Biography
Nikos Kazantzakis was one of the most influential Greek writers of the twentieth century. Born in Heraklion, Crete, on 3 March 1883, when the island was still under Ottoman rule, he studied law at the University of Athens and philosophy in Paris, where he attended lectures by Henri Bergson. His early intellectual interests developed into a lifelong search for freedom, spiritual struggle and the meaning of human existence.
In 1911 he married the writer Galatea Alexiou; they divorced in 1926. In 1919 Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos appointed him Director General of the Ministry of Welfare and sent him to the Caucasus to help organize the repatriation of Greeks living there. He later worked as a journalist and travelled widely, reporting from Europe, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Spain, Japan and China. In 1945 he married Eleni Samiou, who remained his companion for the rest of his life.
Kazantzakis wrote novels, plays, poetry, travel books and philosophical works, and translated major works of world literature, including Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust. Among his best-known books are Zorba the Greek, Freedom or Death (also known as Captain Michalis), Christ Recrucified (published in English as The Greek Passion) and The Last Temptation of Christ. His spiritual autobiography, Report to Greco, was published after his death.
His work often provoked controversy. In 1953 the Greek Orthodox Church sought to prosecute him for sacrilege over passages in Captain Michalis and the whole of The Last Temptation. He was never excommunicated. In response to the Church’s condemnation, he wrote: “You gave me your curse, Holy Fathers. I give you a blessing: May your conscience be as clear as mine, and may you be as moral and religious as I am.”
In 1938 he completed The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, a vast poem of 33,333 lines that he had worked on for thirteen years. Kazantzakis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. After becoming ill on a trip to China, he died in Freiburg, Germany, on 26 October 1957. He was buried in Heraklion, where his grave bears the words: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
