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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
During the years of the German Occupation (1941-4), Nikos Kazantzakis was confined to the island of Aegina. Unable to participate in the Resistance, he vowed (a) to re-enter politics as soon as the Germans left, and (b) to devote the years of enforced confinement to liberating himself from all his manuscripts. But the second part of the vow was not as selfish as it might seem, nor was it unrelated to the first. This is because the intellectual challenges which Kazantzakis set himself during the Occupation were almost all concerned with his country’s welfare. More specifically, they were an attempt to investigate, define, and evoke that elusive quality ‘Greekness’ in preparation for the time when he and his compatriots, once again free, would presumably be attempting to apply their self-knowledge to the everyday problems of reconstituting the nation’s political life.
1. Kazantzakis, Helen, Nikos Kazantzakis, a Biography Based on His Letters (New York, 1968), p. 417.Google Scholar
2. The investigation of Greekness took impetus from the death of Kostis Palamas on 27 February 1943, since this was perceived as a watershed in Greek cultural life. Various essays on Palamas became excuses for an investigation of what defines Greek civilization and what therefore ought to be the basis for a reconstructed Greece after the war. See in particular George Seferis’ ‘Kostis Palamas’, first delivered as a funeral oration on 10 March 1943, reprinted in 
3rd ed., I (Athens, 1974), 215-27. The same impetus accounts for his seminal essay on Makriyannis, which dates from 16 May 1943 (ibid., pp.228-63). The controversy over Kazantzakis’ Odyssey, precipitated by Basil Laourdas’ critique and aired in the pages of Nea Estia from August through November 1943, was really a debate about Greekness. But the discussion, though intensified in 1943, goes back to the Metaxas period, as is clear from Kazantzakis’ travel articles on the Morea (1937) and from Seferis’ ‘Dialogue on Poetry: What is Meant by Hellenism’ (1938-9).
3. ‘The Mellowed Nationalism of Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek’, Review of National Literatures, V (1974), 113-36.
4.
(Athens, 1965), p. 488.
5.
(Athens, 1965). The play was written in 1942.
6. The letter, dated Easter 1944, is cited in Theotokas, 
p. 400.
7. Ibid.
8. On the problem of land distribution in its larger context, see: Petropulos, J. A., Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, 1833-1943 (Princeton, 1968), pp. 107–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woodhouse, C. M., Capodistria (London, 1972), pp. 403–4 Google Scholar; Tsoucalas, C., The Greek Tragedy (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar
9. Personal communication, London, 4 March 1971. See Woodhouse’s Preface to Capodistria, p. vii: Aris condemned Kapodistrias ‘as a ruthless foreign tyrant who had corrupted Greece and deprived the Greek people of the independence for which they had fought. As I came to know Aris Veloukhiotis better, I became increasingly convinced that anyone whom he hated with such intensity, more man a century after his death, must be of sufficient interest to be worth study.’
10. ‘Kapodistrias’, 
31 March 1946; excerpts reprinted in Nea Estia, XXXIX (1946), 255.
11. Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923), p. 3.
12.
3rd ed., I, p. 256; On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism.
Warner, tr. Rex and Frangopoulos, Th. D. (London, 1966), p. 57
Google Scholar. On Makriyannis as inheritor of the popular tradition, see pp. 35–6 in the translated version; on ‘I’ versus ‘we’, see pp. 28–9, 57.
13.
(Athens, Galaxia, 1964), p. 318.
14. Page references to Kapodistrias are from Nikos Kazantzakis, 
(Athens, 1956).
15. Cf. 
p. 313.
16. Ibid., p. 237. Cited by Seferis, 
I, p. 2.58; On the Greek Style, p. 59.
17. Obviously, this ideological split was not unique to Greece. For an analysis of the broader situation in Europe as a whole, see Lukács, G., ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London, 1963). PP. 17–46.Google Scholar
18.
18 Sept. 1947, p. 2. As manifestations of existentialism, Varnalis cites not only Kazantzakis’ philosophical nihilism but Sikelianos’ Delphic idea, Tsatsos’ ‘mythologism’ and the surrealism of’the Clique’.
19. It would be interesting to compare Woodhouse’s analysis of the historical figure in his Capodistria, p. ix et passim. For Woodhouse, the mutually contradictory polarities synthesized by Kapodistrias are nationalism and internationalism.
20. Beckson, K. and Ganz, A., A Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms (New York, 1960), p. 119.Google Scholar
21.
, Nea Estia, XXXIV (1943), 1033.
22. Levin, H., The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington, 1969), p. xiii.Google Scholar
23. Here, Kazantzakis’ interpretation differs from that of Woodhouse, who, in analysing Kapodistrias’ affinities with tragic heroes, asserts that his ‘catastrophe was not due to fate or destiny, though he faced it with a philosophical fatalism based on his favourite maxim: “Let us do our duty, and Providence will do the rest”’ (p.x). Cf. p. 512: ‘[Capodistria’s] tragedy was that of a Shakespearian hero, at least as defined by A. C. Bradley: a good man raised to high estate by his own merits, and then utterly cast down by a combination of character and circumstance,’
24. See footnote 2, above.
25. ‘Burn Me to Ashes’, New York Herald Tribune, 20 Nov. 1963.
