August 15th, 2025
“Actually, the other person. Ιs not relative. Τhe other person is an absolute and unconditional value.” Theodore Kallifatides
Theodore Kallifatidis was born in the village of Molaoi, in Laconia in 1938. His father was Dimitris Kallifatidis, a teacher originally from the Pontus region, and his mother was Antonia Kyriazakou, from Molaoi. He lived through the occupation and the civil war. In 1946, his family moved to Athens, where he finished high school and attended Karolos Koun’s drama school. After his military service, in 1964, at the age of 25, he left for Sweden, where he lives permanently. In Sweden he studied philosophy, completed his doctoral studies and taught at Stockholm University between 1969 and 1972. Later, between 1972 and 1976, he was the director of the literary magazine Bonniers. Since 1969 he has published many novels, poetry collections, travel essays and plays. He writes in Swedish and Greek. He has published translations, written screenplays for films and directed a film. His books have been published in more than twenty languages and he has received awards both in Sweden and Greece.
I was introduced to Theodore Kallifatidis’ work by my sister probably towards the end of my adolescence, but I have mostly read his books in the last decade. Kallifatidis’ books have many virtues, but personally what makes me return to his work are the themes he elaborates on in almost all his books: immigration, integration into the new space-place, language, identity, the feeling and experience of “belonging.” Much of what he discusses is somewhat familiar to me. I’m familiar with the “immigration experience” first as a child of immigrant parents in a foreign country, which was also my birthplace, then as a child of Greek immigrants in Greece, and then through internal migration.
Today I will refer to two very recent readings: Another Life: On Memory, Language, Love, and the Passage of Time & Love and Foreign Land
Another Life / Μια ζωή ακόμα
In this book Kallifatides explores the reasons why for the first time in his life he could no longer write. Writing was his work and for decades, following his daily schedule unwaveringly, he spent a large part of his day in his small studio-office: “In the end it didn’t matter why I was so contented in that room, only the fact that I felt that way. I made my coffee, lit my pipe, switched on the computer, and the world came pouring in. That was how my life had been for forty years, sometimes in other rooms too, in other areas, in other cities, on trains and in hotels, overseas and here at home. I worked all the time. That was my life.”
But now he could not write, a combination of fatigue, forgetfulness / oblivion and a kind of resistance would not allow him to write. The years were weighing heavily and the number of friends that had passed away was increasing. He writes that until now he had not experienced any interruption in the flow of his writing… “Every book was a bridge to the next.… But now it was 2015, and my strength was dwindling I had lived for seventy-seven years. The time weighed heavier than the water. It wasn’t possible to lift that weight from my shoulders. How was I going to be able to write again?..”
The book is a brief narrative of a critical moment in the author’s life where, by looking within and outside himself, and by looking back, he was able to connect his own personal existential anguish with the common existential anguish of society, and to narrate a crisis that transcends the personal level, revealing the broader dynamics and the becoming of our world. One could say that Kallifatides faced this crisis holistically, not just as the result of age, existential anguish and fatigue. He moved beyond self-referentiality. He looked out the window. The world as he knew it had changed.
Sweden’s previously tolerant society had become more claustrophobic and hostile to the growing wave of immigration. The welfare state had shrunk. He comments: “I had a problem. Not only with myself but also with society. It was agonizing to see Sweden changing, step by step. Social justice and solidarity were giving way to the visible and invisible power of the market. Education was becoming increasingly privatized, as was health care.. …… The municipalization or decentralization of the education system destroyed our elementary schools, everyone knows that. But it hasn’t been changed, and it probably never will be. A number of private schools of varying degrees of competence and diligence have been set up, but the result of all this is that the children of less-well-off families will attend worse and worse schools. Decentralization was a crime against the democratic contract, and so far no one has apologized. And they never will.”
Moreover, Kallifatides tells us that the pay gap was growing year by year, Stokholm was experiencing the worst housing crisis in modern times, poverty was becoming more and more evident and there were beggars and homeless people on the streets, in the squares, on commuter trains. At the same time, hatred toward foreigners was growing, the most virulently anti-immigration party was rαpidly increasing, and Swedish society was divided about the refugee crisis.
He also discusses freedom of expression and notes that all freedoms have a natural limit, the other person: “Boundless freedom of expression was also about both resources and power. If you were outside the mass media system, you had virtually no opportunity to express yourself. It is one thing to comment on general matters and quite another to comment on your neighbors…. Whatever you do, whatever you say must take into account the other person’s existence. You can ignore this, of course, but there are consequences. Bitterness, hatred, and terrorism arise, even out-and-out war.» And elsewhere he comments: “Certain democratic freedoms resemble scorpions in that they can destroy themselves. It is possible to introduce tyranny or a dictatorship by democratic means. In a democratic election it is possible to vote in a party whose aim is to bring down democracy. It is possible to strangle freedom of expression with the help of freedom of expression. We have the freedom to put forward opinions aimed at totally or partly strangling the opinions of others.”
He gives examples from the Second World War where, for example, the Nazis in Athens distributed leaflets depicting Greeks as monkeys. He comments that he couldn’t regard it as art or as an example of the Gestapo’s freedom of expression neither then, nor now. He concludes that everything that is not forbidden is not necessarily ethical and permissible, and that the most important standard / value for both the state and the individual is the equal value of all human beings. Every other principle should stem from this.
