Nikos Kazantzakis

From Philosopedia

Kazantzakis, Nikos (18 February 1883 - 26 October 1957)

Kazantzakis, the Greek author of Zorba the Greek (1946), also wrote an ambitious work, The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel (1938), which includes the outlooks of Gautama, Jesus, Nietzsche, Lenin, and others.

His Die letzte Veruchung was included on the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading in 1953.

Kazantzaakis, who was born in Crete while it was a part of the Ottoman empire, studied law at the University of Athens. In 1907 he studied philosophy in Paris, becoming a devotee of Henry Bergson.

Kazantzakis married Galatea Alexiou in 1911, and they divorced in 1926. He married Eleni Samiou in 1945.

From 1922 on, he traveled widely - to Paris and Berlin (from 1922 to 1924), Italy, Russia (in 1925), Spain (in 1932), and then later in Cyprus, Aegina, Egypt, Mount Sinai, Czechoslovakia, Nice (he later bought a villa in nearby Antibes, in the Old Town section near the famed seawall), China, and Japan.

In Berlin, he became an admirer of Lenin and, although never a consistent communist, visited the Soviet Union and stayed with the Left Opposition politician and writer Victor Serge. He witnessed the rise of Joseph Stalin, becoming disillusioned with Soviet-style communism.

In 1945, as the leader of a small party on the noncommunist left, he entered the Greek government as Minister without Portfolio, resigning the following year.

In 1946, The Society of Greek Writers recommended that Kazantzakis and Angelos Sikelianos be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1957, he lost the Prize to Albert_Camus by one vote. Camus later said that Kazantzakis deserved the honour "a hundred times more" than himself.

Late in 1957, even though suffering from leukemia, he set out on one last trip to China and Japan. Falling ill on his return flight, he was transferred to Freiburg, Germany, where he died. He is buried on the wall surrounding the city of Heraklion, because the Orthodox Church ruled out his being buried in a cemetery. His epitaph reads "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free." (Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβάμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος.)

{CE; ILP, Additus, 5 December 1961}