… We are looking at a work which is more than just a work of maturity sure of itself. This is the work of a great, forceful talent. I would call it a perfect work, but the word sounds too cold. Anybody with the merest whiff of sensitivity about himself ought to be cautious when confronted with perfect things, since nothing perfect can excite. And yet this book does not leave us indifferent or contentedly happy. It grips our thinking faculties and our heart too, tossing them up to a great height, from which all is clear and lucid. Excitement and height, these are the two prevailing sentiments as I read Ματωμένα χώματα. We now have the Bible of this modern Exodus of the Greeks of Asia Minor, condensed into a myth both solid and even. This is just the material for the book. Its true content is much wider and its meaning much more profound. We now have our own War and Peace, which, bearing in mind the proportions of modern Greek literature compared to Russian literature in the late 19th century, has significance equal to that of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. I do believe that this is the finest prose diptych of modern Greece: war and peace, resulting in the transformation into epic prose of a great and important national venture. Both the tableaux of peaceful life and, especially, the tableaux of war are sensational. Their composition wisely progresses from small scale to large and passionate, from the personal to the general until it opens up onto a grand, total vista of human fate being baked out of the blood and tears of the generations. Dido Sotiriou’s achieves this without ever skirting her topic, with no generalisations and no sermonizing. She gives us the grand picture, the vantage point from which one can view things in depth and breadth, from where one can take stock of the sum total of the adventures of humanity, of the quintessence of historical experience, and from where he can weight the future with clear gaze and broaden his consciousness. The aim of the text is definitely not an impartial representation, an indifferent charting of the individual adventures befalling its heroes and a whole people who were thrust into a horrific hell. Its aim is rather to depict the depth of things, to control the most precious human values, to help us understand, to acquaint us with others and ourselves.
To achieve this, she most certainly did not chart any secret routes, any internal labyrinths, ultimately leading to the Minotaur of incurable doubt. Instead, she settled on the straight paths of the senses, of experience, of rationality, of knowledge, of the scientific method. But always she asserts her inalienable right to feeling, to the heart, never yielding not even an inch to the motorized brigades of cold reason. She displays her passion in defending the notions of personality, of feelings, of hue as well as in controlling the more general aspects.
Therein lays, more or less, the importance, the essence of the text. As does every creation of greater scope, so does this too present infinite contours, bringing to light a host of philosophical, historical, aesthetic problems and topics…
Dido Sotiriou grew up in a family that was both financially and socially downwardly mobile. Her parents made strenuous efforts to reestablish themselves. She went on to live through the whole tragedies of being uprooted, of the slaughters, of the refugees, with all the meaning that the latter word implies. She has lived through all the contradictions of Greek society after 1922 becoming extremely acute, and at their very epicenter into the bargain. What follows heightens tensions even more: dictatorship, foreign occupation, civil war, and contemporary crisis. These are more than enough to charge the sensitivity of someone of artistic nature with the necessary charge for artistic creation…
Dido Sotiriou did not make her bets on Black or Zero. She has staked everything on red, which stands for the plebeian faith of today, for the doing away of human servitude and of war, for the triumph of love…
The deep freeze of the formless and frigid mass of events, images, proofs holds no attraction for her. She stands consciously by the warmth of her own ideals, taking extra care not to betray them; there is no need for her to forge fake proofs, since true ones abound. Nor does she have to distort the world in order to put it to rights. I believe that, thus far, this is the happiest such case in Greek letters. One should discuss this more openly, Ματωμένα χώματα being an excuse to begin such a discussion…
Finally, we should take good notice of the way the author combines the personal adventures of the protagonist and narrator with the general crisis, only to arrive at the most complete end product we have come across for a very long time…