Novelist, poet, playwright, journalist, philosopher and politician. One of the great chapters of modern Greek literature, with an enormous volume, but also a wide-ranging work. He gained worldwide fame posthumously from the big screen adaptation of his novel "The Life and State of Alexis Zorba" by Michalis Kakogiannis in 1964. Nikos Kazantzakis is the most translated modern Greek writer.
Nikos Kazantzakis was born on February 18, 1883 in Heraklion, Crete, which at that time was still part of the Ottoman Empire. His father, Michalis, was a merchant of agricultural products and came from the Barbarians, where today the Kazantzakis Museum is located. After completing his high school studies in his hometown and Naxos, he settled in Athens in 1902 to study law.
In 1906 he appeared for the first time in Greek literature with the essay "The Disease of the Century" and his first novel "Ophis and Krino". In 1907 he began postgraduate studies in law in Paris. At the same time, he attended the lectures of the existentialist philosopher Henri Bergson and studied the work of Nietzsche. Both of these philosophers had a huge impact on him.
In 1907 he began his journalistic career and was initiated into Freemasonry. In 1909, upon his return to Greece, he published his doctoral thesis "Friedrich Nietzsche in the Philosophy of Law and the State". He earns his living from translations and lives with his compatriot intellectual Galatea Alexiou. He participates in the movement for the establishment of the Educational Group, the most important pressure group for the establishment of the Primary School.
Through this association, in 1914, he became friendly with the poet Angelos Sikelianos. Together they traveled to Mount Athos, where they stayed for about forty days, while they also toured many other parts of Greece. During this period, he also came into contact with the work of Dante, whom he describes in his diaries as one of his teachers, along with Homer and Bergson. With the Sicilian they dream of creating a new religion.
In October 1916, he took his first business step. He travels to Thessaloniki to sign a contract for harvesting timber from Mount Athos. The next year he tries to exploit a lignite mine in the Peloponnese and hires a worker named George Zorba. These experiences will later transform into the novel "Life and State of Alexis Zorba", which refers to the friendship of an intellectual with a primitive layman, full of zest for life. The character of Zorba is the personification of the Berksonian idea of "animal drive". In 1918 he met and became emotionally connected to Elli Lampridou.
Since his youth, Kazantzakis' mind has been restless, his soul is tormented by anxieties and fundamental problems, a metaphysical and existential anxiety, as scholars of his work emphasize. Religious anxieties tyrannize this unbelieving Nietzscheist. Especially the figure of Christ - "this union, so mysterious and so real of man and God", as he writes in one of his letters - follows him as an obsessive idea from his youth to the end of his life.
In 1919, Eleftherios Venizelos appointed him Director General of the Ministry of Nursing, with the mission of repatriating Greeks from the Caucasus region. These experiences are used much later in the novel "Christ is crucified". The following year, after the defeat of the Liberal party, Kazantzakis left the Ministry of Health and made several trips to Europe, starting his own Odyssey around the world.
In May 1927 he isolated himself in Aegina, in order to complete his most ambitious work, the "Odyssey". In the same year, he started the anthology of his travel articles for the publication of the first volume ("Traveling"), while Dimitris Glinos' magazine "Rebirth" published his philosophical work "Asceticism", one of Kazantzakis' most important texts, in which he expresses his metaphysical faith. He himself considered "Asceticism" as the seed for all his subsequent work.
In 1946, the Society of Greek Writers nominated Kazantzakis together with Sikelianos for the Nobel Prize. His candidacy, however, was fought by conservative and reactionary political and artistic circles. The following year he was appointed to UNESCO, with the mission of promoting translations of classical literary works, with the ultimate goal of bridging different cultures. He finally resigned in 1948 in order to devote himself to his literary work. For this purpose he settled in Antibes, where in the following years a particularly productive period followed, during which he created his great novel compositions.
He was accused of heresy, based on excerpts from "Captain Michalis" (an autobiographical novel about the Heraklion of his childhood) and "The Last Temptation" (a novel with Christ as the protagonist, struggling between his divine and human Nature), which had not yet been published in Greece.
Kazantzakis himself, responding to the Church's threats to excommunicate him, wrote in his letter: "You gave me a curse, Holy Fathers, I also give you a wish: I wish you to have a conscience as pure as mine and to be as moral and religious as I am." Finally, the Church of Greece did not dare to proceed with the excommunication of Nikos Kazantzakis, as the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras was against such a thing.
The Last Temptation was included in the Roman Catholic Church's List of Prohibited Books, the now abolished Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
He died on October 26, 1957, aged 74. His body was taken to Athens, but the Church of Greece refused to expose it in pilgrimage. His body was transferred and exposed in the metropolitan temple of Heraklion, without a church ceremony. His compatriots honored him in particular and buried him in a bastion of the Venetian walls of Heraklion. On his grave, the inscription was carved: “I hope for nothing. I'm not afraid of anything. I am free."
