History Unclassified

Archive Fever: Literature, Illegibility, and Historical Method

ARGYRO NICOLAOU

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

SOFTLY LODGED BETWEEN A SET of invoices for a Greek Egyptian newspaper and a polite
rejection letter from an Athenian editor is an old flyer advertising the screening of a
film. According to this flyer, Sa dernière course—an MGM film from 1927—would be
shown at the Ciné de Paris in Cairo, Egypt, between March 14 and March 20, 1929.1
“Sublime,” “tender,” “comical,” and “thrilling,” the film takes place in the Bluegrass re-
gion of Kentucky, where a family of horse breeders find themselves on the brink of fi-
nancial ruin following World War I. They are saved at the eleventh hour by Queen
Bess, a mare that had fought alongside the family’s shell-shocked son in the trenches.
Queen Bess wins the Kentucky Derby, restoring the family’s fortunes as well as the
son’s spirits.
Few stories could be further removed from the social and political realities of early-
twentieth-century Egypt, a British protectorate in the throes of a fiery nationalist move-
ment that was also home to many European communities. Yet the flyer itself is indeli-
bly stamped with a trace of those very circumstances: scribbled atop the printed film
synopsis (in French) are four and a half lines of largely illegible handwritten text (in
Greek). (See Figure 1.) This hastily scrawled something would be banal—and would
have all but guaranteed this fragment of 1920s Cairo being tossed in the trash—had it
not been for the identity of the flyer’s owner, and his eventual fame.
Stratis Tsirkas (1911–1980), one of the most important figures of postwar modern
Greek literature, was a product of a world order that has all but disappeared today. A
Greek Egyptian born in Cairo, he spent most of his life in Alexandria before moving to
Athens in 1963 as a result of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s policies in the aftermath of the
I would like to thank D. Graham Burnett for inspiring me to tackle this topic, and for his constructive com-
ments on an earlier draft of this essay. I am particularly indebted to AHR Editor Alex Lichtenstein, “History
Unclassified” Editor Kate Brown, and an anonymous referee for their comments and insightful suggestions.
Many thanks also to Margaux Fitoussi for her careful reading of the text and Julia Alekseyeva for her trans-
lation input. Finally, I would like to thank Sofia Bora and the rest of the staff at the Hellenic Literary and
Historical Archive in Athens, Greece; Ariadni Moschona and the editorial team at Kedros; as well as Petros
Maloukatos, Spyros Giannaras, and Sofronis Sofroniou for helping me navigate the intricacies of the
archive’s photographic elements. My visit to the Stratis Tsirkas archive was made possible by a generous
grant from Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
1
Titled In Old Kentucky in English, the film was directed by John M. Stahl and starred Helene Cos-
tello and James Murray.

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical
Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com.

112
 Archive Fever 113

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

FIGURE 1: The promotional flyer for Sa dernière course (In Old Kentucky), with Tsirkas’s largely illegible notes
scribbled on it. Stratis Tsirkas archive, Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive—Cultural Foundation of the Na-
tional Bank of Greece (ELIA-MIET).

Suez Crisis.2 Tsirkas was a lifelong communist who saw his literary and critical writ-
ings as vehicles to communicate his belief in social justice and political equality on a
local and international level. Fluent in Greek, French, and Arabic, he participated in the
final session of the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Cul-
ture, which took place in Paris in 1937, helping to compose the “Oath to Federico Gar-
cia Lorca” together with Langston Hughes. Two decades later, in 1956, he joined forces
with other Greek Egyptian literati to write an open letter addressing French and British
intellectuals, asking them to recognize the sovereignty of the Egyptian people and sup-
port Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, an event that inspired his first novella,
Nureddin Boba [Νουρεντίν Μπόμπα], published that same year.
I came to Tsirkas’s archive through his literature. The themes he grapples with in his
most famous work—the novel trilogy Drifting Cities [Ακυβέρνητες Πολιτείες] (1961–
1965), about a Greek communist soldier stationed in the Middle East during World War
II—demand a firm grasp of the region’s historical context. This includes Tsirkas’s own
position as a member of the Greek community in Egypt, as well as the circumstances
governing the growing rift between left- and right-leaning Greek political factions that
would eventually lead to the Greek Civil War in 1946. After a few days with the ephem-
eral stuff of history, however, I soon caught what Jacques Derrida aptly termed “archive
fever.”3 The text scribbled on the film flyer refused to be easily read, and its inscrutability
opened an avenue of inquiry that was as unexpected as it was exhilarating.
2
For a detailed history of the mass departure of Greek Egyptians from Egypt, see Angelos Dalachanis,
The Greek Exodus from Egypt: Diaspora Politics and Emigration, 1937–1962 (New York, 2017).
3
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1996).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

