“Themelis administers a great wealth of materials. In tandem with the love, family and financial life of his characters, he describes the places and cities in which they move; Trieste, Siatista, Salonica, Odessa, Brussels. He depicts in painstaking detail the labour involved in trade and business at large. He also depicts social institutions as well as the multinational quality of the greater area, pointing out the attempts of the Greek bourgeoisie to create educational structures in irredentist Macedonia. He sheds light on the movement of ideas, and puts the spotlight on bourgeois civilisation, mapping out its intellectual dimension and its way of life, while not shying from bringing into the open the substructure of exploitation and squalor of the masses on which it was based. While in the Αναζήτηση the main contrast was between tradition and modernity, here the conflict takes place within the forces of modernity. Its two sides are bourgeois liberalism and the revolutionary and communist ideas and movements. The end result was the great overthrow. It was also the onset of an unprecedented social experiment which ended in its own invalidation and to the refutation of the socialist vision...”