But it was not only the changes in Sweden that worried him. Greece was in the throes of an economic crisis and all of Europe was turning against it, using undignified and racist descriptions of its people. He writes that times were different now, I could see it when I traveled to Athens two months later: “Greece and the Greeks were once more struggling to avoid defeat, as so many times in the past. The German Occupation during the Second World War, the civil war that followed, the mass emigration—these were the experiences that had shaped my generation. Virtually all of us had deaths to mourn, injustices that embittered us, abandoned dreams rotting in our souls. But none of this could be compared with the spiritual impoverishment we had experienced recently.”
Within he felt that something had been lost and that he wanted to find it again. He writes: “Emigration is a kind of partial suicide. You don’t die, but a great deal dies within you. Not least, the language. That’s why I am more proud of not having forgotten my Greek than of having learned Swedish. The latter was a matter of necessity, the former an act of love, a victory over indifference and forgetfulness. I had thrown a black stone behind me, as they say in my village when a person has decided to leave everything. And yet I couldn’t forget. I missed Greece and Greek more and more.” He wondered if it was time to go back to his roots, and if what remained now was not the future, but the past. He says: “When I was twenty-five years old, I asked myself how I should live my life, and the answer was: Leave. That was exactly what I did. Now, at over seventy-five years old, I was faced with the same question: How should I live the years that remained of my life? More and more frequently, the answer was: Go back.
He was brought out of the impasse by a short trip to Greece and to the village he was born, Molaos, where he was being honored by his compatriots. Initially, he was somewhat detached with a sense of resignation. Much had changed in Greece and this saddened him. Somewhere he comments that Greece had become a holiday resort. He writes: “I wanted everything to be just the same as it used to be. That is the emigrant’s drama. The reality he left behind is gone, yet that is what calls to him.”
In his village he attended a performance of a play by Aeschylus by the local students. He writes: “Aeschylus’s words fell like cool rain on parched earth. This language was my language.” The need arose to process the memories of his first language and he decided to follow his impulse to write again, after several decades, directly in Greek, the language of his childhood, the language he had left behind and which still resided within him. He writes: “I was caught between my two languages like Buridan’s famous donkey, which died of both hunger and thirst because it couldn’t decide whether to eat or drink.” Elsewhere, he describes the experience of writing in Greek: “I wasn’t writing. I was speaking. One word joined the next like small siblings. I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes, even though I knew I would. This was my language. It didn’t impose itself upon me, it wasn’t necessary to change my tone of voice.”
Αγάπη και ξενιτιά [Love and foreign lands]
In this book, Kallifatides touches on familiar themes, such as, immigration and foreign lands, loneliness, identity, language, poverty, social justice, freedom and social responsibility, the weight of our decisions, gender relations, memory and the past, love and friendship, and not giving up.
The book takes us back to the 1960s, when Greece was once again sending its children away, either through immigration or through exile. The central character, 25-year-old Christos, now called Christo, a Philosophy student in Sweden, has been forced to leave Greece and his family due to political vews and exclusion from the university, among other things. In Stockholm, while busy with his doctoral thesis, and while trying with great difficulty to survive financially and find his place in the new reality without losing himself, flooded with feelings of loneliness and nostalgia, he falls in love with a married woman.
He chooses Aristotle and catharsis as the subject of his thesis and throughout the narrative he elaborates on questions about love, affection, morality and catharsis, and whether catharsis can be achieved in reality and if so through what means. He writes: “What else could he write about but catharsis? His homeland was a tragedy. Political life was corrupt and often violent… unemployment was approaching fifty percent for young people. It was not only the general situation but also his own… He was slowly sinking into a swamp of unfulfilled desires, vain dreams and plans, hopeless loves and socks with holes… his homeland did not want him even though his grades were excellent, but without a “certification of political beliefs” he could not even enter a chicken coop.” Ultimately, he had no choice but to emigrate like his father and grandfather had done before him.
The hero’s narrative captures the socio-economic and political situation of Greece at the time, which is on the verge of dictatorship, but also of the freer socialdemocratic Swedish society in which he is trying to integrate. Christos wants to succeed, to build a life there. He wants to get to know and love the new country, and he believes that the only way to keep his Greek identity is to be able to support it within the new society and the new language. He’s also aware that his departure from Greece is not over yet because he writes: “it was not enough to learn the foreign language. You have to change your insides too…. His country and his language lived in his mind and his psyche, in his gestures and his jokes, in his desire and in all his choices. How much did he have to change in order to survive?”
Kallifatides writes about his book:
[https://www.ertnews.gr/eidiseis/politismos/agapi-kai-xenitia-grafei-o-thodoris-kallifatidis/]
A few years ago, on a windy afternoon, I was sitting in a café in a provincial town in Sweden with a friend who had once been my teacher at Stockholm University. He had just retired, and I asked him how he was spending his days.
“It’s time to settle my accounts,” he said simply. I don’t know if he did. He died.
I had the same feeling when I started writing my recent book Αγάπη και ξενιτιά / Love and Foreign Lands. I left Greece at the age of 25. I’ve been living in Sweden ever since. I was consumed by the ifs and buts. What would my life have been like if I hadn’t left. What kind of person would I have been? Would I have written or not? I knew that. I would have written. It was all I knew. Because I had always written. As a child, as a teenager, as a young man. And then I left…………
Would I write in Sweden too? I didn’t know, but the need was greater than the difficulties. And I began to write in Swedish. What did this mean, not only for writing but also for me as a person. What did it mean when I met and fell in love with my wife. What did it mean when I spoke Swedish with my children? I didn’t understand these questions at the time. I didn’t even ask them. Years had to pass, I had to emerge from the struggle for establishment and survival in order to “settle my accounts” with the events and ideas that had defined me as a person. Love, immigration, social justice, catharsis, freedom, loneliness, mercy and fear……