kazantzakis world and art of nikos kazantzakis

The Cretan Glance: The World and Art of Nikos KazantzakisAuthor(s): Morton P. LevittReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2, Nikos Kazantzakis Special Number (1971 -1972), pp. 163-188Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831088 .Accessed: 16/01/2012 07:12

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MORTON P. LEVITT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

The Cretan Glance: The World and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis

"There is a kind of flame in Crete-let us call it'soul'-something more powerful than either life or death. There is pride, obstinacy, valor, and together with these something else inexpressible and im-

ponderable, something which makes you rejoice that you are a human being, and at the same time tremble." Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco.

IN AMERICA, as in Greece, the popular reputation of Nikos Kazantzakis is far greater than the critical. Little significant criticism of his work has appeared in English, yet the paperbound editions of several of his novels and the two films made from them-Dassin's He Who Must Die and Cacoyannis' Zorba the Greek, as well as the Broadway musical version of the latter-have reached increasingly wide audiences. The situation in Greece is still more perverse: the eleven American editions to date of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel have sold over eighty thousand copies, but in Greece, where the academic community has continually criti- cized the popular nature of Kazantzakis' art, the original edition of three hundred did not sell out when it first appeared in 1938. The irony would have pleased the poet; as Kimon Friar, who translated the epic, has said of the Odyssey, "The intellectuals of Athens cannot understand this; I give it to the boatmen and fishermen, and they have no trouble."'

1 Cited in an interview with Kimon Friar, July 18, 1966, in Athens. When the Odyssey was finally published, it was in a private edition paid for by Miss Josephine MacLeod. More recent Greek editions have sold well, however, particularly to young people. At the time of his death in 1957, Kazantzakis' works had been published in some thirty languages.

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If the intellectuals complained, it was because Kazantzakis wrote an extreme version of the folk tongue, the Demotiki, rather than the formal and scholarly Katharevousa; if the sailors rejoiced, it was because the vitality implicit in his choice of dialects captured so well what we call the popular imagination. For Kazantzakis, the greatest novelist of modern Greece and one of the foremost men of letters of an admirable Euro- pean generation, somehow retained a sense of identity with the common people of his own land that is translated in his books into an identification with all men. In this he clearly transcends Thomas Mann, with whom he is sometimes compared; he transcends even James Joyce, creator of the great common man; he is, in a way, unique. And this uniqueness develops because beneath his European culture, beneath even his Greek nationality, Kazantzakis was that most historically individual of beings, a Cretan. In leaving his homeland in his youth and returning to it only in his fiction and verse, in fusing its culture with the broader European civilization and thus creating a new and strange and sometimes terrifyingly beautiful hybrid, Kazantzakis was merely playing out the role of the Cretan artist.2 Like the great Renaissance painters from the island who spread their own version of Byzantine art to the Continent after the fall of Constantinople-the name adopted by one of them, El Greco, suggests the continuing strength of the Cretan influence -Kazantzakis, the self-exile, never escaped the force of his heritage. The Cretan influence-he called it "the Cretan glance"-is apparent throughout his canon, even in those books which seem in no way to be concerned with Crete: not only in Zorba the Greek and Freedom or Death, which are set on the island, or even in The Greek Passion, which deals with a similar historical situation; but also in Saint Francis, set entirely in Italy, the Odyssey, which moves throughout the Mediter- ranean to central Africa and the Antarctic, and The Last Temptation of Christ, whose events ostensibly take place in Biblical Palestine.

It was The Last Temptation which led the Greek Orthodox Arch- bishop of Athens to refuse burial to Kazantzakis within his province. And so the poet returned to Iraklion, the major city of Crete, the

2 "The theories which Kazantzakis took from Nietzsche, Bergson, William James-heroic pessimism, anti- rationalism, vitalism-are founded in the works of his leading contemporaries: D'Annunzio, Barres, Claudel and Peguy. But the currents of Western thought encountered in Kazantzakis a being who lived in a different historical time and in a country with a low level of civilization." (Pandelis Prevelakis, Nikos Kazantzakis and his Odyssey, trans. Philip Sherrard (Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 26.)

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WORLD AND ART OF KAZANTZAKIS

Meghalo Kastro of his childhood and of his fiction, to be given a legend- ary funeral. The story goes that as the coffin was being lowered into the grave on the Martinengo rampart overlooking the city, a huge man came down from the hills, a colossus out of one of Kazantzakis' books, and by himself performed the task. A photograph in the Historical Museum at Iraklion shows the coffin being handled by four men wearing traditional costumes-strong men, but not colossi, typical Cretan villagers. The legend persists, however, because it so precisely sums up the spirit of both Kazantzakis and his island homeland. This is the same spirit which informs Freedom or Death, his account of the Cretan Revolt of 1886. "The human beings in this book, the episodes, and the speech are all true," he wrote to a Scandinavian friend, "even if they appear incredible to people who were born in the light or half-light of Western civilization."3

The history of Crete is unlike that of any other Western nation, a long and virtually unbroken succession of foreign domination and unsuccessful revolts. It is said that from the early thirteenth century, when the island became part of Venice's commercial empire, to the end of the nineteenth, when her Turkish successors were finally driven out, each generation of Cretan men married, raised a son to continue the line and went off to the mountains to fight the invaders. The first uprising broke out in 1212, the year the Venetians came to power; during their occupation, which lasted until 1669, the population of the island declined from 500,000 to 200,000.4 Against the Turks, there were ten rebellions in the period between 1770 and 1897 alone; Western travelers to Crete

3 Letter to Borje Knos, Antibes, May 5, 1950. Cited in Helen Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on his Letters, trans. Amy Mims (Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 487.

