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Greek Alexis Parnis. Beloyannis: Epiko piima Athens. Ekdhotiki. 2001. 288 pages ISBN 960-86852-0-6
A POPULAR NOVELIsT and playwright, Alexis Parnis has appeared in the pages of WLT more than once. This new and augmented edition of "Beloyannis: Epic Poem" reminds us that the author started his career as a poet while a self-exile and student of literature in the Soviet Union of the 1950s.
Nikos Beloyannis, a trained engineer and leftist activist, was editor of the communist daily Rizospastis when he was arrested and sentenced to death in 1952, following American pressure on a weak Greek government. He was no traitor, but anticommunist hysteria was at its zenith in Greece then, as it was in the United States. Parnis's poem, in its first form, was finished...