114 Argyro Nicolaou

The flyer for Sa dernière course is a seductive fragment of the Tsirkas archive for
many reasons. Before adopting the pen name Stratis Tsirkas and becoming one of the
most celebrated prose writers in Greek, Tsirkas was Yiannis Hadjiandreas, a lanky adoles-
cent who harbored literary aspirations while working first as a bank clerk in Cairo
(1928–1929) and then as an accountant at a ginning factory in Upper Egypt (1929–1939),
an experience that laid the foundation for his solidarity with the Egyptian working class.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

The fragment, then, is a rare window into his juvenilia and the historical and cultural con-
text of a childhood lived in colonial and cosmopolitan Alexandria, most famously memo-
rialized in the writings of E. M. Forster, C. P. Cavafy, and Lawrence Durrell.
The illegibility of the fragment also tantalizes its aspiring reader with the possibility
of an undiscovered work—a poem, perhaps?—even as it reveals the ultimate unknow-
ability of such a work. Its structure, four short lines of stacked text, seems to yearn for
the formal and affective elements of literary analysis, inverting my view of the archive
—and of history—as a repository of definitive information.
I am not the first to suffer from Derrida’s archival ailment. In her 1968 novel The
Nice and the Good, British philosopher Iris Murdoch alludes to this archival pathology
through the character of Ducane, a detective tasked with solving a mystery suicide.4
Ducane harbors a passion for Greek history and Roman law, precisely because of the
scanty evidence that the immense literature on both these topics is “excogitated from”:
There are certain areas of scholarship, early Greek history is one and Roman law is another,
where the scantiness of evidence sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a
game with very few pieces where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules. The
isolated and uneloquent fact must be exhibited within a tissue of hypothesis subtle enough
to make it speak.5
Like Ducane, I had often wondered whether my passion for the illegible in Tsirkas’s ar-
chive was not “a kind of perversion”: here was a research question that could never be
resolved with one hundred percent certainty, but which held the promise of an irresist-
ible kind of knowledge, retrieved against all odds despite the historical contingencies
that conspired to keep it buried.6
Inspired by Murdoch, I sought ways to complicate the puzzle before me. I
approached the illegible text by playing a game: I would reconstruct the moment of the
author’s handling of the flyer. I hoped that in replicating the traces of Tsirkas’s hand
again and again and again, I could cause the elusive words to form fully, intelligibly, in
my brain. This technique I call “reverse calligraphy”: a process by which the researcher
draws the illegible words repeatedly on paper until some sense is made of them.
What is the purpose of such a manual, do-it-yourself approach to deciphering illegi-
ble text? Reverse calligraphy is certainly not a substitute for the expertise of handwrit-
ing specialists.7 Nor can it replace existing forensic techniques available to scholars,
which have only proliferated with the advent of artificial intelligence. Machine learning
analysis has enabled computers to “fill out” visual and textual patterns when informa-
tion is unavailable or illegible, a method with broad applications, from forensic criminal
4
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (New York, 1968).
5
Ibid., 176.
6
Ibid.
7
One such specialist is Linda Watson, whose Isle of Man–based company Transcription Services
claims to “read the unreadable.” http://www.transcriptionservicesltd.com/.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

 Archive Fever 115

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

FIGURE 2: Two products of “reverse calligraphy” by Argyro Nicolaou.