4 Venetian power on Crete was effectively ended with the siege of Candia (Meghalo Kastro), one of the longest in history, which Byron called "Troy's rival" (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Book IV, Canto 14). Resentment against the Venetians was so strong that, after the Turkish invasion, "The Cretan militia refused to fight, and even the warlike Sphakiotes ... did little beyond cutting off a few Turkish stragglers. At last they yielded to the Turks, whose humane treatment of the Greek peasants throughout the island, combined with the unpop- ularity of Latin rule, frustrated the attempt to provoke a general rising of the Cretans against the invaders" (William Miller, Essays on the Latin Orient (Cambridge, 1921), pp. 194-5). Turkish rule, of course, eventually became much less humane, although it always allowed a certain freedom in the interior and, as the Venetians had done, a substantial measure of religious freedom. But the Turks were totally unconcerned with public works and allowed most of the Venetian projects to fall into disrepair. In all their harshness and poor adminis- tration, however, they never equalled the cruelty of the Venetians in putting down the rebellion of 1362: "the whole plateau of Lasithi was converted into a desert, the peasants were carried off and their cottages pulled down, and the loss of a foot and the confiscation of his cattle were pronounced to be the penalty of any farmer or herdsman who should dare to sow corn there or to use the spot for pasture. This cruel and ri- diculous order was obeyed to the letter; for nearly a century one of the most fertile districts of Crete was allowed to remain in a state of nature" (Miller, p. 185). Yet Venetian colonists were so drawn to the island that they invariably adopted its customs and often its religion; some of the most bloody uprisings against Venice were led by the aristocratic families which had been sent to colonize her wealthiest province. The Turks, on the

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166 MORTON P. LEVITT

during this period reported finding villages whose entire adult population was made up of widows.5 ?nosis finally came to Crete in 1913, seventy-five years after the mainland of Greece had achieved independ- ence and fifteen years after the Turks had been driven out-the final delay was caused by interference from the so-called Great Powers, who could not decide quite what to do with the persistent Cretans. Madame Hortense, the French prostitute of Zorba the Greek, speaks yearningly of the glorious days when she passed from admiral to admiral in the great international fleet which occupied the island. There really was a Mad- ame Hortense-Kazantzakis knew of her as Fatme, the old attendant at the Turkish baths in the town of Rethymnon6-just as there were those other whores, the Great Powers, whose diplomats sided with the Turks at the conference table and whose fleet fired several times on Cretan warriors.

The most recent foreign conquest of Crete took place in April 1941, when the 7th German Parachute Corps landed on the island. The elite troops suffered fearful losses-their nation's worst in the war to that date-many of them to untrained natives armed only with their traditional knives and with ancient guns hallowed in other battles.7 The resistance movement which developed during the occupation was perhaps the most widespread in Europe; it was so effective that the Germans were driven to retaliate by destroying dozens of villages, some of which

other hand, encouraged conversions-more for political and economic than for religious reasons-so that, aside from the Pashas and the army garrison, the entire Moslem population of the island was made up of Cretan converts. "Before the outbreaking of the Greek revolution, Crete was the worst governed province of the Turkish Empire; the local authorities were wholly unable to control the license of the Janissaries, who consisted solely of Cretan Mohammedans . . . the horrors and atrocities which were almost of daily occurrence in Crete, had hardly a single parallel throughout the whole extent of the Ottoman Empire" -Robert Pashley, Travels in Crete (Cambridge, 1837), pp. xxi-xxii.

5 Pashley, volume I, p. 121. In Freedom or Death, an old man passes through such a village and enjoins the survivors, "'Courage you women! Didn't the same thing happen to us in 1866? And yet there were a few little children left, and out of them the whole village was rerrewed. As long as there are still a man and a woman, Crete doesn't die!"' (p. 378).

6 She appears in Prevelakis' Chronique d'une Cite. 7 In one of the rare memoirs by a native member of a World War II resistance movement, George Psihoun-

dakis, from the village of Asi Gonia, speaks of the sanctity of such weapons: although some guns were sur- rendered to the Germans at the beginning of the occupation, "The good ones were hidden away as carefully as sacred relics-holy things to be used at the right time, when the signal of liberation should be given"-The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation (London, 1955), p. 313. "Ce sont surtout les populations de la Crete qui ont porte le poids de cette ultime bataille. Car tous les Cretois, jeunes et vieux, femmes et enfants, ont entrepris de defendre leur Tie, comme au temps des Romains, des Vdnitiens et des Turcs. Les parachutistes allemands ont ete leurs premieres victimes.... On estime que 80% des pertes allemandes parmi les troupes parachutees autour de La Canee sont dues a I'action de la population civile"-Raymond Matton, La Crete au cours des siecles (Athens, 1957), pp. 201-202. Some historians believe that the invasion would have failed if the Fifth Cretan Division had not been stranded on the mainland after the Allied evacuation from Greece.


had been burned down by the Venetians and Turks as well. Today, the portraits of the King and Queen, ubiquitous throughout the rest of Greece-at least until the fall of 1967-are often replaced in Crete by pictures of folk heroes, leaders of revolts against the Turks. Yet it was only on Crete that the recent military coup was resisted with armed force: it was not for the monarchy that the islanders fought, but for the pririciples of freedom which underlay their entire history. The new military government responded by preventing the planned celebration of the tenth anniversary of the death of Nikos Kazantzakis: the dictatorship recognized its enemy even in death.

