Συγγραμματάκι παιγνηδιάρικον : 'Ιστορία ενός φυλλαδίου του Παναγιωτάκη Κοδρικά
Part of : Μνήμων ; Vol.26, 2004, pages 9-62
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9-62
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«A Playful Opuscule» : The History of a Pamphlet written by Panagiotakis Kodrikas (1817)
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Articles
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In the second half of the 1810's, with the Greek national movement heading towards its peak, two members of the Greek intelligentsia, both living and working in Paris, namely Adamantios Korais and Panagiotakis Kodrikas, engaged in keen controversy. It started as a dispute on the correct written form of the Modern Greek language and on the valuation of persons and matters of the present and the past. This dispute, however, evolved in a mutual effort of moral annihilation, in which the two opponents' friends also participated. Due to the fact that the two sides circulated their ideas mainly through pamphlets, the conflict is known as the «battle of the pamphlets». This article attempts at first to define the actual dimensions of the dispute at its emergence, and to illustrate the circumstances and the manner in which it was publicly conducted and perceived; the article mainly examines, though, all matters touching the publication of one of Kodrika's pamphlets, written and published in 1817. This pamphlet's unique feature lies in that: it was being printed in Vienna in expense of the writer's friends, while the author himself —unaware of it— had a reviewed form of the pamphlet printed in Paris. The edition of Vienna was released in October 1817 and that of Paris the following month of the same year. The text was originally untitled; the Viennese editor misunderstood some data and took the initiative in adding a title attributing the text to the Greek students of Pisa. That allowed Korais' friends to accuse Kodrikas of immorally using a pseudonym and to claim that the reviewed Parisian edition was released after the passed-round denial of the students of Pisa, which means after January 1818. The manner in which the author's opponents took advantage of the misunderstanding was expected. What draws the attention though, lies in the fact that until today historians and bibliographers adopt Korais' friends' view concerning the particular matter, and consider Kodrikas as the responsible person for both editions, who was supposedly forced to release a reviewed and false-dated second edition in 1818 in order to ease the strong feeling with which his conscious attempt to attribute his text to the students of Pisa was met. The study is accompanied with an appendix featuring extracts of unpublished letters sent by Alexandras Patrinos from Livorno to his son in law Demetrios Postolakas in Vienna (they both were Kodrikas' friends and sponsors), as well as two —also unpublished— letters sent by Kodrikas to Postolakas, concerning the controversial pamphlet and his preparatory work on his main project titled Μελέτη της Κοινής Ελληνικής Διαλέκτου, the first volume of whic hwas published in Paris in the year 1818.
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