Pavlos Nirvanas (Greek: Parasloός Niρβάνας, * 1866 in Mariupol, Russian Empire; † 28 November 1937 in Athens, Greece) was a Greek writer whose real name was Petros K. Apostolidis.
Nirvanas’ father came from Skopelos, his mother from Chios. As a child, Pavlos Nirvanas moved from his then Russian hometown to Greece and lived in Piraeus. He studied medicine at the University of Athens and graduated in 1890. He joined the Navy and rose to the rank of senior physician (γενικός αρχίατρος). He left the service in 1922. He also worked as a journalist and was a member of the Academy of Athens from 1928. Although not born on Skopelos himself, he considered the Aegean island his home throughout his life.
Pavlos Nirvanas explored almost all genres of literature: he wrote short stories, dramas, poems, essays, critiques, novels, satires, and contemporary historical texts; he also worked as a translator. He published his first volume of poetry in 1884. Of literary-historical significance, however, are less the poems in Nirvanas’s oeuvre than the richness of the work itself and certain individual works, such as the Linguistic Autobiography (Γλωσσική Αυτοβιογραφία) from 1905, in which Nirvanas takes a position on the Greek linguistic dispute.
In a first-person narrative, he describes the career of a young man who increasingly succumbs to the fascination of the standard language and rises to become an extremely atticized scholar. Even though his learned speeches are understood by few, he is admired for his expressive abilities. Only the encounter with some beautiful girls from the people makes him doubt his linguistic world view, because instead of ῥῖ�ες (rínes), ὄμματα (ómmata), ὦτα (óta) and χεῖρες (chíres) – in German something like: heads, faces, facial bays… –[1] he suddenly only sees in his mind their delicate μύτες (mýtes), μάτια (mátja), αυτιά (aftjá) and χέρια (chérja) – completely “natural” noses, eyes, ears and hands – and as a result he turns away from the madness of the standard language.
Pavlos Nirvanas was awarded for his literary work in 1923.