Stratis Tsirkas today

It has now been a century since Stratis Tsirkas was born in Cairo, but for readers and critics alike, the author of “Drifting Cities” and “Lost Spring” remains a towering figure in contemporary Greek literature.

Will he retain this significance into the future? How do younger generations relate to the literature born of the Communist movement, the Resistance, the Greek Civil War and the schism in the country’s Communist Party (KKE)?

What is it in the novels of Tsirkas, a writer and intellectual who reached political maturity within –but later clashed with– the KKE, that can speak to the generations born after the fall of the Colonels in 1974 who have grown up with parliamentary democracy, the euro and the Internet?