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Photo © The Ritsos Estate
Yannis Ritsos
Yannis Ritsos was born in the village of Monemvasia, Greece, in 1909, but early in his life moved to the capital city of Athens. His family suffered a series of tragic blows, especially because of his father's gambling. In Athens, Ritsos worked as a clerk, but whilst still very young, he was affected by tuberculosis and spent a long period of his youth in sanitariums and hospitals. After his recovery, Ritsos worked as an actor and dancer; from the early thirties, however, he became seriously involved with the left-wing movement in Greece and became the most prominent representative of the communist intelligentsia.
Under Metaxas' dictatorship (1935-1940) Ritsos was persecuted for his political ideas and all books he had published until then were burnt publicly in Athens. During the German occupation he escaped to the mountains where he was a leading member of the Greek resistance. After the liberation, the Civil War, and the defeat of the Communist Army, Ritsos was exiled to several Greek islands where he lived in concentration camps for more than five years. In 1952 he was released and moved to Athens. That was the first stable period of his life and it helped him to write some of his most interesting and important poems. Meanwhile Ritsos travelled widely in many Eastern European communist bloc countries, where he was considered a major international voice of progressive ideology.
During the dictatorship of 1967-1974, Ritsos was imprisoned on his wife's island of Samos. Whilst there, he suffered from cancer, which, after the international outcry against the military regime, led to his confinement at home. After the Restoration of the Republic in 1974, Ritsos became the central figure of contemporary Greek letters, the most popular and the most widely read internationally. His works have been translated into almost all European languages. Ritsos has been awarded numerous prizes and honours. He was nominated ten times for the Nobel Prize. He died in his sleep on Monday, November 11, 1990, after a long and painful illness. His burial was a farewell to a whole generation of ideologists, since almost simultaneously, everything that Ritsos stood for and believed in disintegrated and collapsed.