cases to photo-editing software.8 Data science tools have been used to reveal redacted
parts of U.S. classified documents, as in the case of the “declassification engine” devel-
oped by researchers at Columbia University’s History Lab; and to decipher distorted
images, as in the case of a Dartmouth computer science lab that used image synthesis
to generate a large set of fake license plate numbers that were used to read the otherwise
illegible license plate of a suspect’s getaway car in a ten-year-old cold murder case.9
We all have methods that we initially use to begin making sense of an archival frag-
ment or a text, and reverse calligraphy is one such method, a brainstorming exercise
that reveals the value of the often creative problem-solving processes triggered by the
gnawing yet unfulfillable desire to know something exactly. I think of reverse calligra-
phy as a primary way for scholars to engage directly with a handwritten text and its mo-
ment of production, transposing what is often an exclusively cerebral process into a
more materially engaged, practice-based activity. To put it simply: reverse calligraphy
is a first step in accessing an illegible fragment, without making any claims to the defini-
tiveness of any one of its calligraphic outcomes or to their universal application. With
such a method, misreadings of the text are not a failure, as they may lead to other fruit-
ful discoveries within the archive itself, and beyond it. Forensic methods that deal with
8
The catch is that many of the available deciphering options that work with language—human and ma-
chine alike—are limited to English, or at best can be applied to languages that use the Latin script only.
9
“Tools for Analyzing Official Secrecy,” History Lab, http://history-lab.org/research/declass; Shruti
Agarwal, Du Tran, Lorenzo Torresani, and Hany Farid, “Deciphering Severely Degraded License Plates,”
Electronic Imaging: Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics (2017): 138–143, https://doi.org/10.
2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2017.7.MWSF-337.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

116 Argyro Nicolaou

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

FIGURE 3: Deciphering the drafts of “reverse calligraphy” by Argyro Nicolaou.

image synthesis—like the Dartmouth license plate project—have more in common with
reverse calligraphy than might initially be evident. Pattern-deducing computer models
work by producing a large number of “unreal images, [which,] if they are realistic
enough, can lead to the truth.”10 Similar to reverse calligraphy, the truth value of the end
product is not necessarily contingent on the truth value of its constituent parts.
In my case, applying reverse calligraphy to the illegible fragment in the Tsirkas ar-
chive resulted in a series of drawings of dubious artistic merit. (See Figures 2 and 3.)
These calligraphic interpretations produced dozens of variations of the text, with two
distinct phrases emerging from the fragment as certainties: “στις φλεγόμενες στέπες”
(in the burning steppes) and “νέρινες αντιφεγγιές” (watery reflections). The other two
lines remained unclear. Was Tsirkas jotting down ideas? Was he quoting something he
had read, heard, or seen? How could these two phrases make sense together, and could
their combination somehow help decode the illegible lines in between?

AS A GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURE that Tsirkas himself would not have experienced firsthand
in Egypt, and a landscape not featured in John M. Stahl’s film, the reference to “the
burning steppes” may derive from a text that he read around the time of the screening
of Sa dernière course. With its distinctly Russian ring, the phrase could be evidence of
the young author’s budding interest in Soviet culture and politics, and his lifelong com-
10
Joshua Rothman, “In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?,” New Yorker, November 5, 2018,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is-seeing-still-believing.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

 Archive Fever 117

mitment to the communist cause. In his twenties, Tsirkas was a member of a number of
left-wing groups in Egypt, including the Ligue Pacifiste (Union of Peace Partisans) and
the Antifasistiki Protoporia (Anti-Fascist Movement).11 The extent and importance of
his insider knowledge of left-wing activities in Egypt is evidenced by the fact that, later
in life, he was treated as a primary source in seminal studies on communism in the
Greek Egyptian community, including Alexander Kitroeff’s 1989 book The Greeks in

