“Bien’s book is at once a comprehensive intellectual biography of its subject, and the definitive synthesis of many years of scholarship. With the first volume, it offers the fullest study of Kazantzakis’s prodigious oeuvre ever published in any language. It admirably bridges the gap between readers worldwide who approach Kazantzakis’s work through translation and specialists with access to the originals, and to the huge bibliography of minor and secondary material available only in Greek. It establishes the standard in Kazantzakis scholarship and will be an essential point of reference for all future studies of him.”–Roderick Beaton, King’s College London, author of George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel, A Biography

“This is a magisterial work, without equal in English or Greek, and promises to be the single most significant book on Kazantzakis for a generation, or more.”–Richard P. Martin, Stanford University

Peter Bien is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. His “Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, Volume 1” was first published by Princeton in 1989 and was translated into Greek in 2001. It will be published in paperback by Princeton in February 2007. Bien has translated Kazantzakis’s books “The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis”, and “Report to Greco” into English, and is the author of “Kazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature” (Princeton).

Kazantzakis

POLITICS OF THE SPIRITBy PETER BIEN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12813-9

Contents

Preface………………………………………………………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………….xviiTechnical Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………….xixONE. KAZANTZAKIS’S ATTRACTION TO FASCISM AND NAZISM IN THE 1930s……………………………………………………1TWO. TRAVEL WRITING……………………………………………………………………………………………16THREE. SPAIN………………………………………………………………………………………………….22FOUR. JOURNEY TO THE MOREA……………………………………………………………………………………..33FIVE. GREEK POLITICS, 1922–1936; METAXAS……………………………………………………………………43SIX. WRITINGS CA. 1935–1939: JARDIN DES ROCHERS……………………………………………………………..60SEVEN. WRITINGS CA. 1935–1939: OTHELLO RETURNS………………………………………………………………81EIGHT. WRITINGS CA. 1935–1939: MELISSA……………………………………………………………………..86NINE. WRITINGS CA. 1935–1939: JULIAN THE APOSTATE……………………………………………………………100TEN. PERIOD 1940–1944: THE ALBANIAN CAMPAIGN AND AXIS OCCUPATION………………………………………………111ELEVEN. BUDDHA………………………………………………………………………………………………..134TWELVE. ALEXIS ZORBAS: A PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION……………………………………………………………..144THIRTEEN. ALEXIS ZORBAS: A POLITICAL INTERPRETATION……………………………………………………………….157FOURTEEN. PROMETHEUS TRILOGY AND GREEKNESS……………………………………………………………………….165FIFTEEN. KAPODISTRIAS………………………………………………………………………………………….197SIXTEEN. CONSTANTINE PALAIOLOGOS………………………………………………………………………………..224SEVENTEEN. ATHENS, OCTOBER 1944–JUNE 1946…………………………………………………………………..237EIGHTEEN. LONDON AND PARIS, 2 JUNE 1946–2 JUNE 1948………………………………………………………….273NINETEEN. SODOM AND GOMORRAH……………………………………………………………………………………279TWENTY. THE POLITICAL COMPREHENSIVENESS OF CHRIST RECRUCIFIED………………………………………………………292TWENTY-ONE. THE FRATRICIDES…………………………………………………………………………………….328TWENTY-TWO. KOUROS…………………………………………………………………………………………….356TWENTY-THREE. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: KAZANTZAKIS’S FINAL PLAY……………………………………………………….363TWENTY-FOUR. O KAPETAN MIHALIS: AN EPIC MANQUÉ……………………………………………………………….372TWENTY-FIVE. KAZANTZAKIS’S LONG APPRENTICESHIP TO CHRISTIAN THEMES………………………………………………….394TWENTY-SIX. THE LAST TEMPTATION AS A RELIGIOUS NOVEL………………………………………………………………428TWENTY-SEVEN. IS THE LAST TEMPTATION A RELIGIOUS NOVEL OR A POLITICAL NOVEL?…………………………………………442TWENTY-EIGHT. KAZANTZAKIS’S META-CHRISTIAN SAINT FRANCIS AS A MODEL OF SOUL-FORCE CREATING HIS OWN FATE…………………453TWENTY-NINE. REPORT TO GRECO……………………………………………………………………………………524APPENDIX. KAZANTZAKIS AND WOMEN…………………………………………………………………………………547Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………..551Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………….583Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………..603

Chapter One

Kazantzakis’s Attraction to Fascism and Nazism in the 1930s

In the first volume of this study I treated the Odyssey as a “mythification” of Kazantzakis’s experiences up to 1929—a reworking on the plane of imagination of his frustrating attempts at action on the plane of reality. I also presented an articulation of “freedom,” Kazantzakis’s new “political” stance that had followed both nationalism and leftism, not to mention Buddhism. When we come to a discussion of Report to Greco at the end of this second volume, we will see Kazantzakis once again asserting this “freedom” as the goal of his spiritual journey, but calling it now “Odysséas.”

