stories of his own childhood, the adult narrator writes Katharevousa in counterpoint to the demotic voice of his childhood self, and the difference in language suggests a poignant distance between the little boy and the man he will become. Papadiamantis never expressed any dissatisfaction with Katharevousa as an artistic medium. Vizyinos, however, had different attitudes to Katharevousa and to childhood. In one piece he recalled his own confusion and dismay at being forced, early in his school-days, to call an apple tree by the Ancient Greek word μηλέα, instead of the demotic μηλιά. After being beaten by the schoolmaster he decides on a compromise: apple trees in general can be μηλέα, but the one in the family garden will always be μηλιά to him. Here Vizyinos (who had risen from very humble beginnings) was one of the first to give a voice to the generations of pupils who had been told when they started school that their names for things were unacceptable, and that they must now learn Ancient Greek words for those same things. This anticipated the work of Fotiadis and the demoticists of the Educational Association a generation later. Vizyinos himself emphasized the importance of the educational issue; he concluded that "the mania of those who want to teach not the nature of things ... but unfamiliar words ... renders Greek education a Sisyphean labour and condemns the nation to the worst possible death from spiritual starvation! For this reason the question concerning the Greek language is, in my view, ... more vital than the Eastern Question." In his other works Vizyinos started a trend for placing much of the narrative in the mouths and thoughts of ordinary people, so that most of the writing could be in demotic, framed by passages in Katharevousa. Roïdis, by contrast, was known for pure Katharevousa prose, used with precision and cool irony. Coming from a wealthy cosmopolitan background, he had little contact with rural demotic, and specialized in satirical essays; but he had his own criticisms of Katharevousa, which he was later to set out in detail in The Idols (1893). Some of the next generation of young prose writers were also unhappy with Katharevousa as an artistic medium. In an 1883 prologue to his first novel, Grigorios Xenopoulos wrote that "the Greek language, or rather that monstrous mixture which the Greeks of today call a language, is an abyss" that