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Nikos Kazantzakis (1885-1957) |
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Prolific Greek writer, whose works include essays, novels, poems, tragedies, travel books, and translations of such classics as Dante's The Divine Comedy and J.W. von Goethe's Faust. Like his hero, Odysseus, Nikos Kazantzakis lived most of his artistic life outside Greece - except for the years of World War II. "I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear," Kazantzakis wrote in Toda Raba (1934). In 1956 he lost the Nobel Prize for Literature by two votes to the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. "Having seen that I was not capable of using all my resources in political action, I returned to my literary activity. There lay the the battlefield suited to my temperament. I wanted to make my novels the extension of my own father's struggle for liberty. But gradually, as I kept deepening my responsibility as a writer, the human problem came to overshadow political and social questions. All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present. The more the intelligence unveils and violates the secrets of Nature, he more the danger increases and the heart shrinks." (from Nikos Kazantzakis by Helen Kazantzakis, 1968) Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Megalokastro, Ottoman Empire, now Iráklion, Crete, the son of Michael Kazantzakis, a farmer and dealer of in animal feed, and his wife, the former Maria Christodoulzki. The family had a beautiful garden in the courtyard. Although Kazantzakis left Crete as a young man, he returned to his homeland constantly in his writings. He attended the Franciscan School of the Holy Cross, Naxos, and the Gymnasium at Herakleion (1899-1902), where distinguished himself as a student with excellent grades. Kazantzakis went to study law at the University of Athens. While visiting his home on Crete, he met and married in 1911 his first wife, the future writer Galatea Kazantzaki (née Galatea Alexiou, 1884–1962). From 1907 to 1909 Kazantzakis studied philosophy in Paris at
the Collège de France under Henri Bergson.
He followed Bergson in his belief that there is an élan vital driving life. They
both took a critical stand towards abstractions and saw that
genuine knowledge can be acquired through intuition. Ophis kai krino (1906),
Kazantzakis's first book, portrayed a fin de siècle aesthete, whom
prefers death over
mundane life. A laudatory review of the novel by Dimitrios
Kaloyeropoulos, a journalist and author, was published in the
conservative periodical Pinakothiki.
In 1919 Kazantzakis was appointed director general at the Greek Ministry of Public Welfare. By 1927, when Kazantzakis resigned from this post, he had been responsible for the feeding and eventual rescue of more than 150 000 people of Greek origin, who had been caught up in the civil war raging in the Caucasian region of the Soviet Union. Between the 1910s and 1930s Kazantzákis wrote dramas, verse and travel books drawing on his extensive travelling. Restlessly moving on, he came to identify himself with Odysseus, writing in a poem: "Hail, my soul, whose homeland has always been the journey." While in Vienna he contracted a rare skin disease, which caused his face to swell. In Berlin, a Russian woman named Itka introduced him to him to Marxism-Leninism. Though never a member of the Communist party, Kazantzakis sympathized leftist movements. Later in life Kazantzakis was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. His first novel, Toda Raba (1934), Kazantzakis published at the age of 51. After three journeys in the Soviet Union in the 1920s,
Kazantzakis became
disenchanted with the materialism of the Bolsheviks. The basis of his
own philosophy, which contained elemests from Bergson, Marxism,
Nietzsche, Christianity, and Buddism, Kazantzakis presented in Salvatores Dei
(1927), written in
1922-23 in Berlin. "We come from a
dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval
life," were his much quoted opening words in the book. In
1924 Kazantzakis met the journalist Eleni Samiou
(1903-2004) and started a
long affair with her; officially Kazantzakis married her in 1945.
Kazantzakis still continued his traveling, but since the mid-1930s,
they had made Aegina their permanent residence. After WWII, Kazantzakis
served a brief period as Minister without Portfolio in Themistoklis
Sofoulis' coalition government. In 1947-48 he worked for UNESCO. While
visiting China with Eleni as the guest of the Chinese government,
Kazantzakis
received in Cantona vaccination, which soon became infected. Kazantzakis died of leukemia on October 26, 1957, in Freiburg im Breisgau, in Germany, aged 74 years. His body was transferred to Crete, where he was buried in Iráklion. The inscription on Kazantzakis' grave stone reads: "I hope for nothing, I fear nothing. I am free." Eleni Kazantzaki has told in her biography on her husband, that he always had as his traveling companion a miniature Dante, and Dante alone remained at his bedside until his last breath. A number of his books Kazantzakis published in
French,
but his most celebrated works were composed in the colloquial language
of
the Cretan working classes. Zorba the Greek was written on the
island of Aegina during the war, when Greece was occupied by the Nazis.