The Odyssey took a long time to write. If we discount the first draft, its composition was accomplished in concentrated bursts of energy that stretched out over nine years. However, the actual time devoted to the six reworkings was only about twenty-four months, which explains why Kazantzakis was able to do so much else during the years in question (1929–1938). We should also realize that the epic had attained its definitive form by the third draft (1932) and that in his subsequent reworkings Kazantzakis merely improved individual sections, adding metaphors or concepts drawn from his recent experience (Prevelakis 1965b:126–127). Although incorporated to some degree in the epic, these experiences did not determine its essential nature or subject matter. Hence I feel justified in having discussed this work in its entirety immediately after my treatment of Kazantzakis’s experiences in Russia, his writing of Toda-Raba, and his third “political” stage—”freedom”— which he dates from about 1933. It should not surprise us to learn that a great many things happened to him during the Odyssey years, things that we must now stop to review.

These experiences helped to direct Kazantzakis’s career in the crucial years that saw the Italian and German invasions of Greece, the Axis occupation, the resistance to it, the civil war, Kazantzakis’s attempt to reenter politics, and—in the literary field—the writing of Víos kai politeía tou Aléksi Zorbá, the Prometheus trilogy, Kapodístrias, and Konstantínos Palaiológos.

Kazantzakis’s activities in the eight years from 1932 to 1940, aside from the Odyssey, were (as usual) enough to occupy the entire lifetime of a less energetic man. Outwardly, they included two trips to Spain (1932–1933 and 1936), a journey to Japan and China (1935), and a visit to England (1939). But Kazantzakis also wrote continuously throughout these years. In constant need of money, he kept an eye on markets that the Odyssey would never reach, turning out a history of Russian literature in two volumes; a series of children’s books; one-half of a French-Greek dictionary; five scenarios for the cinema; translations of selected lyric poetry of contempoary Spain; travel articles on Spain, Japan, China, the Peloponnesus, and England, later collected in four volumes of Taksidévondas; translations of the entire Divine Comedy, of Pirandello’s Questa sera si recita a sogeto, and of Goethe’s Faust, part 1. In addition, he reworked the travel articles on the Orient, as he had the Russian articles, in order to produce in French the novel Le Jardin des rochers (written in 1936). It was also during this period that he composed most of his terzinas on the great personalities who had influenced him. Finally, he drafted—again in French—the novel that eventually became Kapetán Mihális, and he completed three ambitious plays in Greek: Othello Returns, Melissa, and Julian the Apostate (written in 1936, 1937, and 1939, respectively).

Not all of this voluminous output relates directly to Kazantzakis’s political experience or thought during the 1930s, yet much of it does. Certain writings must therefore be considered if we are to understand his evolving stance in the crucial years following the Odyssey—years that produced in him a revived nationalism in a mellowed form very different from his Dragoumian chauvinism of the 1910s. This new stance suffuses many (although not all) of the novels and plays written from 1940 onward.

We are already beginning to see that the label “freedom” that Kazantzakis attached to a putative final period, presumably lasting from 1933 until his death, needs some qualification. The last two and a half decades of Kazantzakis’s life were hardly static; they involved obvious growth and change. Yet the label “freedom” is an appropriate one for this period since Kazantzakis always maintained his allegiance to the creative imagination, never losing his faith in some future political effectiveness of the kravyí (the cry or outcry) that he was voicing. (This futurity is what leads me to term his politics eschatological.) But within this basic stance there were many changes of detail—or, more accurately, revivals of attitudes that had been surpassed. Kazantzakis never really abandoned an allegiance. What we are tempted to call “positions” or “stages” are merely instances of priority when the ongoing clash of opposites becomes temporarily quiescent. Hence his “freedom” may be termed a priority that remains unchallenged for the last twenty-five years of his life if it is viewed as a general principle; nevertheless, it is a priority cloaking the same conflicts that we saw earlier—specifically, between participation and withdrawal, action and art.

Insofar as Kazantzakis allowed himself to become involved once more in the active life, he betrayed a continued attraction to opposite extremes of the political spectrum, with hatred of the bourgeoisie remaining, as always, the fulcrum allowing him to swing either way. In the 1930s he refused to oppose fascism; in the 1940s he returned briefly to the parliamentary socialism that he had rejected first in his Paris years and again in his years of militant communism; in the 1950s he placed his hopes in Chairman Mao. But all this, I repeat, was only insofar as he allowed himself to become involved in the active life, for overriding these worldly allegiances was always the unworldly allegiance to “freedom” defined in the way I tried to demonstrate in the first volume—namely, as “the condition of a creative soul expressing itself in art” (Bien 1989:188, 2001:237), with devotion to all that is subjective, imaginative, and eschatological as presuppositions. We must always remember that Kazantzakis was a communist/fascist/Maoist/socialist/ nationalist whose kingdom was not of this world (Prevelakis 1965b:342).

