Апостолос Доксиадис – яркий современный представитель прозы, интеллектуальной в лучшем смысле этого слова. Интеллектуальной без претенциозности, на глубинном, тонком, неявном уровне. В прозе этого писателя, многоуровневой, многомерной и почти «кинематографичной» в своей витальности, мир сугубо абстрактных теорий становится миром абсолютно живым – таинственным, мистическим, в чем-то – забавным, а в чем-то – откровенно трагичным.
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Apostolos Doxiadis was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1953 and grew up in Greece.
Although interested in fiction and the arts from his youngest years, a ‘sudden love affair with mathematics’ – his words – led him to write an original paper by virtue of which he was admitted to New York's Columbia University at the age of fifteen. He did graduate work in Applied Mathematics at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, creating mathematical models for the nervous system.
After his studies, Apostolos returned to his adolescent loves, writing, cinema and the theatre. For some years he directed professionally for the theatre, and in 1983 made his first film Underground Passage (in Greek). His second film, Terirem (1986) won the prize of the International Center for Artistic Cinema (CICAE) at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival.
Since the mid eighties, most of his work has been in fiction. He has published four novels, Parallel Life (1985), Makavettas (1988), Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture (1992) and Three Little Men (1997). These were originally written in Greek, although his own translation and rewriting of Uncle Petros was published internationally in 2000.
Apostolos now writes in both Greek and English, a process he explains in the autobiographical essay What’s in a name.
More recently, he wrote, designed and directed the musical shadow puppet play The Tragical History of Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionist and created an accompanying volume of texts and images, Paralipomena. He has just finished a full-length play Incompleteness, inspired by Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the last days of its creator.
In the past few years Apostolos has lectured extensively and written essays on subjects ranging from traditional storytelling, the relationship of mathematics to stories (Euclid’s Poetics) a narrative-philosophical approach to understanding mathematics which he calls ‘paramathematics’, aspects of Greek history and culture and more.
His translations for the theatre, from English into Greek, include Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, a libretto of Midsummer Night's Dream (staged by the Greek National Theatre in 2000, with music by Dimitri Papadimitriou) and Eugene O' Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra.
Apostolos is currently working on the 'graphic novel' Logicomix, a joint project with computer scientist Professor Christos Papadimitriou of Berkeley University, and artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. It is the story of modern logic and the birth of computers in a comic book form.
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