Kazantzakis, Volume 2

Politics of the Spirit

Peter Bien

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780691128139
• eBook ISBN: 9781400824427
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Putting Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis's vast output into the context of his lifelong spiritual quest and the turbulent politics of twentieth-century Greece, Peter Bien argues that Kazantzakis was a deeply flawed genius--not always artistically successful, but a remarkable figure by any standard. This is the second and final volume of Bien's definitive and monumental biography of Kazantzakis (1883-1957). It covers his life after 1938, the period in which he wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, the novels that brought him his greatest fame.


A demonically productive novelist, poet, playwright, travel writer, autobiographer, and translator, Kazantzakis was one of the most important Greek writers of the twentieth century and the only one to achieve international recognition as a novelist. But Kazantzakis's writings were just one aspect of an obsessive struggle with religious, political, and intellectual problems. In the 1940s and 1950s, a period that included the Greek civil war and its aftermath, Kazantzakis continued this engagement with undiminished energy, despite every obstacle, producing in his final years novels that have become world classics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Technical Notes
• One: Kazantzakis’S Attraction to Fascism and Nazism In The 1930S
• Two: Travel Writing
• Three: Spain
• Four: Journey to The Morea
• Five: Greek Politics, 1922–1936; Metaxas
• Six: Writings Ca. 1935–1939: Jardin Des Rochers
• Seven: Writings Ca. 1935–1939: Othello Returns
• Eight: Writings Ca. 1935–1939: Melissa
• Nine: Writings Ca. 1935–1939: Julian The Apostate
• Ten: Period 1940–1944: The Albanian Campaign and Axis Occupation
• Eleven: Buddha
• Twelve: Alexis Zorbas: A Philosophical Interpretation
• Thirteen: Alexis Zorbas: A Political Interpretation
• Fourteen: Prometheus Trilogy and Greekness
• Fifteen: Kapodistrias
• Sixteen: Constantine Palaiologos
• Seventeen: Athens, October 1944–June 1946
• Eighteen: London and Paris, 2 June 1946–2 June 1948
• Nineteen: Sodom and Gomorrah
• Twenty: The Political Comprehensiveness Of Christ Recrucified
• Twenty-One: The Fratricides
• Twenty-Two: Kouros
• Twenty-Three: Christopher Columbus: Kazantzakis’S Final Play
• Twenty-Four: O Kapetan Mihalis: An Epic ManquÉ
• Twenty-Five: Kazantzakis’S Long Apprenticeship to Christian Themes
• Twenty-Six: The Last Temptation As A Religious Novel
• Twenty-Seven: Is The Last Temptation A Religious Novel Or A Political Novel?
• Twenty-Eight: Kazantzakis’S Meta-Christian Saint Francis As A Model Of Soul-Force Creating His Own Fate
• Twenty-Nine: Report to Greco
• Appendix. Kazantzakis and Women
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index