Yet he always had a great deal to say about this world, including fascism and Nazism, which dominated the 1930s. It is important therefore to expose whatever facts we have concerning Kazantzakis’s attitude toward these -isms so that we may judge responsibly, avoiding facile name-calling or labeling.

Kazantzakis’s attraction to the right, which goes back to his early sojourn in Paris (1908–1909), surfaced again in 1924 when he concluded, “Mussolini is perhaps much greater than we have been accustomed to thinking up to now” (1958a:236). Interestingly, the characteristics that Kazantzakis admired in Mussolini were precisely those that he had also admired in the communists of Berlin in the early 1920s and, a decade or so earlier, in the archnationalist Ion Dragoúmis (1878–1920), whose extensive influence is recorded in volume 1 of this study—namely, an all-encompassing ideology, subordination of the individual to the “mystic” whole, youthful energy, Darwinian hardheadedness, primacy of the will over the mind, a cult of the ritualistic, and hatred of bourgeois morality. Let us always remember that Kazantzakis’s allegiances at discrete moments in his career were ways he found to apply positions broader than any particular faction, indeed that they were often broad enough to encompass antithetical factions. Thus he found no difficulty in concluding in 1927 that communism and fascism were “faithful collaborators” (1927f:1). If he adhered exclusively to anything at all, it was to Bergsonian vitalism, not to any political party or ideology. Valuing passion and energy above all else, he was apt to equate communism with fascism because both, in his opinion, displayed vitalistic virtues.

In examining his attraction to Mussolini and his subsequent reluctance to oppose Franco or Hitler, we must acknowledge his inborn distrust, as a Greek, of the Great Powers, in particular of Great Britain and France, which (so he concluded, along with many other Greeks) had manipulated little Greece for their own benefit ever since the time of the Greek war of independence. 1 The depth of this prejudice may be seen in Kazantzakis’s reaction to Parisian life when he went there in 1908 and wrote home chiefly about effete French sculptors, painters, and musicians (compared with the robust Germans), and about profligate French customs. Kazantzakis also accepted all the clichés about Anglo-Saxon reserve and sexlessness, going out of his way, for example, to describe the female English tourists on a bateau mouche fancifully as “camel-footed and plank-breasted” (1909a: 10 January 1910). Starting in this way, perhaps playfully, he continued to harp on the same string as his career unfolded. In Vienna, observing the postwar misery there, he wrote to his first wife, Galatea, that France was the cause; next, when he moved to Berlin and saw even greater misery, he again cited France as the villain (1958a:21, 145). All this serves as background to the even stronger—and decidedly unplayful—remark he made, first in a letter to Galatea in 1924 at the height of his Bolshevik fervor (1958a:245–246), then in his 1926 article “The New Pompeii” (reprinted in 1965e:259–267; cf. 1964a:504, 1965c:419). After contemplating the fate of Pompeii while walking through the ruins, he hears a whisper: “God grant that I may stroll in this way in Paris and London, talking Russian to the comrades.” No wonder that Kazantzakis preferred “vital” dictatorships in the 1930s to the necessarily sedate workings of parliamentary democracy.

It is against this background of his distrust of Great Britain and France, his sympathy for Germany after the First World War, his general preference for German culture, and his vitalistic, antirationalistic orientation that we must view his reaction to Hitler. More specifically, this reaction was determined by his attitude toward war. As usual, he struggled to reconcile two opposing tendencies: his basic humanity, on the one hand, and his intellectual conviction that strife is good, on the other. As we examine the specific situation in Germany, we are therefore going to find Kazantzakis wavering between repulsion and attraction—or, as he liked to phrase it, between the dictates of the heart and the mind.

