Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Iraklion, the modern Capital city of Crete, in 1883. His youth was dominated by his father, an extremely taciturn and tightly wound patriarch whose life was formed by the unceasing and cruel occupation of Crete by the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Nonetheless, Nikos felt that his childhood life was “magical.” His earliest memories included the beauty of the garden in the family courtyard, where his mother and the neighborhood women
held daily conversations as they went about their household tasks.
Nikos’s schoolmasters were stern, even mean at times, but he very much enjoyed his school studies, especially those involving Sacred History and the Lives of the Saints. When it came time for his middle school education, his father delivered him to the Priests of a Roman Catholic
school on the island of Naxos
in order to avoid the revolutionary conflict on Crete at the time. There he shined as a student of creative writing. When Crete was finally delivered from the 400-year Turkish occupation in 1898, Nikos returned to Crete for his high school. During the following years, he experienced the usual turmoil of a young adolescent. Nearly all we know of his youth comes from his creative, but somewhat fictionalized “autobiography” Report to Greco.
After having distinguished himself as a student with great promise in high school, Nikos went off to the University of Athens to study law. Having come from the remote island of Crete, he was rather overwhelmed by the splendors of the City of Athens. He did spend a good many hours wandering through the Greek countryside and made several lifelong friends. Eventually, he decided against a law career, opting instead to study literature. He actually won an important prize for one of the plays he wrote. After a brief return to his home on Crete, he fell in love with the famous palaces of the Minoan
civilization and met and married his first wife Galatea.
At this point, Kazantzakis’s life took a radical turn, leading him to study for a doctorate degree at the University of Paris
. There he encountered the spirit of Frederick Nietzsche
and the teaching of Henri Bergson
. Both of these philosophers became primary figures in Kazantzakis’s own philosophical worldview. We shall consider both of these thinkers in some detail as we consider how they factor into the various novels within which Kazantzakis expressed his understanding of reality and human life. While he was inspired and soothed by the beauty and insights of Bergson’s
lectures, Kazantzakis was challenged, even terrified, by the power of Nietzsche’s
writings, eventually writing his doctoral dissertation on them.
Subsequently, Nikos embarked on a three-month tour of his Greek homeland. Along the way, he had several conversations with some traditional, and some not so traditional, monks, especially during his visit to Mount Athos
. There he came face to face with the dualism between the life of the spirit and that of the flesh. This was a dualism with which he continued to struggle, both in all of his novels as well in his personal life. He also visited various “Holy Places,” such as the home of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. Later on, Kazantzakis traveled to Vienna where he immersed himself in the teachings of Buddhism
. While there he struggled with a rare skin disease, often called the “Saint’s disease” because it attacked people who were suffering under the pressure of great sexual guilt. Next, he spent several months in Berlin, where he had a serious affair with a Russian
woman named Itka who introduced him to the ideas of Lenin
. He temporarily embraced Communism
because of its desire to erase human suffering and political oppression, and later the two traveled together to Moscow.
In Moscow Kazantzakis became disenchanted with the grandiose claims of Communism
, and especially the practices of Communism under the rule of Stalin. He and Itka argued over these issues and eventually, Kazantzakis returned to Crete, and with his second wife, Eleni
, moved to the island of Aegina near Athens where they weathered World War Two. During the Nazi occupation of Greece Kazantzakis wrote his novel Zorba the Greek. In my all-too-brief visit with Eleni
, she shared many of his stories concocted to alleviate their impoverished life at that time. She also shared many of his stories and feelings about his great friend Zorba.
One day, while the inspiration for his great work, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, was forming within him, Kazantzakis came upon a tiny chrysalis beginning to open up. Impatient to witness the emergence of the butterfly, he began to blow on the cocoon in order to hurry its birth along. When the butterfly finally came forth it was underdeveloped and deformed because he had hurried its birthing process. He was stricken with guilt, and proclaimed “To this day I carry the responsibility for that deformation in my heart.” He lamented his impetuosity that taught him the value of waiting for nature’s processes to follow their natural course.
Finally, in 1957, while stopping in Japan on a trip to China, Kazantzakis received a vaccination which soon became infected and brought him to death’s door. Eleni
flew him to Freiburg, Germany for medical treatment, but it was too late. Eleni
told me that Aristotle Onassis offered to fly Nikos back to Greece, but she decided rather to have a driver take them to Athens. Regrettably, the Bishop of Athens, who had long detested Kazantzakis’s writings, would not allow him to lie in state in his Province. Eleni
appealed to the Bishop of Crete, who was pleased to have the great writer buried on the ruins of the Venetian wall surrounding Iraklion, what Kazantzakis, in his novels, called “Megalo Kastro.”
On his gravestone is the inscription, which he himself chose, “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Although he had always admired “men of action,” he had eventually resigned himself to merely being “a weak-bottomed pen-pusher.” In the end, he was castigated by both the religious leadership of his own church and the Greek leaders of the Communist movement, for being on the one hand too liberal, and on the other hand too idealistic. Among his fellow Cretans, however, he will always be a national hero, a national treasure.
By virtue of his many writings, as well as the two popular American films, “Zorba the Greek” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Kazantzakis has, as well, become a worldwide symbol of freedom, courage, and artistry. In the pages that follow I shall trace the diverse themes his writings embraced under the headings of “Nature,” “Humanity,” and “Divinity.” As we shall see, he sought to devise a philosophy that incorporated the teachings of Christ, Buddha, Bergson
, Nietzsche
, Marx, and most of all Zorba. Through it all, he struggled to “Reach what he could not.”
At the outset, I should mention that I shall be using Peter Bien’s
more recent and reliable translation of Zorba the Greek as the text for my analysis of this well-known novel. Professor Bien
is universally regarded as the “Dean” of Kazantzakis translation and interpretation. His own book Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit is more than worth a careful reading.