26. For a more extensive analysis, see: Bien, P., ‘Kazantzakis’ The Masterbuilder, with an additional note on Capodhistrias’, The Literary Review, XVIII (1975), 398–411.Google Scholar
27. I translate the title in this way, rather than ‘The Chief Mason’, because of the work’s obvious indebtedness to Ibsen.
28. See footnote 3, above. The article in question attempts to see Alexis Zorbas as a projection, in part, of Kazantzakis’ matured appreciation of his countrymen based on their endurance during the terrible first winter of the Occupation. In the novel, Zorbas replaces Stavridakis as the Boss’s ‘saint’; similarly, in Kazantzakis’ own life a mellowed, compassionate nationalism had replaced his Dragoumian nationalism of the 1910s, after two decades in which he had despised all forms of Greek nationalism.
29.
p.319;Woodhouse, pp.500-1.
30. This estimation of Kazantzakis is best seen in
Laourdas, B., 
, XXXIV(1943), 1337.Google Scholar
31.
Journey to Che Morea (New York, 1965), p. 171. Originally published in Kathimerini, 15 Dec. 1937. Reprinted in 
(Athens, 1965), p. 329. The English version mistranslates 
as ‘distillation of East and West’; thus my bracketed change.
32.
(Athens, 1955), p. 189.
33. See Orpheus’ song, with Odysseus’ continuation, III. 116, 371-9.
34. See the famous analogy of the jet of steam, Creative Evolution (London, 1911), pp. 260-1, and compare Kazantzakis’ essay ‘H. Bergson’, 
II (1912), 328.
35. ‘The Art of Poetry XIII: George Seferis’, Paris Review, Fall 1970, p. 60.
36. In addition to Laourdas’ high estimation (see footnote 30, above), some other testimony c. 1944-6 may be seen in: I. M. Panayiotopoulos, 
XXXVI (1944), 624; I. M. Panayiotopoulos, 
12 June 1945, p. 1; L. Koukoulas, 
30 Dec. 1946, p. 2.
37. The nomination came on 27 May 1946. See Tetrakosia Grommata, p. 389, also the announcement in Nea Estia, XXXIX (1946), 640.
38. Helen Kazantzakis, p. 437.
39. 28 March 1946, p. 1. But the reviewer admits that he was only able to stay for the first act.
40.
Alexiou, Elli, 
(Athens, 1966), p. 237.Google Scholar
41. Tsoucalas, The Greek Tragedy, p. 100.
42. Eudes, Dominique, Les Kapetanios: la guerre civile grecque de 1943 à 1949 (Paris, 1970), p. 346.Google Scholar
43. The anonymous reviewer for Kathimerini has already been mentioned. Fairness was also displayed in notices in: 
30 March 1946, p. 2 (‘Kazantzakis presents an arbitrary version of Kapodistrias, but poetry has a right to do this’); Akropolis, 31 March 1946, p. 2; Nea Estia, XXXIX (1946), 371 (Aim. Hourmouzios); and quintessentially in George Theotokas’ attempts to defend the production (footnote 47, below).
44. 27 March 1946, p. 1, reviewed by L. Koukoulas.
45. 31 March 1946, p. 2.
46.
(1946), 95-6.
47. 47. 
XXXIX (1946), 472.
48. Rizospastis, 21 June 1945, p. 2.
49.
Rizospastis, 22 June 1945, p. 1; 
30 june 1945, pp. 1-2.
50.
23june 1946, p. 1.
51.
30 June 1945, pp. 1-2.
52. Nea Estia, XXXIX (1946), 471-2.
53. Helen Kazantzakis, p. 438, claims contrariwise that Kapodistrias was withdrawn from the stage ‘at the very moment when it was beginning to play to a full house’.
54.
Rigas, P., 
1 Oct. 1946, p. 288
Google Scholar; also issue of 15 Oct. 1946, p. 311, and issue of 1 Nov. 1946, p. 327.
55.
15 June 1946, p. 216, laments the invasion of the Mousouri Theatre by a band of ‘nationalists’.
56. ‘H 28 
23 Sept. 1958, p. 1; reprinted in Theotokas, 
(Athens, 1961), pp. 118-23.
57. Petros Psiloritis [Nikos Kazantzakis], 
21 June 1910; reprinted in Nea Estia, LXIV (1958), 1563-4.
58. Helen Kazantzakis, p. 439. The letter is dated simply ‘Aegina, Spring 1946’; we know that Kazantzakis was on Aegina from 18 April until the end of May (Tetrakosia Grommata, p. 389).
59.
Vrettakos, N., 
(Athens, n.d. [1957], pp. 598–9
Google Scholar. Cf.
Thrilos, A. in Nea Estia, XXXIX (1946), 438–9.Google Scholar
60. See, for example, the Souliotissa’s speech on pp. 117-18, or the Old Man’s strong lines on the middle of p. 36.
