Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis was the writer who brought modern Greek literature to the world — the novelist whose Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ became international bestsellers, whose epic poem rivalled Homer in ambition, and whose restless philosophical hunger drove him across continents, ideologies, and spiritual traditions in a lifelong attempt to reconcile the competing demands of body and soul, action and contemplation, earth and heaven. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, losing by a single vote in 1957 to Albert Camus, who declared publicly that Kazantzakis deserved the prize “a hundred times more” than he did.

Crete and Becoming

Kazantzakis was born in 1883 in Heraklion, Crete, then still under Ottoman rule. The Cretan struggle for independence from the Ottomans — which culminated in union with Greece in 1913 — shaped his imagination permanently. The figure of the Cretan warrior, simultaneously brutal and free, passionate and doomed, recurs throughout his fiction. His father, Michail Kazantzakis, was a farmer and livestock dealer of fierce temperament — a physical, inarticulate man whom the bookish Nikos both feared and admired, and who became the prototype for the vital, earthy characters in his novels.

He studied law at the University of Athens and philosophy in Paris under Henri Bergson, whose concept of the élan vital — the creative force driving all life forward — became the philosophical foundation of his work. He also absorbed Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch and the ecstatic nihilism of Nietzsche’s later writings. These two influences — Bergson’s vitalist optimism and Nietzsche’s tragic affirmation — fused in Kazantzakis with the mysticism of Orthodox Christianity and with the materialist dialectic of Marx (he visited the Soviet Union three times and briefly flirted with communism) to produce a philosophical vision unlike any other in modern literature.

Zorba the Greek

Zorba the Greek (Alexis Zorbas, 1946) was Kazantzakis’s most popular novel. It told the story of a cerebral, bookish narrator who hires a Macedonian laborer named Alexis Zorba to help him operate a lignite mine on Crete, and who is gradually transformed by Zorba’s ferocious appetite for life — his dancing, his eating, his womanising, his refusal to be governed by logic or caution. Zorba was based on a real person, Georgios Zorbas, whom Kazantzakis had met in 1917, and the novel was Kazantzakis’s most accessible treatment of the tension between the contemplative and the active life. Michael Cacoyannis’s 1964 film adaptation, starring Anthony Quinn, made Zorba one of the iconic literary characters of the twentieth century.

The Last Temptation of Christ

The Last Temptation of Christ (1955) reimagined the life of Jesus as the story of a man tormented by the knowledge that he is the Son of God, who resists his divine mission and longs for the ordinary human life of marriage, fatherhood, and peaceful death. On the cross, he is offered a final “temptation” — a vision of the life he might have lived — and must choose between human happiness and divine sacrifice. The novel was placed on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books and provoked the Greek Orthodox Church to excommunicate Kazantzakis. Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film adaptation reignited the controversy, but the novel itself — whatever its theological provocations — is one of the most psychologically penetrating portrayals of religious vocation in modern fiction.

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

Kazantzakis spent over a decade composing The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938), an epic poem of 33,333 lines (the same number as Dante’s Divine Comedy) in which he continued the story of Odysseus beyond Homer — sending him on new voyages through Egypt, Africa, and the frozen South, through philosophical encounters with Buddha, Christ, and Lenin, toward a final dissolution of the self in the cosmic void. The poem was written in a deliberately archaic demotic Greek enriched with dialect words from across the Greek-speaking world, and it consumed more of Kazantzakis’s creative energy than any other single work. It remains more admired than read, but those who have engaged with it in Kimon Friar’s magisterial English translation (1958) recognise it as one of the great modernist long poems.

Other Works and Travel

The Greek Passion (Christ Recrucified, 1954) transposed the Passion of Christ onto a Greek village under Ottoman occupation, where villagers assigned to play roles in a Passion play gradually become the characters they are enacting. Freedom or Death (Captain Michalis, 1953) was an historical novel about the 1889 Cretan uprising, based in part on Kazantzakis’s own father. The Fratricides (1964) depicted the Greek Civil War. Report to Greco (1961), published posthumously, was a spiritual autobiography structured as a letter to his ancestor El Greco — a magnificent summing-up of his philosophical and artistic journey.

Kazantzakis was also one of the twentieth century’s great travel writers. His journeys through Spain, Italy, Egypt, England, Japan, and China produced a series of travel books — Travels in Greece, Spain, England: A Travel Journal — that are as much philosophical meditation as geographical description. He also wrote a study of St. Francis of Assisi, God’s Pauper (1956), that treated Francis as a supreme example of the spirit’s struggle to transcend the flesh.

Legacy and Reputation

Kazantzakis died in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany. His epitaph, which he composed himself, reads: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” The line encapsulates his philosophical vision — the idea that true freedom comes only from the abandonment of hope and fear, from the embrace of life’s struggle for its own sake.

His reputation remains paradoxical. In Greece, he is revered as the national novelist but also criticised by purists for his idiosyncratic demotic Greek and by the Orthodox Church for his heterodox theology. Internationally, he is known primarily through Zorba and The Last Temptation, which has led to a somewhat reductive understanding of his range. The epic poem, the travel writing, and the philosophical novels deserve wider attention. At his best, Kazantzakis achieved what few novelists have attempted — a fiction that is simultaneously visceral and metaphysical, rooted in the Cretan earth and reaching toward the absolute.