Study Guide to Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645423577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek, the internationally acclaimed novel of opposing forces. As a tale of Greek’s Great Famine during WWII, Zorba the Greek gives a fresh perspective on the duality between body and mind, beauty and pain, feeling and thinking. Moreover, Kazantzakis empowers readers to pursue life like Zorba. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Kazantzakis’ classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

NOTE TO THE STUDENT

This Monarch Note is designed to aid you in your study and appreciation of the themes, literary techniques, and characterization in Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel Zorba the Greek. This critical discussion will make little sense to you unless you are already familiar with the novel either in the original Greek or in translation. The novel is available in an English translation by Carl Wildman: the hardcover edition is published by Simon and Schuster; the paperback edition is published by Ballantine Books. In the critical discussion that follows, all page references are to the Ballantine paperback edition; but since the criticism also includes chapter references, it will be easy to use this Note with any edition of the novel. Throughout this Note, the author assumes that her critical discussion will prompt you continually to refer back to your original text.

Walter James Miller Editor-in-Chief Monarch Notes

LIFE, TIMES, AND THOUGHT OF NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

Writing “Zorba.” Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) began writing “The Golden Legend of Alexi Zorba” during the great famine of 1941-1942. Due to lack of food, he spent many hours in bed trying to conserve energy. Then would come a knock on the door. If it was an elderly person, his wife would beg him not to open the door. If it was a child, he would give it a spoonful of oil and hastily close the door. 35,000 Greeks were dying of malnutrition, and Aegina where he lived was one of the islands hit hardest. Fifty-eight-year-old Kazantzakis believed that he was soon to die and asked his wife not to waste time worrying about the future. War planes, bullets, German land-vehicles, mass murders of unarmed civilians - these and more became part of his everyday existence. Although bullets shot into his house missed his head by less than half an inch, Kazantzakis continued to sit in the same place writing about the lively, lusty Zorba in order “to appease his hunger,” as he put it. The full toll of this period of deprivation, however, was such that a doctor who later examined him asked if he had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.

Politics. During the famine in Aegina, Kazantzakis was willing to give up writing Zorba the Greek in order to join the Greek Partisans fighting in nearby mountains. Politically, however, he was unpopular with all sides. He knew that the Left did not consider him one of them and that the Right distrusted him for having flirted once with Communism. Still, he was quite taken aback when the Resistance leaders rejected his offered assistance, insinuating that he was a secret agent. In the same year, 1941, the National Theater refused, for political reasons, to produce a play he had translated. Referring to this play, Kazantzakis wrote his Cretan friend, Pandelis Prevelakis: “Apparently, there is no regime that can tolerate me - and very rightly so, since there is no regime that I can tolerate” (Helen Kazantzakis, 401).^* Peter Bien, one of his critics and translators, maintains that Kazantzakis was abused by both Left and Right throughout his life because he was too complicated: “Politics and paradox do not mix. Kazantzakis angered people because he seemed to embrace everything instead of defending one position consistently” (Politics of Twentieth-Century Novelists, 140).

[Footnote *: See “Bibliography” for full description of works cited.]

Childhood In Crete. Born in 1883 in Heraklion Crete, Kazantzakis was the first of his family to pick up the pen instead of the sword. Until 1897 Crete had been ruled by foreign masters for seven centuries. And for seven centuries each generation of young men would - after siring the next generation -go off to fight for the freedom they prized so highly. The Turks who ruled Crete during Kazantzakis’ youth were unusually fierce. In his spiritual autobiography, Report to Greco, Kazantzakis tells about a trip he and his father took one morning after the Turks had spent the night bloodletting. The tiny Kazantzakis saw fountains red with blood, and his father made him kiss the feet of two hanged victims - so that he would not forget. Captain Michalis, Kazantzakis’ father, was renowned for bravery, and, like his father before him, became the subject of oft-repeated tales. All of his life Kazantzakis was in awe of his father, whom he writes about in the novel Freedom or Death. When the Turks rampaged outside their home, Captain Michalis assured his family that he would kill his own wife and children himself rather than let the Turks get them.

Stories of Cretan revolutionaries and his father’s brand of heroism deeply impressed the young Nikos. He greatly admired the man of action, the revolutionary fighter, and was torn all his life between the life of action that he valued most highly and the life of contemplation for which he was more temperamentally suited. Again and again he belittles his writing or refers to himself as an “incurable pen pusher” or a nanny goat chewing “anemic paper.” In Report to Greco he tells us that when he met Zorba (the real man who inspired the novel), it was too late. He had already degenerated into the thing he “most scorned”:

Would that I really could have turned those words into action! But I was afraid I could not. In me the fierce strength of my race had evaporated, my great-grandfather’s pirate ship had sunk, action had degenerated into words, blood into ink; instead of holding a lance and waging war, I held a small penholder and wrote (443).

This polarity of pen and sword, of contemplation and action, remained in Kazantzakis’ personality throughout his life. Prevelakis likens him to a pirate who envies the ways of a Benedictine. Though he was not the man of action he would have liked to be, Kazantzakis was in many ways both the active, earthy Zorba and passive scholarly Boss of Zorba the Greek.