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

Egypt, 1919–1937: Ethnicity and Class.
Indeed, the phrase “burning steppes” is found in the 1923 long poem Pro eto by the
avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a leading intellectual of the Soviet revolu-
tion.12 The poem was written while Mayakovsky was estranged from his on-again, off-
again lover, Lili Brik, the wife of his longtime friend and collaborator Osip Brik. The
“burning steppes” are part of a metaphor describing the narrator’s feeling of desperation
and claustrophobia as he encounters his ex-lover among the crowd at a drunken party:
And again
the slamming of the door and the croaking,
and again the dances, and shuffling on floors.
And again
the walls of the burning steppes
ring and sound in my ear in the two-step.13
Tsirkas first came in contact with the communist movement around the same time he
received the flyer advertising Sa dernière course.14 By 1929, the year of the film
screening, communism had been part of Egyptian politics—and Greek Egyptian society
—for more than two decades.15 The Egyptian Communist Party (ECP), initially named
the Egyptian Socialist Party, was founded in 1921, but was extremely short-lived: author-
ities began cracking down on it in 1924. By 1928 the ECP had been entirely dismantled,
and much of its leadership was behind bars. The party was revived in the mid-1930s as a
response to the rise of fascism in Europe.
Scholars note that some of the earliest responses to the first communist initiatives in
Egypt came from “the Greeks, Austrians, and Russians,” and that the Greeks especially
were heavily involved in “[t]he earliest forms of union organisation and strike action”
in the country.16 For political reasons, however, foreigners were not included as official
members of the ECP: “the Greek communists in Egypt were aware that it was necessary
for the Egyptians to lead the communist movement in their own country and always
tried to remain in the background.”17 Foreign communities also played a vital role in
11
The Ligue Pacifiste was founded by Paul Jacot-Descombes, a Swiss Marxist intellectual who worked
closely with Greek communist groups in Egypt. See Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifaʿat El-Saʿid, The Communist
Movement in Egypt, 1920–1988 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1990), 33.
12
Mayakovsky’s poem is variously translated into English as About That or That’s What.
13
Translation in consultation with Julia Alekseyeva.
14
“Stratis Tsirkas: 30 Years since His Death,” Stratis Tsirkas, 1911–1980, The National Book Center
of Greece, http://tsirkas.ekebi.gr/chronologio.asp?recyear=all.
15
The first mention of socialism in the Egyptian press came in 1892, and in 1894 a first communist
“manifesto” of sorts was distributed in support of the Paris commune, according to Kyriakos Nikolaou-
Patragas, To kommounistikon kinema Aigyptou [The Egyptian Communist Movement] (Athens, 2011), 35.
16
Ismael and El-Saʿid, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 14; Alexander Kitroeff, The Greeks in
Egypt, 1919–1937: Ethnicity and Class (London, 1989), 136.
17
Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 139.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

118 Argyro Nicolaou

sustaining momentum for left-wing causes in the wake of the crackdown on the party
and well into the 1930s, the period of Tsirkas’s political coming-of-age.18 Thanks to
the system of Capitulations, foreign residents of Egypt were immune from local legisla-
tion that had been used to persecute their Egyptian comrades in the mid- and late
1920s. This meant that Greek Egyptian communists could, and did, actively organize
throughout the seven-year hiatus of the ECP. In fact, Greek Egyptian Marxists were at

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

the center of Greek intellectual life both in Alexandria, where Tsirkas grew up, and in
Cairo, where he went to school, and where he was working in 1929 when he picked up
the film flyer in question.19
The pillar of Tsirkas’s early contact with communism was one such Greek Egyptian
Marxist: Sakellaris Yannakakis, a sponge merchant originally from the island of
Kalymnos. Yannakakis had been involved in setting up the ECP in its early days and
was extremely active in left-wing activities that involved both the Greek Egyptian com-
munity and local socialist and labor organizations.20 Together with another Greek
Egyptian Marxist, the Alexandria-based schoolteacher Iordanis Iordanides, Yannakakis
formed the Groupe d’études sociales, a socialist reading group.21 In fact, Kitroeff notes
that “a few years after the [Communist] Party was broken up by the authorities in 1924,
it was Yannakakis who began reorganising the communist network.”22 In his final years
as a student at the Ambeteios Commercial School in Cairo and after his graduation in
1928, Tsirkas was at the heart of this politico-intellectual activity. A photo from 1930
shows a young Tsirkas posing behind Sakellaris Yannakakis himself, outside the Mena
House Hotel.23 (See Figure 4.)
As a result of Tsirkas’s contact with Greek Egyptian Marxists such as Yannakakis,
and bearing in mind his demonstrated passion for literature, it is not far-fetched to as-
sume that he would have encountered Mayakovsky’s poetry by 1929, when he scrib-
bled on the flyer for Sa dernière course. Mayakovsky was a leading figure of Soviet
arts and letters, and his work would have circulated among left-wing intellectuals in Eu-
rope. Mayakovksy himself traveled to many European cities between 1922 and 1929,
including Prague, at the behest of linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson; Berlin,
where he gave lectures; and Paris, where he met the surrealist poet Louis Aragon and
gave at least one reading in 1927.24 A copy of Pro eto might have traveled to Cairo in
its original form or via a French translation in the suitcase of one of the many young
Egyptians returning from their university studies in France and other European
countries.25
In fact, the possibility that a Greek translation of Mayakovsky’s poem circulated in
18
Nikolaou-Patragas, To kommounistikon kinema Aigyptou, 38–40; Ismael and El-Saʿid, The Commu-
nist Movement in Egypt, 32; Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 139.
19
Nikolaou-Patragas, To kommounistikon kinema Aigyptou, 38–39.
20
Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 139.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
23
Asterios Topes, Alexandreia: Stigmes, choroi, kai prosopa pou esan mia phora: Photographiko
leukoma [Alexandria: Moments, Places, and People That Used to Be: A Photographic Archive] (Athens,
2002).
24
Charles A. Moser, “Mayakovsky’s Unsentimental Journeys,” American Slavic and East European
Review 19, no. 1 (1960): 85–100, here 97.
25
“Socialist ideas were first introduced by Egyptian students returning from Europe. In 1908, about six
hundred Egyptian students were in Europe, most of them in France.” Ismael and El-Saʿid, The Communist
Movement in Egypt, 1.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