Many of Greece's most vital men, in Renaissance times as well as our own, have been Cretans: statesmen as well as artists: Venizelos, the first President of modern Greece, as well as El Greco and Kazantzakis.8 Nearly all have been exiles, nearly all nourished by an ancient tradition of hardship and persecution, of an unrelenting if unsuccessful striving for freedom, a tradition which set them apart from other people and in which they gloried. As Kazantzakis put it, "Love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul's enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stal- wart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosanct of the old molds when they are unable to contain you any longer-these are the three great cries of Crete."9

II.

To most Westerners, Crete is the land of Minos, the glorious ancient civilization whose greatness and fall are celebrated in the myths of Daedalus and Theseus. Many Cretans, however, know of Knossos only as an attraction to foreign tourists; ancient Cretan civilization seems to have had no enduring influence on modern Crete. And yet one is sur- prised at times to find a huge storage jar in some mountain village exactly like a Minoan pithos, or to meet a young Cretan girl who looks like the daughter of one of the court ladies in Sir Arthur Evans' restored

8Eleutherios Venizelos, born in Canea in 1864, effected not only the union of Crete with Greece, but also the establishment of Greece as a modern nation. When an attempt was made in 1935 to restore the monarchy, he organized a futile series of uprisings, beginning, of course, on Crete. He died the following year, like all good Cretans, in exile. He had been excommunicated by the Archbishop of Athens for his republican attitudes, as Kazantzakis was very nearly excommunicated for his philosophical views.

9 Report to Greco, trans. Peter A. Bien (Simon and Schuster, 1965), pp. 440-1.

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frescoes. To Kazantzakis, there was a special glory in the ancient Minoans, a glory different from and perhaps greater than that of their mainland cousins, the Mycenaeans and their successors. "Crete served as the first bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa," he wrote. "Crete was the first place in a then totally dark Europe to become enlightened. And it was here too that the Greek soul accomplished its destined mis- sion: it reduced God to the scale of man. Here in Crete the monstrous immovable statues of Egypt or Assyria became small and graceful, with bodies that moved, mouths that smiled; the features and stature of God took on the features and stature of man. A new, original humanity full of agility, grace, and oriental luxury lived and played on the Cretan soil, a humanity which differed from the subsequent Greeks."10 This difference was somehow symbolized in the distinctions between Knossos and the palaces on the mainland: in Knossos, "one does not see the balanced geometric architecture of Greece. Reigning here are imagination, grace, and the free play of man's creative power. This palace grew and pro- liferated in the course of time, slowly, like a living organism, a tree. It was not built once and for all with a fixed, premeditated plan; it grew by additions, playing and harmonizing with the ever-renewed necessities of the times.... The intellect was useful, but as a servant, not a master."11 The master here was God, the spirit, the flame; this, too, is part of the Cretan glance.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Kazantzakis returned for a while to Crete, viewed the flying fish on the restored fresco in the queen's apartment at Knossos and thought of Christ, the ICHTHYS, who sought the same goal: "to transcend man's destiny and unite with God ... with absolute freedom.... What good fortune, I reflected, that Crete should have been perhaps the first place on earth to see the birth of this symbol of the soul fighting and dying for freedom! The flying fish -behold the soul of struggling, indomitable man! ... Shaken and disturbed, I reflected that it is here in this terrible moment of confrontation between the Cretan and the abyss that Crete's secret lies concealed."12 It was this secret that Kazantzakis' life and work were dedicated to uncovering; he found the answer as well as other forms of the question,

0 Greco, p. 151. n Greco, p. 149. 12 Greco, pp. 454-5.

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not only in union with the Minoans or with the great, anonymous rebels of his father's generation; he found it also in the artists of the Cretan Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it is no accident that his spiritual autobiography is a Report to Greco, to the man he called "grandfather," the greatest of his precursors.13

III.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the center of Byzantine culture shifted to Crete, one of the few Western outposts remaining in the Levant. For the next two centuries, until the Turkish conquest, it was through Crete that this culture was transmitted to Italy and the West. "In the revival of classical scholarship in the West," writes one scholar, "Cretan men of letters occupy a noteworthy position. Beginning in the early fifteenth century... a surprisingly large number of Cretan intellectuals spread over the Mediterranean area, from Syria in the East to as far as Spain in the West. As emigres to Western Europe, Cretans filled teaching positions in leading universities, copied manuscripts for patrons of virtually every Latin country, and were closely associated with the early development of the Greek press in Venice and else- where."14 But it was not only as transmitter of an inherited culture that Crete flourished; by the time Byzantine culture had passed through the island, it had been transformed into patterns uniquely Cretan. This is immediately apparent in Cretan religious art, which incorporates into the stylized Byzantine tradition certain naturalistic innovations of

