Niko Kazantzakis. Greek storyteller, poet, and playwright whose novels are extremely popular. His first novel was The Serpent and the Lily and his first play Apunta el día .
Summary
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- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Another stage of his life
- 2 Death
- 2 Novelas by Kazantzakis
- 3 Phrases
- 4 Sources
Biographical synthesis
He was born in Heraklion, on February 18, 1883, into a peasant family, with a closed and uncommunicative father and affectionate mother.
He completed his primary and secondary studies in Greece. In 1902, he entered the University of Athens to study Law and in 1907 he obtained a literary award from the same university. Then he moved to Paris (France) to study philosophy, where he had Henri Bergson as a professor and collaborated with numerous Greek publications.
Another stage of his life
In 1911, after a stormy relationship, he met the writer Galatea Alexiou and they married, living in a small apartment in Athens. During the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), Nikos participated voluntarily, holding diplomatic positions. Some time later he moved and temporarily resided in Paris and Berlin (Germany), being a critical period in his life, where he was influenced by romanticism and Buddhism. In addition, he visited Italy and Russia (1925), where he was impressed with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and sympathized with communism, although he later disappointed him. In 1926 he returned to Greece and divorced his wife, beginning a series of trips that would take him to Spain (1932) and then to Cyprus, Egypt, Czechoslovakia and Nice among other destinations.
In 1945 he married Eleni Samiou, who accompanied him and gave him unconditional support for the rest of his life and a year later he edited the work Alexis Zorbas , which would make him known when it was adapted for the cinema in the film Zorba el Grecia . He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Society of Greek Writers in 1946.
Death
In 1957, Nikos Kazantzakis traveled to China and Japan, where his leukemia condition worsened and he was transferred to Freiburg (Germany), dying on October 26 of that same year. He had previously lost the Nobel Prize for Literature by one vote to Albert Camus. He later declared that Nikos deserved the award “a hundred times more than him.”
Kazantzakis novels
- Alexis Zorbas(1946): Represents for many the most perfect work of Kazantzakis. The main value of this great novel is its character as a fable with a main character who is the incarnation of the noblest vital impulse, a man who to the abstruse and far-reaching reflections of his young boss is able to respond: “Ah, boss, If you could dance all that you say so that I would understand. “
- Freedom or Death(1950): It tells in prose full of vigor an uprising against the Turkish rule in Crete that Kazantzakis knew in his childhood. The main character of the story, Captain Miguel, is based on the novelist’s own father and is a tormented character willing to immolate himself in the fight for freedom. Its tragic end makes us consider the meaning of an existence that forces us to choose between submission to a hateful tyranny and the sacrifice of our own life.
- Christ Crucified Again(1954): In this masterful novel, the description of rural life and the portraits of the protagonists serve as the basis for developing a symbolic conflict that reveals the universal struggle for justice.
- The Last Temptation of Christ(1955): It is an attempt to explore the human being who, beyond his legend, could be Jesus of Nazareth. He is presented as a good man caught in a dilemma between the joys and pains of a normal life and the sacrifice for his fellow men. The path of commitment that he chooses leads him to be vindicated by his followers as a god, when that had never been his intention.
- The Poor of God(1956): The novel is unforgettable because of the portrait it draws of the madman in Christ, the same despiser of the world that we find in other of Kazantzakis’s novels, but here with the particular features of the saint: his passion for poverty, his sympathy and his love for all living beings.
Phrases
- Beauty is ruthless. You do not look at her, she looks at you and does not forgive.
- The gates of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.
- Be simple and good! Love men, love animals and plants. Love nature; do not violate it!
- Time is not a field that is measured by cubits; it is not a sea that is measured by miles; it is the beat of a heart.
- People need a little madness, otherwise they never dare to cut the rope and break free
- To succeed, we must first believe that we can.