 Archive Fever 119

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

FIGURE 4: A group of friends from the Greek Egyptian community meet at the Mena House Hotel pool in Cairo.
Third from the left in the back row is a young Stratis Tsirkas, and third from the left in the front row is Sakellaris
Yannakakis. From the collection of Ms. Antigone Tsirka, first published in Asterios Topes, Alexandreia: Stigmes,
choroi kai prosopa pou esan mia phora: Photografiko leukoma [Alexandria: Moments, Places, and People That
Used to Be: A Photographic Archive] (Athens, 2002).

the Greek communist and intellectual circles of Egypt cannot be entirely ruled out, ei-
ther. Another member of the Groupe d’études sociales, Maria Iordanidou, had spent
four years in Russia as a teenager between 1914 and 1919. She was proficient enough
in the Russian language to help her future husband, the aforementioned Iordanis Iorda-
nides, draft a letter to the Comintern and ask for guidance in the early years of the
Egyptian Socialist Party.26 Maria could easily have obtained a copy of Mayakovsky’s
poem in its original Russian and translated it for the group during the years the Egyp-
tian Communist Party was active in the mid-1920s. She could even have received a
copy after the party’s dismantling: Greek Egyptian communists had smuggled commu-
nications between Russia and Egypt via Athens on multiple occasions.27
The phrase “burning steppes” would have stood out in the original layout of Maya-
kovsky’s poem, which might be a reason it could have made a lasting impression on a
young Tsirkas. In addition to being part of Mayakovsky’s characteristic poetic style of
bringing radically different and often incongruous imagery together, the phrase is used
as a caption for one of the original photomontages designed for Pro eto by the graphic
artist Alexander Rodchenko, an innovator of Russian constructivism. Rodchenko’s
collage-type images for the book are composites of various photographic fragments,
and they are each captioned with lines from Mayakovsky’s poem. Rodchenko’s photo-
montages infuse the autobiographical elements of Mayakovsky’s work with broader so-
26
Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 139.
27
Ibid.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

120 Argyro Nicolaou

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

FIGURE 5: The cover of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Pro eto by Alexander Rodchenko (1923). © VAGA at ARS,
NY. Letterpress, 9⅛ x 6ʺ (23.2 x 15.3 cm). Jan Tschichold Collection, Gift of Philip Johnson. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Re-
source, NY.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

 Archive Fever 121

cial and political commentary by bringing together mass-produced images and text, of-
ten drawn from advertising, with photographic portraits of the poet and his lover.
The photomontage illustrating the “burning steppes” line communicates the oppres-
sive nature of a self-satisfied bourgeois lifestyle. Rodchenko pastes Lili Brik’s face on
top of a dancing woman’s body, and surrounds her with disproportionately sized
images that Mayakosvky associated with the bourgeoisie, such as liquor, tea, biscuits,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

and cigars. The textual reference at the top of the composition to American dances such
as the foxtrot, the shimmy, and the two-step (echoed in the poem itself) further intensi-
fies the suffocating sensory effect that the scene of dancing and merrymaking has on
the lovelorn poet, on both a personal and an ideological level. (See Figure 6.)
Bold, disjointed and irreverent; politically and personally charged; Pro eto would
have offered a radical take on love and a very different model for the relationship be-
tween visual and textual language to a young Tsirkas. This model, which drew from
the cinematic technique of montage and the Soviet avant-garde’s engagement with the
industrial and technological, was unlike anything he would have encountered in the
texts that he was reading at the time.28

