In the novella the narrator, who may or may not be the author himself, "looks back with nostalgia to the lost world of his childhood" and "summons up from his memory, Vasilis… The anarchic and self-willed spirit of Vasilis fascinates him but also, one feels, disturbs him".
Beverley Farmer provides one of the best descriptions of the narrator's hero Vasilis: "Virile, beautiful, amoral, fierce and magnanimous by turns and always dangerous, he is no social or political rebel.
[2] According to Pavlos Andronikos, Myrivilis "wanted his hero, Vasilis Arvanitis, to be an expression of the Greek spirit at its most heroic, but in attempting that, he created one of the most enigmatic heroes in the Greek tradition: a godless, anarchic, and free spirit to haunt the twentieth century and remind us of the 'hunted bird' inside each of us which 'still struggles to free itself but cannot'.”[3] Vasilis Arvanitis first appeared in an Athenian newspaper in 1934 as a short story.
[4] In 1939 a second, much longer version was included in a collection of short stories by Myrivilis entitled The Blue Book, but this was again revised and extended during the period of the German occupation of Greece and was published as a separate volume late in 1943, with woodcut illustrations by Panos Valsamakis.
[10] The classical composer Yiannis Papaioannou (Greek: Ιωάννης Παπαιωάννου) wrote a musical work with the title Vasilis Arvanitis (1945).