13 Kazantzakis wrote to Borje Knos from Lugano on July 10, 1955: "Here I'm thinking of beginning the new

work, Letters to Greco. A kind of autobiography- I shall make a confession to my grandfather, El Greco. Yester-

day a wise friend came to see me, von der Steinen, and he told me that Petrarch had written Letters to Cicero, whom he loved very much. I was pleased. So my idea is not a personal one, but an ancient need of the creator to converse with a beloved dead person in whom he has confidence and to whom he can tell his grief" (Cited in Helen Kazantzakis, p. 534). Of the published work, Prevelakis-Kazantzakis' fellow Cretan and literary ex-

ecutor-has written, "Kazantzakis has here made a myth of his life.... He has confused the dates, put ideal order into his struggles, given harmony to his life. Imagination has given him whatever life denied him. The

Report is not an autobiography: it is the chronicle of the fight with the daemon, the mythical preparation for the

Odyssey. It is an ascent affording a magnificent view, the total conception of the world" (p. 167). 14 Deno John Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from

Byzantium to Western Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 41. Cf. Alexandre Embiricos, La Renaissance Cretois (Paris, 1960, p. 9): "Seule la Crete, colonie v6nitienne, vivant sous une domination civilisee, respire encore avec quelque liberte. Malgr6 bien de la misere et de I'oppression, on peut toujours y cultiver les arts et

les lettres. C'est donc de cette seule Tle que I'hellenisme a la possibilit6 de faire encore entendre sa voix." Also Kenneth M. Setton, "The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance," Proceedings of the American Philo-

sophical Society, c (1956): "... Cretan scholars deserve much credit in the general history of Greek humanism in

Italy.... The island of Crete occupies an almost unique position in the history of Italian classical scholarship" (pp. 58-59).

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Western art and thus creates some strikingly new forms.15 There were in the sixteenth century more than eight hundred frescoed churches and monasteries on the island, and Cretan painters worked throughout the mainland-on Mount Athos and the Meteora as well as in other major centers. Little of their work has survived: the harshness of Cretan life has always been conducive to the creation of art, but never to its preserva- tion. Perhaps this is one reason that so many Cretan artists have gone into exile. El Greco, the greatest of them, is said to have studied under Michael Damaskinos, the master of the Cretan school, and there is some evidence that he did not leave for Venice until he had mastered its technique. Certainly we can find in even his mature work this same strange combination of naturalism and stylization, of traditional patterns inspired by the insight of the creator.16

In literature, too, the most outstanding Cretan works represent a fusion of the two traditions, Greek and Italian. The masterpiece of the Cretan Renaissance, the Erot6kritos of Vincenzo Kornaro, takes a ster- eotypic Italian romance and transforms it into a work of both charm and originality. The action of the epic is set in Athens, but the Cretan na- tionalism of the poet is apparent throughout, and his language is the wonderfully inventive and easily recognizable Cretan dialect, which "deviates from Athenian Greek about as much as the speech of County Galway from the B.B.C."17 The Erot6kritos was the most popular work of Greek literature into modern times; there are still Cretan shepherds

15 "Mais ces peintres ont garde leur personnalite et ils I'ont imprimee a leurs oeuvres en Crete ils ont ajuste cet art nouveau a la tradition byzantine." "Car les meilleures fresques cretoises ne denotent pas une imitation servile des mod6les, mais, au contraire, les peintres, dans I'ex6cution de leurs oeuvres, font souvent preuve d'une grande originalite et d'un grand esprit createur"- K. D. Kalokyris, "La Peinture Murale Byzantine de I'lle de Crete," Kritika Hronika, viii (1954), pp. 396 and 390.

16 "Dans sa vie, dans son nom, dans les livres, dans sa technique, dans ses oeuvres, on trouve une permanence sublime ou un souvenir stable et actif du monde hell6nique, de sa patrie, de sa culture et de son esprit. On dirait qu'il s'agit de la nostalgie persistante de la patrie, telle cette d'Ulysse errant ou celle des grecs de la diaspore qui vivent a I'etranger.... Avec une noble fiert6 et une admiration de la patrie hell6nique il souligne continuelle- ment qu'il est un Cretois de Candie" (Sebastien Cirac, "L'Hellenisme de Dominique Theotokopoulos-Cr6tois ou Grec," Kritika Hronika, xv-xvi (1961-2), Part II, pp. 215-6). Seeing an El Greco portrait of a saint in the National Gallery in London, George Seferis was convinced "that the model for this picture must have been a Cretan boatman." And two brush strokes on the shoulder, his companion added, are "like Cretan fifteen-sylla- ble lines."-Seferis, On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism (Boston, 1966), pp. 95, 166.

17 Patrick Leigh Fermor, introduction to The Cretan Runner, p. 22. Earlier travelers to Crete also commented on the uniqueness of the Cretan dialect. In 1837, the Englishman Robert Pashley observed with surprise, "Al- though I thought myself sufficiently acquainted with modern Greek when I landed in Crete, yet I discovered, the very first time I spoke with a Cretan peasant, that I was still at a great distance from a knowledge of his language; and so numerous are its peculiarities that, for some weeks, I had to spend much of my time in endeavouring to render myself familiar with them" -Travels in Crete, p. 11.