THE ACTUAL SETTING OF Sa dernière course—the grasslands of Kentucky—seems to

have influenced Tsirkas in another, more indirect, way. The second phrase that my ex-
ercise in reverse calligraphy revealed—“νέρινες αντιφεγγιές” (watery reflections)—
marks the fragment as an early draft of the short story “Hemerologio” (Diary), which
Tsirkas wrote on March 26, 1929, six days after the final screening of Sa dernière
course in Cairo.29 This early prose piece tells the story of “the richest cattle herder in
Argentina,” not unlike the Kentucky horse breeders and cattle farmers he would have
seen in the film. In this, Tsirkas’s first, and possibly only, story set in the Americas, the
narrator describes himself as being “at the end of the world,” spending his days watch-
ing his livestock roam the fields “as far as the eye can see.” Indeed, what stands out
most about “Diary” is the vastness of the landscape. And while the steppe is not explic-
itly mentioned in Tsirkas’s story, another dramatic and unfamiliar geographical feature,
the “savannah,” is. Did Tsirkas transform the black-and-white images of Kentucky
bluegrass pastures into the “burning steppes” of Patagonia, imagining what life would
be like in an isolated region so far away from the culture and geography of Cairo?

CLARIFYING TWO OUT OF the four illegible lines did not make reading the fragment as a
whole any easier. In fact, right before I gave up on deciphering the text in its entirety,
my research revealed another potential source for “the burning steppes.” This develop-
ment forced me to confront—and challenge—an assumption I had made: that all of the
text on the flyer was written at the same time.
28
Between 1926 and 1928, Tsirkas’s diary entries bordered on the melodramatic and were mostly dedicated
to his unrequited feelings for a girl named Sonia. This failed romance fueled his interest in the German and
French Romantic poems that he translated in those years, including Alfred de Musset’s “Pale Star of Even.”
29
With the summer sun “low in the sky” and burning their skin, “watery reflections” is the only men-
tion of water in the story, and it refers to the play of light that the narrator observes on his beloved daugh-
ter’s face as she washes herself over an outdoor basin.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

122 Argyro Nicolaou

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

FIGURE 6: Alexander Rodchenko’s photomontage for Pro eto (1923), illustrating the “burning steppes” line in
Mayakovsky’s poem. © VAGA at ARS, NY. 91=6 x 6⅛ x ⅛ʺ (23 x 25.5 x 0.3 cm). Gift of the Judith Rothschild
Foundation. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/
Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

 Archive Fever 123

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

FIGURE 7: A section from the Greek communist newspaper Rizospastes (July 21, 1945) advertising the publication
of a section from Ève Curie’s book Journey among Warriors (1943). The text in the red box reads: “Starting on
MONDAY in ‘LIBERATED GREECE,’ the riveting political reportage of a great Frenchwoman, Ève Curie, on
the most dramatic moments of the war in Russia: ‘Titans Clash on the Burning Steppes.’” Rizospastes Archives,
The National Library of Greece.

I found the phrase “burning steppes,” in Greek, along with the preposition used on
the flyer, “στις” (in, on), in a July 1945 issue of Rizospastes (Ριζοσπάστης), the newspaper
of the Greek Communist Party. (See Figure 7.) This second potential source text raised
the possibility that the flyer was written upon twice: once between the screening of Sa der-
nière course and the composition of the short story “Diary” in March 1929, where the
phrase “νέρινες αντιφεγγιές” (watery reflections) is found; and a second time in July 1945,
when Tsirkas may have encountered the announcement in Rizospastes. This interpretation,
however unlikely, reveals as much about Tsirkas’s influences and lived experience as
does Mayakovsky’s Pro eto.
The small announcement at the bottom of Rizospastes’s second page advertised an
article to be published in the paper’s magazine a few days later. Titled “Agones titaton
stis flegomenes steppes” (Clash of the Titans on the Burning Steppes), the featured re-
portage was an excerpt from Journey among Warriors (1943), a non-fiction book by
Ève Curie about World War II. Ève Curie, the daughter of renowned chemist and Nobel
Laureate Marie Curie, was a French Polish journalist who had traveled to, and reported
from, almost every front of the war between 1941 and 1943.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

124 Argyro Nicolaou

Throughout World War II and the Nazi occupation of Greece (1941–1944), Tsirkas
was on the front line of communist activism in the Greek Egyptian community. He was
on the editorial board for the anti-fascist magazine Hellēn (Έλλην)—writing under the
pen name Loukis Arapis (Luke the Arab)—and continued to be a leading member of
the Egyptian Hellenikos Apeleftherotikos Sindesmos (Greek Liberation Association),
as well as the Egyptian branch of the Greek Communist Party.30 There is little doubt

