Confession and time : the subject in Papadiamantes's The Merchants of The Nations

Alexandros Papadiamantes's importance for modern Greek letters is enormous. His short stories and novellas exhibited the first signs of a mature Greek prose following the emancipation from the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century. They captured a whole era's socio-political upheavals, and they inaugurated Greek modernism in the twentieth century.1 Here I will concentrate on one of Papadiamantes's "juvenalia," The Merchants of the Nations (Οι έμποÏοι των εθνών, 1882-83), one of his most neglected works.