Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer, journalist, politician, poet, and philosopher, born on 2 March 1883, according to the New Style date, in Kandiye, now Heraklion, on Crete. The island had not yet joined the modern Greek state and was still under Ottoman rule, a setting that placed questions of identity, faith, and freedom close to the beginning of his life. With origins in the village of Myrtia, Kazantzakis grew into one of the major figures of modern Greek literature. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in nine different years and remains the most translated Greek author worldwide.

His education moved between law, philosophy, and literature. From 1902 to 1906 he studied law at the University of Athens, completing a Juris Doctor thesis on Friedrich Nietzsche and the philosophy of right and the state. In 1907 he went to the Sorbonne to study philosophy, where Henri Bergson strongly influenced him. Kazantzakis later graduated with a reworked doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche. Bergson’s idea that understanding comes from intuition, personal experience, and rational thought helped shape themes that returned in Kazantzakis’s stories, characters, and personal philosophy.

Kazantzakis’s first published work was the 1906 narrative Serpent and Lily, signed with the pen name Karma Nirvami. He went on to write plays, travel books, memoirs, philosophical essays, and novels. His best-known fiction includes Zorba the Greek, published in 1946 as Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas, Christ Recrucified in 1948, Captain Michalis in 1950, translated as Freedom or Death, and The Last Temptation of Christ in 1955. His work became widely known in the English-speaking world through the films Zorba the Greek in 1964 and The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.

Travel and politics also formed him. In 1914 he met the writer Angelos Sikelianos, and together they spent two years visiting places where Greek Orthodox Christian culture flourished. From the 1920s onward Kazantzakis lived or stayed in Paris, Berlin, Italy, Russia, Spain, Cyprus, Aegina, Egypt, Mount Sinai, Czechoslovakia, Nice, China, and Japan. In Berlin he discovered communism and admired Vladimir Lenin, though he never became a committed communist. After seeing the rise of Joseph Stalin, he became disillusioned with Soviet-style communism, and his earlier nationalist beliefs gradually gave way to a more universal outlook.

During the Second World War, Kazantzakis was in Athens, where he and the philologist Ioannis Kakridis translated the Iliad. He also translated major works into Modern Greek, including the Divine Comedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Origin of Species, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. In 1945 he led a small party on the non-communist left and entered the Greek government as Minister without Portfolio, resigning the next year. In 1946 he became head of the UNESCO Bureau of Translations, then resigned in 1947 to concentrate on writing. Most of his literary output came in the final ten years of his life.

Kazantzakis died on 26 October 1957 in Freiburg im Breisgau, West Germany, at the age of 74, after illness following a last trip to China and Japan. He is buried at the Martinengo Bastion, the highest point of the Walls of Heraklion, looking out over the mountains and sea of Crete. His epitaph reads, “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Those spare words fit a writer drawn to struggle, belief, doubt, and human will, and they help explain why readers still return to him.