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

that Rizospastes would have been on Tsirkas’s reading list. Studying that July 1945 is-
sue of the paper, he could very well have lingered on the title of Ève Curie’s reportage
and its powerful combining of Greek mythology and Russian imagery. The flyer for Sa
dernière course could have been arbitrarily pulled from the bottom of a dusty drawer
and repurposed by Tsirkas as scrap paper, to serve as the literal basis for jotting down
this catchy phrase.
Even if this hypothesis proves to be false—something that can be conclusively
assessed through the use of forensic ink-dating techniques—the possibility of a “dou-
ble” intervention on the flyer allows us to briefly entertain the fragment as a photomon-
tage of Tsirkas’s trajectory as a literary and political actor. Greek but not “from
Greece”; a Marxist intellectual with “bourgeois sensibilities”; a supporter of Egyptian
liberation but a lover of modernist European literature: the syncretic quality that would
establish Tsirkas as an important, and often contested, figure in postwar Greek culture
from the 1950s onward is already present in the refracted and multiple potential histo-
ries of this piece of paper.

DESPITE MY ULTIMATE FAILURE to decipher the entire text on the film flyer and to defini-
tively assess its provenance, there is no doubt that the ache of not knowing produced af-
firmative results. Indeed, the most valuable contribution of reverse calligraphy to the in-
exorable process of historical speculation is the revelations it may lead to. These
revelations may not be conclusive, but they arm the researcher with new source materi-
als and new research questions. The potential intertexts presented here—Mayakovsky’s
Pro eto, Tsirkas’s short story “Diary,” Ève Curie’s article in the Greek communist
newspaper—could only partially solve the puzzle of the illegible archival fragment.
However, they all illuminate Tsirkas’s lived experiences, fleshing out the minutiae that
make up the umbrella themes of communism and “the political” that have often been
used to interpret his literary oeuvre.31
Reverse calligraphy as a practice may be a Rorschach test when it comes to what
constitutes a scientific historiographic method. Yet as a metaphor for our quest for
knowledge in the archive, and the creative forms and strategies that we use to get to the
“unknowable” origins of an artifact or an event, it is potent. Are not we all inclined to
30
“Stratis Tsirkas: 30 Years since His Death.”
31
Some examples include Charalampos-Demetres Gounelas, He Trilogia tou Tsirka: Dokimio sto
dytiko Marxismo [Stratis Tsirkas’s Trilogy: A Treatise in Western Marxism] (Athens, 2002); Yiannis
Papatheodorou, “Dianoese kai kommatike strateuse: O Manos Simonides stes Akyvernites Politeies tou
Strati Tsirka” [Intellectuals and the Party Line: Manos Simonides in Stratis Tsirkas’s Drifting Cities], Nea
Hestia 1743 (2002): 367–386; Vangelis Athanasopoulos, He politike diastase tes “mythikes methodou”:
Stratis Myrivillis—Stratis Tsirkas [The Political Dimension of the “Mythic Method”: Stratis Myrivillis—
Stratis Tsirkas] (Athens 1990); Rena Stavridi-Patrikiou, “Ho politikos Kavafes ki ho politikos Tsirkas”
[The Political Cavafy and the Political Tsirkas], I Leksi 136 (1996): 779–786.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020

 Archive Fever 125

draw out legible and interpretable patterns in the data in front of us? Isn’t that what
makes a hypothesis? And similarly, are not we all hard-pressed to find methods to break
those patterns, in the hope that we can “think outside the box” and see something we
have been conditioned to ignore, something we were unable to see before?
Historical and literary research—as well as their products, written or otherwise—
depend on such exercises of the imagination. In fact, they are largely defined by the vi-

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/112/5721703 by Princeton University user on 05 February 2020

sual and textual syntheses that our brains, eyes, and hands are capable of, which take
place on the cusp of the material and the intellectual, the tangible and the symbolic.

Argyro Nicolaou is a literary scholar and filmmaker from the island of Cyprus.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Seeger Center for
Hellenic Studies, where she is working on a book project about representations of
Mediterranean migration in literature, film, and visual art from the mid-twentieth
century to the present. Her work has been featured in the Journal of Mediterra-
nean Studies and the Boston Art Review. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature with a secondary field degree in Critical Media Practice from Harvard
University in 2018.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2020