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who can recite from memory its more than ten thousand verses.18 Its dialect might well have become the national language of Greece if it had not been for the Turkish conquest-much to the displeasure, no doubt, of Greek literary historians, who have for years scorned it for its popular idiom and appeal. The sophisticated freedom of Kazantzakis' language clearly derives from the inventiveness of the Cretan dialect: his scholarly detractors claim that he invented new words and new patterns at will-that he wrote in the maliarf, the most extreme form of the demotic, for its own sake and not for any literary reason-but he seems to have done no more than follow his native tradition. Kornaro's national epic has had a profound effect also on the local folk idiom, for the vast and ever-growing body of Cretan folk song often refers directly to it or uses it as a model. The subject matter of most of these songs, however, comes not from the Italian romance tradition but from rebellions first against the Venetians and later against the Turks; there is even a substantial body of songs which grew out of the World War II resistance, and one suspects that an anti-junta group is even now being formed.19

This same indigenous combination of Western forms and ideas with the nationalistic spirit of Crete, of modern views of the nature of man

18 The Erot6kritos "has remained the favourite reading of the Greek people for two hundred years.... It is only since the [First World] War with the multiplication of newspapers and the massed entertainments of industrial life that its popularity has begun to wane.... And all the time it has been monotonously insulted by the historians of Greek literature who, quite apart from the question of its uncongenial [i.e., Demotic] language, have felt for it something of the jealous contempt which the highbrow reserves for the best seller"-John Mavrogor- dato, The Erotbkritos (London, 1929), pp. 1-2. For a discussion of its borrowings from Western literatures, see Gareth Morgan, "French and Italian Elements in the Erot6kritos," Kritika Hronika, vii (1953), pp. 201-228. Also Embiricos (p. 132): "C'est precisement la comparaison des textes, qui nous a fait comprendre A quel point I'art des ecrivains cretois du xviie si6cle etait conscient et reflechi; combien ils s'entendaient a modifier, a ameliorer, a perfectionner I'ouvrage qui les avait inspires; a insuffler des sentiments nouveaux a une intrigue d'emprunt; a adapter au genie de la langue grecque des beautes qu'ils puisaient ailleurs; a transformer en valeurs propre- ment cretoises, populaires-et souvent 'actuelles'-les inventions et trouvailles d'une litterature concue par des auteurs ferus d'antiquit6 et d'humanisme...." Prevelakis, the foremost living Cretan artist, adds that the epic, "both as a spiritual climate and as a poetic form, is still alive in Crete. The Erot6kritos... is still known by heart on the island. Shepherds on the mountains console themselves in their solitude by reciting hundreds of its verses. The same is true of lesser-known poems like the Rimada of Sachlikis, Daskaloyiannis' little epic and the song of Alidakis, the Cretan Girl of Hadjimichales Yannaris, the former warrior who recounted his own exploits in song. I myself remember a coffeehouse keeper in Rethymnon, called Klados, who used to gather his fellow soldiers together each evening and relate in endless couplets their common sufferings after the Smyrna disaster" (Kazantzakis and his Odyssey, pp. 52-3).

As for the Erot6kritos itself, "C'est une oeuvre remarquable par I'analyse psychologique profonde, temoignant d'une grande experience de la vie, par la beaute des images et des comparaisons poetiques et par le souffle de lyrisme qui le parcourt d'un bout a I'autre. Sa langue, tres proche du parler populaire, mais savamment elaboree, est pleine d'harmonie et d'une richesse extraordinaire. Kornaros, dont I'ouvrage a connu une diffusion et une reputation sans egale chez le peuple grec, est certainement le plus grand po6te de la Grece moderne jusqu'A Denys Solomos"-Matton, p. 167. Other major works of the Cretan Renaissance include the plays Erophile, The Sacrifice of Abraham and Gyparis. 19 "Cretan oral poetry... is rich in illustrative material for Homer. The persistence in Crete of the heroic age into the present, the geographic isolation of villages in the mountains of Sphakia, the recitation of old poems...

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MORTON P. LEVITT

and the universe with the Cretan dialect and with local legend, arises in the fiction and verse of the noblest of modern Cretan masters. One can find echoes of the Erot6kritos in Kazantzakis' Odyssey, and the famous folk piece "The Song of Dhaskaloyannis," which celebrates an eighteenth-century rebellion against the Turks, provides character and incident for his Freedom or Death. The mythopoeic quality of Cretan folk art resounds throughout Kazantzakis' art: his view of man is at once naturalistic and heroic: his heroes are many-faceted, capable of great cruelty and injustice as well as great flights of spirit; but there are no relatives and neighbors to betray them, no blood feuds or jealousies to divide their followers, no Cretan converts to Islam to outdo their Turkish oppressors. In the mythmaking of Kazantzakis, a process which almost totally ignores the baser aspects of his country's history, only noble pallikaria are called "captain"-there are no pretenders to the island's most honored title; old sea captains, pirates most of them but patriots as well, abound in his books-although the last Cretan pirates died out with the start of Turkish rule; and the most noble acts of Cretan history somehow accrue to his heroes-it is the brother of Captain Mihalis in Freedom or Death who blows up the monastery of Arkadi to save it from the Turks and not, as legend has it, the abbot. And yet, in the strange land that is Crete, a land as close to Asia and Africa as it is to Europe, these are not distortions at all, but amplifications that perfectly reflect the spirit of the people. And it is this spirit which distinguishes the art of Kazantzakis from that of all his contemporaries. Even his most derivative work, the philosophical essay which he called Spiritual Exer- cises, is somehow transformed by this spirit into a unique and chal- lenging statement of faith. In it can be found the major themes and sym- bols of Kazantzakis' life and art.

