing side of the long Greek language question. He also produced the novel Leandros in 1834, an early Greek Romantic work modelled on Foscolo and Goethe. He died of typhus in Smyrna in 1863, poor and largely out of fashion. His brother Panagiotis outlived him and remained the better-known writer of the two.

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