The Boundless Garden: Selected short stories Volume II

The stories included in this second volume of Alexandros Papadiamandis’s literary work were written during the years 1894–1902, a period regarded as his most creative. As the nineteenth century gives way to the twentieth, in these stories we are presented with an unrivalled gallery of authentic individuals who are emerging out of a past defined by traditional beliefs and practices while moving into a new age shaped by the challenges of modernity. Wandering dervishes, naked witches in the moonlight, a child falling in love with a hamadryad, nymphs inhabiting both sea and land, desperate lovers, graceful adolescents, stalwart rustics, seafarers, outcasts, wild revellers — figures in both country and urban landscapes with their unrequited longings, unrealistic expectations, utopian hopes, daily drudgery, often living on the edge of hope and despair, salvation and damnation, beauty and awfulness. By simply observing life around him and recording it in his unique manner he was able to capture things mysterious, inexplicable, paradoxical and contradictory, namely the inexhaustible richness of existence.