Alexandros Papadiamantis’s The Murderess, translated from the original Greek by Peter Levi, is a folktale, but not a simple one. It is a fairytale without a princess, a tragedy without a heroine and a morality play without a moral. This is all to say that the novella, deemed Papadiamantis’s masterpiece by many, draws upon a range of genres, bends to none, and proves complex and beautiful in its own right.

Levi's translation, originally published in 1983, was reissued last month. In his introduction, Levi argues that The Murderess captures an important crisis of the past in a way that helps us understand our present. The crisis at hand in The Murderess is at once local and universal. It is the story of a damned, damaged family on the Aegean island of Skiathos, where Papadiamantis was born in 1851 and where he set many of his works — the most famous of which were short stories and serialized novels (such as The Gypsy Girl and Merchant of Nations), and which featured tales of Mediterranean adventure, provincial portraits, and legends of religious significance.

In The Murderess, Papadiamantis fuses portrait and legend in his knowledgeable, intricate depiction of Skiathos, a poor place, strict in its adherence to local customs and stagnated by its own traditions. The implied and stated dangers, both tangible and intangible, of this particular breed of provincialism give heady subtext to a simple foreground: the story of a struggling family in a struggling community.

At the novella’s beginning, we meet protagonist Hadoula, who sits hearthside at home keeping watch over her sickly newborn granddaughter. Papadiamantis grants the reader almost immediate access to Hadoula’s inner life:

Hadoula, or Frankiss, or Frankojannou, was a woman of scarcely sixty, with a masculine air and two little touches of moustache on her lips. In her private thoughts, when she summed up her entire life, she saw that she had never done anything except serve others. When she was a little girl, she had served her parents. When she was mated, she became a slave to her husband, and at the same time, because of her strength and his weakness, she was his nurse. When she had children she became a slave to her children, and when they had children of their own, she became slave to her grandchildren.  

On the heels of a thumbnail sketch of his main character, Papadiamantis reveals this dark realization of Hadoula’s — not a sudden realization but one that has plagued her for some time. She can imagine no escape from her perpetual state of servitude. And, worse yet, she knows well its cyclical nature. She is Hadoula, daughter of Delcharao; and mother to a second Delcharao; and grandmother to a second Hadoula, “In case the name should die out,” she scoffs. To Hadoula, there’s no romance in the passing down of family names, only a reminder of the endless cycle of suffering and want in which she is just a temporary player.

All are poor in Skiathos, but the worst financial burdens fall on families whose women bear girls. At the core of the island’s poverty is its longstanding dowry system. Even the poorest of families must provide for their daughters in marriage — or continue to provide for them into old age. In Hadoula’s mind the dowry system takes on monstrous dimensions:

… And every family in the neighborhood, every family in the district, every family in the town had two or three girls. Some had four, some had five. … So all these parents, these couples, these widows, faced the absolute necessity, the implacable need, to marry off all those daughters… And to give them all dowries. Every poor family and every widowed mother with half an acre of land, with a poor little house, was living in misery, and going out to do extra work. … And what dowries, by customs of the island! ‘A house at Kotronia, a vineyard at Ammoudia, an olive grove at Lehouni…’ Everyone had to give in addition a dowry counted in money. It might be two thousand, or a thousand, or five hundred. Otherwise, he could keep his daughters and enjoy them. He could put them on the shelf. He could shut them up in the cupboard. He could send them to the Museum.

In his translation, in excerpts like the one above, Levi captures Papadiamantis’s dichotomy of tone, a clever fusion of the orally driven language of fairytale and the darker-edged language of satire (as in the lines, “He could shut them up in the cupboard. He could send them to the Museum.”). We see this playful mix-and-match style throughout the book, most notably in introducing Hadoula’s personal past:

For a long time [Iannis] had been an apprentice and assistant to [Hadoula’s] father … When the old man noticed the young man’s simplicity, his economy and modesty, he respected him for it and resolved to make him a son-in-law. As a dowry, he offered him a deserted, tumbledown house in the old Castle, where people used to live once upon a time, before the ’21 revolution.

But the whimsical quality of the language is in direct and jarring opposition with the sinister advancement of plot, as Hadoula comes to terms with the idea that the best daughter is a dead daughter — and as she begins, almost mindlessly, to act on this realization.

The strength of The Murderess lies in its treatment of characters, through skillful employment of tone and voice, as three-dimensional individuals rather than folkloric archetypes. We see Hadoula set out to murder the burdensome, sickly baby girls of Skiathos. But we do not see her as a monster. Because we also see her intentions, we know her repentance; we understand her descent into madness. We experience the frightening burden of her guilt-driven nightmares. And ultimately we feel remorse for Hadoula in her attempt to escape punishment, swimming across a too-rough sea, catching a last glimpse of the deserted field that was her own dowry.