IV.

The alternate title of this work, Salvatores Dies-translated by Kimon

and the creation of new ones ... at social and religious festivals..., the absence in their heroic poems of super- natural or shamanistic elements and the presence in them of a humanistic epic mentality, all make the Cretan poems an interesting laboratory"-James A. Notopoulos, "Homer and Cretan Heroic Poetry: A Study in Com- parative Oral Poetry," American Journal of Philogy, Ixxiii (1952), pp. 228-229. The scholarly collecting of Cretan folk songs goes back at least to Pashley and has become an active occupation in modern times. See e.g., J. H. Freese, A Short Popular History of Crete (London, 1913) and Michael Llewellyn Smith, The Great Island (London, 1965).

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Friar as the Saviors of God-suggests its metaphysical emphasis;20 but Friar, who so ably translated Kazantzakis' verse Odyssey, agreed to work on this text only because he felt that it was also great poetry. Its poetry is apparent in its language of personal and spiritual confession; in the vivid dream imagery which permeates the work; above all, in the author's strikingly original conception of the relationship between man and God, a conception which recalls the man-size deities of Minoan art.

The form and function of the Spiritual Exercises are the same: the ascent to God and beyond. Just as the reader moves through a series of steps-The Preparation, The March, The Vision and The Action-up to the peak of The Silence, so the soul of man must climb to perilous heights, must lean out over the Abyss and confront terrifying truths: God is as dependent upon man as man is upon Him; to save himself, man must first save God; the fight is unequal, the results predestined: neither man nor God nor the two fighting together can save themselves. Know- ing this but continuing to struggle, man discovers his dignity, becomes himself a kind of God.

In the first step, The Preparation, there are three duties: to see boundaries, to reject boundaries, to become free of hope as well as of fear; only thus can man ready himself for the march up to God. On The March itself, he moves from the ego, to the race, to all mankind and finally to the earth: from an awareness of self to a recognition that the individual is also one of a race of men, with ancestors and descendants; from a further acknowledgment that both he and his race are but parts of a greater humanity to a final discovery that mankind, too, is united with all the other creatures of the earth in a single entity. This is no proper pantheistic insight, but a "dread vision" (p. 88).21 The earth is no nourishing mother, but a "beast that eats, begets, moves, remembers. She hungers, she devours her children-plants, animals, men, thoughts -she grinds them in her dark jaws, passes them through her body once more, then casts them again into the soil" (p. 82).

It is at this point that the physical ascent begins, as the visionary perceives Job-like, Christ-like man becoming God, panting, struggling,

20 The title of the original edition, in 1927, was Salvatores Dei and the subtitle Askit(ki, or "Asceticism." The order of titles was reversed in the revised edition of 1945, and then again-by Friar, but with the author's ap- proval-for the first American edition.

21 All page references are to The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises (Simon and Schuster, 1960).

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clawing his way up the mountain to the peak: "Difficult, dreadful, unending ascension!" (p. 93). Rising in a kind of Darwinian process from the plants to the animals to man and beyond, God creates not Adam, but Himself. Then this stubborn, beast-like, blood-splattered God aban- dons the plants, "encamp[s] in [the] loins" of the animals and finally "struggle[s] to escape beyond us [too], to cast us off with plants and animals, and to leap farther. . . ," to reach, in short, the Abyss (pp. 89-90).

Living in a new age, Kazantzakis devises a vision of God different from those of earlier ages, for they have now lost all meaning and rele- vance. Man today serves God by going to His aid in His unending struggle for survival. If God falls, man falls with Him; if He is victorious, man is saved. But this Old Testament deity can be defeated. And so men must band together out of mutual love and responsibility and sacrifice in order to fight God's fight, in order to destroy and purify the old world by fire and to establish the new world which may rise from its ashes. "Set fire! This is our great duty today amid such immoral and hopeless chaos.... Sow fire to purify the earth! Let a more dreadful abyss open up between good and evil, let injustice increase, let Hunger descend to thresh our bowels, for we may not otherwise be saved.... For it is only One who struggles at the far end of earth and sky. And if He goes lost, it is we who must bear the responsibility. If He goes lost, then we go lost" (pp. 113, 115).

This heretical vision perceives a divinity with dramatic possibilities: it is as if Milton's Satan really could defeat his eternal adversary. The vision is the result of Kazantzakis' life-long effort to reconcile the uni- versals of Christianity with the ideals and rhetoric of Marxism, to com- bine the clear, unassuming simplicity of Buddha with the Nietzschean views of the ubermensch and the death of God with the elan vital of Bergson; and its images are those of all of his works: the clawing ascent, the fire of the human soul, the abyss which it confronts and flies over as a bird. "The soul of man is a flame," he writes, "a bird of fire that leaps from bough to bough, from head to head, and that shouts,... Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of this life?... And a fire within me leaps up to answer: 'Fire will surely come one day to purify the earth. Fire will surely come one day to obliterate the earth. This is the Second Coming.... Fire is the first and final mask of my God. We dance and weep between two enormous pyres.'... This ultimate stage of our spiritual exercise is called Silence." Leaning out over the Abyss, the man who has reached the peak of Silence sings a

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"profound and magical incantation" of belief in God in all His historical guises, of belief in the man who has climbed to His rescue, of belief in the ultimate unreality of the existence of both man and God:

BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO HEAR AND RUSH TO FREE YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: "ONLY YOU AND I EXIST."

BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO FREE YOU AND BECOME UNITED WITH YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: "YOU AND I ARE ONE."

AND THRICE BLESSED BE THOSE WHO BEAR ON THEIR SHOUL- DERS AND DO NOT BUCKLE UNDER THIS GREAT, SUBLIME, AND TERRIFYING SECRET: THAT EVEN THIS ONE DOES NOT EXIST!

(pp. 127-9).

Knowing that they cannot win, but still struggling-struggling because they cannot win-the heroes of Kazantzakis confront themselves at the abyss and affirm the divinity of man and the painful beauty of life.

The Spiritual Exercises demonstrate dramatically the blending of Western and Cretan sources which characterizes Kazantzakis' fiction. The image of the ascent, for example, has roots in the Naturalistic novel and in the Marxist theme of the inevitable revolution, as well as in the perpetual Cretan struggle for freedom-and even perhaps in the often inaccessible mountains which cover so much of the island. The suggestion of inevitable failure derives similarly from the philosophical deter- minism of the late nineteenth century and from the history of Crete. But the continuation of the struggle, the confrontation at the abyss, is uniquely Kazantzakian, the product of his own experience and of the experience of his homeland. A student of Bergson who discovered Nietzsche with a shock of recognition, a frustrated reformer who admired the new Russian regime but tried to live himself according to Buddhist ideals, an unpretentious man who admired the masterful figures of history, Kazantzakis in his own life and work displayed the same dualities which characterize his fictional heroes. At one point, under the influence of Nietzsche and Bergson, he composed a series of terza rima cantos on the great men whom he called the Companions of the Odys- sey-among them Moses, Christ, Don Quixote, Dante and Lenin. If he admired these figures, it was not simply for their philosophical implica- tions, or because they were so different from himself- he knew without affectation the heroism of his own literary career-or even because they recalled the image of his father, the original Captain Mihalis. Like Odys- seus, like El Greco, each of them embodied what he called the Cretan

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Glance, that attitude of bravery with which man alone faces the abyss and prepares to play with life as the Cretan boys and girls once played with the bulls of Minos.

Whatever their ostensible nationalities, Kazantzakis' heroes are all Cretans, and their adversaries-whether they are called Turks, or Phari- sees, or Dominicans-represent the forces that have opposed Crete throughout its history, the same forces that eternally confronted God and man at the abyss. Torn between intellect and spirit, like Boss in Zorba the Greek; between the demands of patriotism and those of the flesh, like Captain Mihalis in Freedom or Death; between their desire for a normal life and their compulsion to martyrdom, like St. Francis, Jesus and Manolios in The Greek Passion, the Kazantzakis hero strives for unity and self-knowledge and rarely succeeds. His metaphysical conflict is played out in all the fiction against a backdrop that is at once naturalistic and symbolic, demonstrating both the sources of Kazan- tzakis' art and its uniqueness. It is in Freedom or Death, with its echoes of the Cretan past and of Kazantzakis' own childhood, that this conflict is most forcefully dramatized.

V.

In 1889, when Nikos Kazantzakis was not yet seven, the Christians in a village near Meghalo Kastro killed an important aga: the signal for another massacre. Barricaded in their home, surrounded by hostile neighbors and the local garrison, with the four gates to the walled city closed and guarded, he and his family watched through the night. "My mother, my sister, and I sat glued to one another, barricaded within our house. We heard the frenzied Turks in the street outside, cursing, threat- ening, breaking down doors, and slaughtering Christians. We heard dogs barking, the cries and death rales of the wounded, and a droning in the air as though an earthquake were in progress. My father stood in wait behind the door, his musket loaded. In his hand, I remember, he held an oblong stone which he called a whetstone. He was sharpening a long black-handled knife on it. We waited. 'If the Turks break down the door and enter,' he had told us, 'I plan to slaughter you myself before you fall into their hands.' My mother, sister, and I had all agreed. Now we were waiting."22 In the morning, before other Christians had

22 Report to Greco, p. 87.

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dared leave their homes, his father took him to pay obeisance to the bodies of the men hanged from the plane tree on the edge of the town square. In Freedom or Death, it is Captain Mihalis and his son Thrasaki who await the marauding Turks, and the lifting of the siege is a sign for them not of the eternal martyrdom of Crete, but of the necessity to rebel anew. And so they go to war in the mountains, where, months later and now fighting almost alone, Mihalis dies the futile heroic death that Kazantzakis' father may always have desired for himself.23 And Thra- saki will certainly become, perhaps unwittingly, a pallikar like his father and not, like Kazantzakis, a detested scribbler. So much did the writer change history, and yet many of the episodes and characters of Freedom or Death are unmistakably drawn from his own life.

