Cold Wars after 1989: Thanasis Valtinos' Orthokosta and its Reception

Abstract

  This paper examines the reception of Thanasis Valtinos' novel Orthokosta (1994). Since its first appearance, Orthokosta has enjoyed a less than favorable reception, predominantly from leftist commentators who have mounted what seems to be a systematic campaign to discredit the novel's apparent claims to historical truth. The work has been credited with prompting a turn towards "revisionism" in the historiography of the Greek Civil War. Indeed its author has been labeled as a "former leftist” who turned “reactionary" after the demise of “Real Socialism” in 1989. These comments on the text and its author have been accompanied by aesthetic evaluations of the novel which question its status as literature. This paper argues that Orthokosta challenged the basis for the construction of Party-based leftist identities in post-dictatorship Greece and criticized implicitly the populist ideology of the 70s and 80s in Greece. Leftist historians and intellectuals relied on this ideological climate to construct both their political identities and their version of Civil-War historiography. As a work of fiction, Orthokosta questions the institutionalized discourse that sanctified the Left in such historiography and challenges the literary aesthetics that its makers implicitly espoused in constructing it.