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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability, to divine which wind is urging all these waves of mankind upward. I bend over the age in which I live, that tiny, imperceptible arc of the vast circle, and struggle to attain a clear view of today’s duty. Perhaps this is the only way man can carry out something immortal within the ephemeral moment of his life: immortal because he collaborates with an immortal rhythm.
Report to Greco
The name of Nikos Kazantzakis continues to arouse controversy. Much of it, especially in Greece, is political in nature and revolves around the confusion concerning Kazantzakis’ relation to Marxism. The confusion arises because of the ways Kazantzakis’ activities and writings have been interpreted. For example, even before the latest military regime in Greece and while he was still alive, Kazantzakis was anathema to the royalists. Consecutive right wing governments, both before and after World War II, waged war against him and his books; he was called immoral, red, and a Bolshevik troublemaker. In the fall of 1924, in his native Crete, he was actually arrested. In the spring of 1928, in Athens, he was accused of being a Russian agent. Yet his books were banned in Russia—particularly those he wrote about that country—and the Greek Communist party refused to include him in its ranks, labelling him bourgeois, decadent and even fascist. In fact, his offer to join the communist controlled resistance in the 1940s was rejected. Such responses neidier prevented the International Peace Committee from offering him the Peace Award in Vienna in 1956 nor did it bar the Chinese communists from inviting him to the Peoples’ Republic of China as one of their ‘chosen Foreigners’ and, upon the occasion of his death in 1957, from praising him: ‘Kazantzakis was not only a great writer. He was actively interested in social and political issues. He was also a devotee of peace’. More recently, views about him have ranged from those in which he is considered an egomaniac, oblivious to the fate of others, a man whom ‘the really important things—political tyranny, social injustice, economic exploitation—interested … the least’, to those in which he is seen as an advocate of equality, peace and the cooperation of the world’s people, one who to the end of his career sided with the ‘ideas of genuine Democracy and Socialism’.
1. In a letter dated 18 December 1953 from Amsterdam, Kazantzakis complained to his intimate friend Pandelis Prevelakis that the Swedish Academy, responsible for the Nobel Prize, was being bombarded with letters by Greeks against him. In the same letter he wrote that a representative of the Greek intellectuals had told die Swedish king and members of the Academy that ‘I am a communist and corrupt Greek youth and that it would be a humiliation to Greece were my person honoured with the Nobel Prize’. 
ed.
Prevelakis, P. (Athens, 1965), p. 649.Google Scholar
2.
April 1928, p. 380.
3. From an article by
Sao, Emi in the People’s Daily, XXI (Peking, 1957)Google Scholar. Reprinted in Greek as ‘A Gentle Fighter’, 
Fall, 1958, 158-9.
4. See the incident related by Bien, P. in ‘Nikos Kazantzakis’, The Politics of Twentieth-Century. Novelists, ed. Panichas, G. (New York, 1971), pp. 137–8.Google Scholar
5.
Pouliopoulos, N. D., 
I (Athens, 1972), p. 17.Google Scholar
6.
p. 150.
7.
November 1907, reprinted in 
15 August 1958,12-13.
8.
(Athens, 1958), pp. 18-21.
9. Ibid., p. 39.
10. Ibid. p. 26.
11. Ibid. P .34.
12. Ibid. P. 194.
13. Ibid. p. 78.
14. Ibid. p. 258.
15. Ibid., p. 138.
16. Ibid., pp. 201-2
17. A translation of the ‘Apology’ is appended at the end of Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography, by Kazantzakis, Helen, trans, by Mims, Amy (New York, 1968), p. 566.Google Scholar
18. Ibid., p. 566.
19. Ibid., p. 568.
20. Ibid., p. 569.
21.
Kazantzakis, Nikos, 
5th ed. (Athens, 1969), p. 68
Google Scholar. It is important to note that Kazantzakis’ impressions of Russia were first published in 1926 in articles for the Athenian newspaper 
These articles were subsequently published in two volumes entitled 
Kazantzakis published the one volume edition entitled 
in 1928 soon after his return from his last trip to the Soviet Union.
22. Panait Istrati was a Greek-Rumanian writer who was introduced to the literary world of France by Romain Rolland as the ‘Gorki of the Balkans’ and who was loved by the European public for his stories about his own vagrant life. At the very height of his fame, we are told by Kazantzakis himself, ‘in one of his articles in L’Humanilè, full of indignation and disgust, he bade goodbye to Western Civilization, rotting in dishonour and injustice, and took refuge in a new land, where he could live and work … in Russia’. 
31 December 1927.
23. See
Kazantzakis’, Helen ‘Afterword’, Toda Raba (New York, 1964), p. 210
Google Scholar. For further details concerning the whole incident see
Vrettakos, N., ‘O 
(Adiens, 1960), pp. 140–1.Google Scholar
24. Prevelakis, P., Nikos Kazantzakis and His Odyssey: A Study of the Poet and the Poem, trans, by Sherrard, P. (New York, 1961), p. 136.Google Scholar
25. Both the deep temperamental differences between the two friends as well as Kazantzakis’ views about the world in general and Russia in particular—views of which we will speak later and which had a negative influence on Istrati—helped bring about the crisis and Istrati’s journey. See Kazantzakis’ letters of that period in 
Aspects of Kazantzakis’ discussions with Istrati on Russia and communism were dramatized in Toda Raba in the conversation between Geranos and Azad.
26. Nikos Kazantzakis and His Odyssey, Greek edition (Athens, 1958), p. 322, n. 245.
27. Kazantzakis, Nikos, Toda Raba, trans, by Mims, Amy (New York, 1964), p. 63 Google Scholar. Conceived on his second trip to Russia this book was first published in French in 1938.
28. Ibid., p. 120.
29. Ibid., p. 94.
30. Nikos Kazantzakis: a Biography, p. 135.
31. Toda Raba, p. 117.
32. Nikos Kazantzakis and His Odyssey, P. 160.
33.
p. 338.
34. Nikos Kazantzakis and His Odyssey, p. 129.
35. Toda Raba, p. 159.
36.
p. 156. We will have occasion to refer again to this essay. Written in Gottesgab in 1929, soon after his return from Russia, this document, together with the ‘Apology’, as Prevelakis himself does not fail to note, is indispensable for becoming acquainted with Kazantzakis’ position concerning Marxism.
37. Ibid., p. 154.
38. Ibid., p. 154.
39. Ibid., p. 154.
40. Ibid., p. 151.
41.
pp. 222-3.
42. Ibid., p. 224.
43. Ibid., p. 225.
44. Ibid., p. 221.
45. Engels, F., Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, ed. and trans, by Dutt, C. P. (New York, 1900), p. 12.Google Scholar
46.
pp. 218-19.
47. Ibid., p. 220.
48.
153.
49. Ibid., p. 154.
50. Ibid., p. 154.
51. 51. Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography, p. 567.
52.
p. 261.
53. Ibid., P.269.
54.
p. 155.
55. Ibid., p. 155.
56. Ibid., P,155.
57. Nikos Kazantzakis and His Odyssey, p. 160.
58.
ed.
Mitsotakis, K. (Athens, 1965), pp. 126–33.Google Scholar
59. From a speech on the BBC on 18 July 1946. Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography, p. 443.
60. Ibid., p. 443.
61. Pouliopoulos, op. cit., p. 20.
62. Kazantzakis, Nikos, The Greek Passion, trans, by Griffin, J. (New York, 1953). PP. 259–60.Google Scholar
63. Ibid., p. 422.
64. Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography, p. 530.