Education. No doubt the family wondered how Captain Michalis could produce such a “bloodless” scholar. Despite father and son’s temperamental distance, however, Captain Michalis saw to it that Kazantzakis got the education he desired both from institutions and from travel. In 1906 Kazantzakis took his law degree from the University of Athens and went to Paris to study philosophy. In Paris he encountered the philosophy of Bergson and Nietzsche, who became his principal mentors. Bergson, one of his teachers, taught him about elan vital, the life force that can conquer matter; like Bergson, Kazantzakis was an anti-rationalist who dethrones reason and emphasizes the importance of the collaboration of intuition and reason. After his formal schooling, Kazantzakis spent five years traveling in Europe. Throughout his life he lived and traveled in Europe, Russia, Egypt, Palestine, China and Japan and was well known for his travelogues.

Nietzsche’s Influence. Nietzsche’s influence on Kazantzakis (especially evident in Zorba the Greek) was powerful and pervasive. In his youth Kazantzakis not only wrote a treatise on Fredrick Nietzsche and his Philosophy of Right, but he also took a “pilgrimage” to the towns in Germany where Nietzsche had lived. A few years later he translated into modern Greek, for an Athenian publisher, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Later, in a chapter of Report to Greco entitled “Paris, Nietzsche the Great Martyr,” Kazantzakis tells how Nietzsche helped him overcome his past education and traditional Christian beliefs: “Nietzsche taught me to distrust every optimistic theory.”

I wanted whatever was most difficult, in other words most worthy of man.... Yes, that was what I wanted. Three cheers for Nietzsche, the murderer of God. He it was who gave me the courage to say, That is what I want! (338)

Even a cursory glance at Nietzsche’s life and works reveals startling similarities to Kazantzakis’ life and works. In their early childhood, each would avidly entertain audiences of family or servants by reading aloud stories about the lives of saints. Throughout their lives each harbored the dream of founding a colony of artistic, sensitive men. Both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis exalt struggle and “joy,” which attends the strong man’s efforts. Both emphasize man’s potential to evolve higher. Both are nihilists and not infrequently make disparaging remarks about optimists, conventional people, and women. Two of their major works - Report to Greco and Thus Spake Zarathustra - are compared by critics. In important ways, however, they are dissimilar. Unlike Nietzsche, who continually made new discoveries and would contradict his own former views, Kazantzakis’ ideas remained essentially the same throughout his life. Another dissimilarity is that Kazantzakis lacked Nietzsche’s venom; despite his criticism of people who want secure, comfortable lives, Kazantzakis did not have Nietzsche’s contempt for ordinary human beings whom Nietzsche characterized as “the bungled and botched.” Nor are their views on God alike. While for Nietzsche, God is dead, for Kazantzakis there is a sense in which God may exist. (Textual analysis of Chapter 4 contains a discussion of Kazantzakis’ concept of God.)

In describing the power of Nietzsche’s influence, Prevelakis writes that in 1908, after Kazantzakis became familiar with Nietzsche’s philosophy, “the great themes” which were to occupy Kazantzakis all his life - “optimistic or Dionysiac nihilism, the theory of the Superman, the bankruptcy of Western civilization” - became clear in his mind. According to Prevelakis, these Nietzschean ideas that the young Kazantzakis discussed in Fredrick Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Right remained substantially unchanged throughout his life.

Searching And Unsettled. In 1924, when Kazantzakis returned from the starvation and inflation of postwar Berlin, he had mastered five modern languages in addition to Latin and ancient and modern Greek. His translations included works of Bergson, Darwin, Eckermann, William James, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, and Plato. His writings at this point included a novella, numerous verse plays, and his credo The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises (completed in 1923 and first published in 1928). In 1919 he had served briefly as Director General of the Ministry of Public Welfare in order to repatriate 15,000 Greeks from South Russia and the Caucasus. By this time he had also made two trips which later provided material for the novel Zorba the Greek. One was a trip to Mount Athos in Macedonia where he lived alone in a monk’s cell for six months. The other in 1917 was a lignite mining adventure in the Peloponnesus where he came to know Giorghos Zorba - the model for the fictional Zorba.

Despite all these accomplishments, Kazantzakis was still unsettled, still searching. He felt that Western civilization was bankrupt and that modern man was living in a void left by the downfall of Christianity: in The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises he says “an entire world is crashing down.” In this void the old gods are dying, and the new gods have yet to be born. He personally felt that, in some way, he must help the new gods be born. In his university days he had written a play, “The Snake and Lily” (1906), which portrays victims who are trapped in the “transitional age” and can find no exit. In order to escape, the heroine of the play can only kill herself. For her there is not yet a new faith, a new myth which gives freedom from despair and frustration: “Our epoch is not a moment of equilibrium in which refinement, reconciliation, peace, and love might be fruitful virtues” (The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, 114). According to Kazantzakis, man has the potentiality of fashioning a new god and a new world for himself. Because he thought this could be accomplished politically, he abandoned Christ and Buddha and fastened his hopes on Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But soon he was having misgivings about the “big ideas,” especially the materialistic emphases. In 1928 after his fourth trip to Russia, he had become disillusioned with Communism for not fulfilling man’s spiritual needs. However, despite civil wars, world wars and continual political disillusionment, Kazantzakis (like his friend Albert Schweitzer) spent his entire life attempting to understand and strengthen man’s spiritual values. Repeatedly he says that his purpose is to “transubstantiate” flesh into spirit.