His inconsistent attitude toward Hitler is a perfect example of this wavering. As early as July 1931 we find him horrified at the thought of Germany under such a leader. Writing to Pandelis Prevelakis from his retreat in Gottesgab, Czechoslovakia, he comments:

Yesterday, Eleni sent me French newspapers. Suddenly I saw that Germany is at the lip of the abyss. My heart constricted; a people half an hour away from me was in danger all the days I was writing poetry. Tomorrow I must abandon my writing and go to Germany to see. (Prevelakis 1965b:254)

Two years later, as he pleaded with Eleni Samiou to leave Paris and join him in Aegina, he had no illusions regarding what Hitler would eventually mean to Europe: “With Hitler the world is upside-down again and I’m afraid that some huge harm may break out all of a sudden and you’ll be far away in the center of the fire” (Eleni Kazantzaki 1977:347, 1968a: 287). In 1935 he expressed interest in an antifascist congress although declining an invitation to attend (Eleni Kazantzaki 1968a:324). In 1938 he clearly viewed Hitlerism as a curse:

Have you seen what is happening in Germany? … We’ve entered a middle age…. All the symptoms. What should we do? Dream, plan, work for the coming civilization. (Eleni Kazantzaki 1977:426, 1968a:356)

Nevertheless, these reactions of the heart were countered by the opposite reaction of the mind, which counseled him to admire the German situation in a qualified way, or at least to gaze down upon human folly with Olympian passivity. In 1933 he justified his inactivity in a letter to Renaud de Jouvenel, whose periodical Le Cahier Bleu was vigorously anti-Nazi: “If I were a man of action I would be absolutely at your side. But the smile of My Lord Buddha invades me from time to time” (Jouvenel 1958:91). In 1936 he published his notorious article “Fear and Hunger” as a justification for his refusal to join with other Greek intellectuals in signing a protest against the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. I must quote this at length since it offers such a succinct, clear exposition of Kazantzakis’s attitude toward war, his valuation of energy, his distrust of France and Great Britain, even his Olympian eclecticism:

The fundamental instincts of man are two:

a) to extend his power around him as much as he can; to grasp, conquer, take things, devour;

b) to preserve as much … as possible what he has conquered.

The first instinct is the primordial need of the living, developing organism: Hunger. The second instinct has primordial Fear as its immediate consequence.

A young organism—healthy, lively, still involved in its upward assault—is hungry. Need urges it to intensify its power, to face danger bravely, to lunge everywhere around itself, and to find food so that it may satisfy its hunger.

A mature organism that has eaten and been filled has just one additional purpose: to prevent others from taking what it owns, to keep established order from being altered, to preserve everything as it is—peacefully.

The first preaches war because only war can save it from the danger of dying from hunger. Naturally, it proclaims that war is holy, that power and justice are one and the same, and that the end justifies the means. The second preaches peace and formulates various philanthropic, justice-loving, sublime worldviews in order to camouflage its fear. It knows that only peace serves its interests and guards its abundant conquests.

Of today’s great nations, Germany, Japan, and Italy are suffocating within their borders; they have no place to expand; they are hungry. France and England are overstuffed; they have divided the world between them and they look with fear upon peoples who lack property or food.

How can an impartial mind, one that refuses to be blurred either by love or hate, confront the actions of these two groups?

A few months ago, our “intellectuals” carried around an infuriating, anodyne protest against Italy, which had leaped forward to devour Abyssynia. Someone asked me if I would sign it.

“Surely I sympathize with Abyssynia, which is defending its liberty,” I answered him, “but at the same time I recognize Italy’s right to live: to stop suffocating within the narrow frontiers that do not give her sufficient room. All the peoples who created great civilizations have followed the same gluttonous, inhuman, dark instincts: in their initial bodily development they committed injustices, they seized, they devoured. And as soon as their bodies became stabilized and hunger ceased, they began to create. Italy is doing the same today, following the same inhuman laws. The spirit is the most bloodthirsty of vultures.”

I would have signed had the protest been against England and France, which possess the entire world and refuse to give land to poor peoples in order that they may live. They are the inhuman overfilled capitalists of the nations, and they do not permit other peoples, the proletarians, to lift their hands in revolt. And although both instincts—hunger and fear—are primordial and profoundly human, yet of the two I prefer hunger because only that stirs up stagnant waters and urges the world upward.

“Aren’t you afraid of being called a fascist?”

“Why should I be afraid? Didn’t they call me a communist? I can never be either the one or the other because I am a free man. I am free because I am not a man of action, who, in order to act, needs dogmas, certainties, and practical thoughts.”

Today, whoever wants to preserve his liberty pays dearly. But he is left with a great joy: he knows that he remains sober among his intoxicated contemporaries.

Fascism and Hitlerism are profound, extremely significant phenomena worthy of the greatest reverence and fear because they spring from the deep psychical and at the same time economic needs of the nations that engendered them. Mussolini and Hitler are two great, leading doers-of-deeds who are playing their part in their own way, just as Lenin and Gandhi did in their way, to help solve the frightful worldwide drama that we are experiencing….

Hitler is an instrument of a power higher than himself…. Whatever good he possesses he owes to passive powers inside him, to feminine elements that receive the monstrous instigation of his endangered race….

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Kazantzakisby PETER BIEN Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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