Later in the 1960s, it was through Michael
Cacoyannis' popular screen adaptation of the novel, for which Mikis
Theodorakis composed the music, the bouzoúki
found worldwide fame and became the symbol of the Greek tourist
industry. ('Bouzoúki' by Panayotis Panapoulos, in Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of
the World: Volume II, edited by John Shepherd, David Horn, Dave
Laing, Paul Oliver, Peter Wicke, 2003, pp. 411-412) The narrative focuses on the relationship between a writer and intellectual, modelled on Kazantzakis, and an uneducated man, Zorba, who drinks, works, loves and lives like a force of nature. His character has been seen as the personification of Henri Bergson's ideas of élan vital. He doesn't care about books, he values more experience and understanding than scholarly learning. The narrator meets Alexis Zorba in Pireus. He plans to reopen on the island of Crete an abandoned mine and Zorba becomes his foreman. Kazantzakis weaves the narrator's childhood memories and thoughts against the life and teaching of Zorbas. After a series of tragedies, failures and small victories, the narrator leaves Crete, but asks his friend to teach him to dance. "How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea." (from Zorba the Greek) The Irish-Mexican macho actor Anthony Quinn, who has been hailed as the perfect cast for the role of Zorba in Cacoyannis' adaptation, was rhythm-deaf, but he believed he could do anything. His famous syrtaki dance, seemingly improvisational, was "constructed" especially for the film by choreographer Giorgos Provias. Freedom or Death was based on the Cretan revolt of
1889, one of the final uprisings against Turkish rule. One of the
central characters is Captain Mikalis, who chooses rebellion instead of
love, and dies in the middle of his cry, "Freedom or..." Kazantzakis
shows understanding of the Turkish culture in the character of
Nuri bei, who commits suicide. The Greek Passion was story
about a group of villagers under Turkish domination, who re-enact the
Passion. The Last Temptation of Christ explored the theme of
the battle between spirit and flesh. The book was banned by Vatican in
1954 and in 1955 Kazantzakis was excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox
Church. Moreover, the members of the Orthodox Church of America damned
it
as extremely indecent and atheistic, after admitting that they hadn't
read it and had based their case on the magazine articles. Christ is presented as an existential hero, a rebel against
his divine
mission until he is awakened by Judas, whom he calls his brother.
Judas's heroic struggle against God ends in
failure. Martin Scorsese's film adaption from 1988 boosted rediscovery
of the novel. Kazantzakis' major literary achievement was not Zorba the Greek but the vast and rambling epic poem Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, 33 333 lines long, which he wrote seven times and published in 1938. Kazantzakis dismissing other works he had done as "spin-offs." The poem manifested the
author's deep knowledge of modern archeological and anthropological
discoveries. Some critics accused the author of being too
revolutionary in vocabulary and diction.
Kazantzakis himself emphasized that he made a synthesis of conflicting
forms of thought, one created by the ancient Greek civilization: the
Apollonian, representing contemplation and order, and its opposite, the
dark
Dionysian underground stream, the expression of the creative principle.
"Crete, for me . . . is
the synthesis which I always pursue, the synthesis of Greece and the
Orient," he said. For further reading: Nikos Kazantzakis and His Odyssey by P. Prevelakis (1961); Nikos Kazantzakis by H. Kazantzakis (1968); Nikos Kazantzakis: La vie, son oeuvre by C. Janiaud-Lust (1970); Kazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature by P. Bien (1972); Nikos Kazantzakis by P. Bien (1972); Nietzsche and Kazantzakis by B.T. McDonough (1978); The Spiritual Odyssey of Nikos Kazantzakis, ed. by K. Friar (1979); The Cretan Glance by M.P. Levitt (1980); Tormented by Happiness by P. Bien (1982); Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit by P. Bien (1988); The Last Temptation of Hollywood by L.W. Poland (1988); God's Struggler, edited by Darren Middleton and Peter Bien (1996); Kazantzakis and God by Daniel A. Dombrowski (1997); Creative Destruction: Nikos Kazantzakis and the Literature of Responsibility by Lewis Owens (2002); Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit by Peter Bien (2006); 'The "Invisible" Dimension of Zorba's Dance' by Magda Zografou and Mimina Pateraki, in Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 39 (2007); In Search of Transcendence: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Kazantzakis by Jerry H. Gill (2017); Kazantzakis' Philosophical and Theological Thought: Reach What You Cannot by Jerry H. Gill (2018); Dromoi zōēs: sta chnaria tou Nikou Kazantzakē 1989-2019 by Giōrgos Stasinakēs; eisagōgē Peter Bien (2020); Politikos Kazantzakēs by Alkēs Rēgos (2021); Nikos Kazantzakēs: hē anthrōpographia henos tragikou dianooumenou by Theodosēs P. Tasios (2021); Glōssari sto ergo tou Nikou Kazantzakē by Vasileios A. Geōrgas (2022) Selected works:
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