“The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel.” During the time he was becoming disillusioned with Communism, Kazantzakis was discovering what he wanted to do. He - the epic poet - would provide a myth, a model for a new consciousness. From 1924 to 1928 Kazantzakis wrote and rewrote seven times his epic of 33,333 verses. First published in 1938, Odyssey: A Modern Sequel is considered by many critics to be “a monument of the age,” one of the great literary events of our time. Kazantzakis begins exactly where Homer left off. Odysseus washes off the blood of Penelope’s suitors. But having sheathed his sword, he finds Ithaca a bore. His wife, his son, his father, and his kingdom mean nothing to him now. Choosing five companions, he sets off again. He undergoes an incredible range of experiences, including stealing Helen from Menelaus and eventually losing all of his companions. Throughout his journeys he meets symbolic figures resembling Buddha, Don Quixote, Christ, the Primitive, the Hedonist. After seeing his newly-built ideal city destroyed by an earthquake, Odysseus becomes an ascetic, travels south in Africa, builds a small boat, and sails to his death on an ice cap in Antarctica.

God And Nihilism. Odysseus “the god-slayer” is Kazantzakis’ new man, a synthesis of East and West, a model for how to live. Now that the God of the Bible is dead, Kazantzakis wants to replace the Christian-Platonic myth of salvation from the outside. In The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, an important record of Kazantzakis’ beliefs (hereafter referred to as Saviors of God), he tells us that there is not a God above and beyond man but a God who is in the process of being created by man. Echoing Bergson’s elan vital and “creative evolution,” Kazantzakis sees all life as a struggle of spirit to free itself from matter. (See textual analysis of Chapter 4 for further discussion of Bergson and Kazantzakis’ concept of God.) From this struggling, evolving spirit, Kazantzakis takes his concept of God. Mud, plants, animals, men are ascending steps in God’s upward struggle. For Kazantzakis, God is not almighty. God needs men, and special men who strive to liberate spirit from matter actually become “saviors of God”: God “struggles for he is in peril every moment; he trembles and struggles in every living thing and he cries out” (Saviors of God, 103). It is man’s duty - in whatever individual path he chooses -to help God, “to transubstantiate matter and turn it into spirit.” There is no other discernible purpose or goal; for Kazantzakis freedom is not the goal but the process of struggle itself. The struggle is what matters, the struggle without fear or hope is what gives man his freedom.

This view - that there is no one path to salvation and no purpose to human struggle other than the struggle itself to liberate spirit from matter - is what many critics consider nihilism or pessimism; they variously label Kazantzakis’ world view as “nihilism of the first order,” “Dionysiac nihilism,” “thorough-going pessimism,” “heroic pessimism,” etc. (See Textual Analysis for further discussion of Kazantzakis’ world view.) Kimon Friar, translator of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, is more impressed with Kazantzakis’ affirmation of life, “his great Yes,” rather than his nihilistic despair, “his great No.” However, Pandelis Prevelakis - a much older friend of Kazantzakis - points out that Friar knew only the older Kazantzakis, not the younger Kazantzakis” at the height of his nihilistic struggles.”

Novels And Acclaim. Soon after his The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel was published (1938) came the Second World War and then the Greek Civil War. Although he served briefly as Minister of National Education (1945), Kazantzakis despaired of the political and religious situation in Greece. Leaving Greece in 1948, he settled for the remaining years of his life in Antibes on the French Riviera. Except for a brief time as Director of the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Bureau of Translations, he spent most of his time writing novels.

Kazantzakis had come late in life to novel writing. His first novel, Freedom or Death, was begun in 1936, Zorba the Greek was written in 1942, The Greek Passion in 1948, The Last Temptation of Christ in 1951, and Saint Francis in 1953. In 1953, when Kazantzakis was 70 years old, he had been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize and was known throughout Europe for his novels which had been translated into thirty languages. After years of non-recognition, however, Kazantzakis had to suffer an acclaim that gained him many detractors. Some readers and critics were especially incensed at his portrayals of Christ. The Greek Passion angered the Greek Orthodox Church, which threatened to ex-communicate him. Freedom or Death and Zorba the Greek angered many Greeks who took exception to his non-romanticized portrayal of Greek peasants, and The Last Temptation of Christ roused the ire of Greek, Roman Catholics, and Protestants alike. Perhaps the biggest fury of all was caused by his use of demotic Greek - the language of the peasants. For a long time Kazantzakis had been a partisan in the continuing Greek language controversy. Intellectuals thought that he should respect “pure” Greek and use only Atticisti...