Childhood
Vikelas was born in Ermoupoli, on the island of Syros in Greece. His father was a merchant, originally from Veria (then under Ottoman rule, now in Macedonia (Greece)) and his mother, Smaragda, was a member of the rich Melas family. He was educated at home by his mother, possibly due to his fragile health.
When he was six, the family moved to Constantinople, and ten years after that to Odessa. There he started working for his father's business.
Already he showed signs of his literary potential. At the age of 17 he translated Esther, a tragedy by Jean Racine.
Read more about this topic: Demetrius Vikelas
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Indeed, my mother’s beautiful face still shone with youthfulness that night when she so softly held my hands and sought to stop my tears; but, precisely, it seemed to me that this should not have happened, her anger would have saddened me less than this new sweetness that my childhood had never known; it seemed to me that, with a hidden and impious hand, I had just traced the first wrinkle and made appear the first grey hair in her soul.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
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“It is not however, adulthood itself, but parenthood that forms the glass shroud of memory. For there is an interesting quirk in the memory of women. At 30, women see their adolescence quite clearly. At 30 a woman’s adolescence remains a facet fitting into her current self.... At 40, however, memories of adolescence are blurred. Women of this age look much more to their earlier childhood for memories of themselves and of their mothers. This links up to her typical parenting phase.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)