The character of Kosmas, for example-the Europeanized nephew of Mihalis, a man of letters and a socialist, who returns to his homeland with a Russian-Jewish bride-is based loosely on Kazantzakis himself. When Kosmas is confronted by an image of his dead father demanding that he fulfill his heritage and fight for Crete's freedom, he is merely duplicating the experience of Kazantzakis' own father. This grandpar- ent, who dwarfed his titan-like son, is also recalled in the novel by the father of Captain Mihalis, a patriarchal figure who leaps unaided onto his horse even after his hundredth birthday. And Tityros, the ineffectual schoolmaster, youngest brother of Mihalis, is drawn from the author's first teacher, also named Tityros-"what cheese?"24 When Kosmas and his schoolmaster uncle shed their veneers of education and culture and become pallikaria, they seem to represent some sort of wish fulfillment for Kazantzakis, who felt as inferior to his father as the older man had felt to his.

23 "The last days of Kapetan Michales [in 1932] were not at all like the last days of the hero in Freedom or Death. The actual Kapetan Michales died in his own bed, in a state of euphoria familiar to doctors"-Helen Kazantzakis, p. 262. "The man-beast whom Kazantzakis had feared all his life and had regarded as deathless had collapsed. He had symbolized, while he lived, the roots, the original beast: the mud of which the son was destined to make spirit" - Prevelakis, p. 150. As the son himself wrote of his father, "The new novel on Crete will soon be ready. I am trying my utmost to resurrect my father. To pay back my debt in this way: by giving birth to him who gave me birth"- Letter to Borje Knos, Antibes, December 12, 1949; cited in Helen Kazantzakis, p. 485.

24 The name is a sign of his pretentiousness, derived from his use of the Kathar6vousa-tyr6s-instead of the Demotik(-tyr'. His real name was Papadakis. Other characters from Kazantzakis' childhood who appear in Freedom or Death include his Turkish playmate Emin6; Mr. Dimitr6s, who periodically wandered off into the mountains with only his umbrella for protection; the affected, French-trained Dr. Pericles; and the jealous wife of his uncle Nikolaki, whose personality merges with that of Tityros in the novel. Numerous incidents from this time are also reflected in the fiction: the Turks' vision of St. Minas on horseback during a massacre of Christians; the

unknowing guest who is welcomed in a house of mourning; the dying grandfather who still enjoys the sensuous

pleasures of life; and-from a later time-the meeting of the Cretan intellectual with the Jewish girl in the

European city.

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Freedom or Death demonstrates its Cretan roots in other ways as well, for its central plot appears to be derived from the most famous of Cretan folk songs, the eighteenth-century "Song of Dhaskaloyannis." Dhas- kaloyannis-literally "John the Teacher," a title of respect and not of his vocation-was the foremost citizen in the warlike and independent province of Sphakia, a descendant of the famed Kallerghis family of Venetian times. Lured by a promise of Russian aid-Catherine the Great had just declared war against Turkey and professed to be anxious to open a new front-he led his entire province into rebellion. This was in 1770, and the revolt failed when the promised Russian fleet failed to appear-although the eight hundred Sphakians held off twenty-five thousand Turkish regulars for several weeks; in Freedom or Death, Russian assistance is again promised and again disappoints.25 Dhas- kaloyannis continues to resist in the mountains despite demands from the Pasha that he surrender and a letter from his own brother seemingly endorsing the peace terms; Mihalis, too, fights on despite requests from Turks and Cretans alike-in the novel, the Cretan resignation is again expressed in a letter, this time from the Metropolitan, which is carried to Mihalis by Kosmas, the son of his eldest brother. It is at this point that Dhaskaloyannis suddenly walks into the Turkish camp and surrenders, still refusing to sign a truce and stoically accepting his torture and death; Mihalis, however, does not surrender-although, like his pred- ecessor, he refuses to escape-and instead dies charging the enemy. In the poem, a priest who originally opposed the revolt voluntarily submits with the rebel leader; in the novel, Kosmas, convinced of the need for capitulation until some more propitious time, nevertheless dies fighting alongside his uncle. "'Don't flinch, nephew,' said Captain Mihalis to Kosmas. 'There's no hope. Long live Crete.' 'You're right,'" answered the younger man. "'There's no hope. Long live Crete!"' (p. 432).26

25 William J. Stillmann, the American consul in Crete during the revolt of 1866-8, claimed that the Russians first encouraged the Cretans in order to embarrass their Turkish adversaries, but later used their influence with the Greek government to betray the Cretans-The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-7-8 (New York, 1874), pp. 99, 144-145, 151-153.

26 All page references are to the Simon and Schuster edition (New York, 1955), translated by Jonathan Griffin. On the advice of Kimon Friar, I have attempted to resolve some of the difficulties that Americans have in pro- nouncing Greek words by adding accent marks to them and spelling them phonetically. Thus, Michales and Mavrudes in Peter Bien's translation here become Mihalis and Mavroudhis (the dh representing a vocalized th sound). However, I have left untouched such Italianate names as Vincenzo Kornaro and such familiar Greek ones as Eleutherios Venizelos and Domenicos Theotocopulous. I am also indebted here to the assistance of Eleanora Marovitz of Kent State University and Kostas Myrsiades of West Chester State College.

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The events in both folk song and novel are epic, growing out of history and somehow surpassing it. Just as the song-the creation of a rimad6ros named Barba-Pantzelio-was an elaboration of several earlier versions of the same tale,27 so Kazantzakis' rendition intensifies the epic possibilities. Dhaskaloyannis is defeated only when one of the Sphakians betrays a secret mountain pass to the Turks;28 but Kosmas is able safely to follow the hidden passage to Mihalis' stronghold minutes before the final battle. And Dhaskaloyannis is something of a prideful fool as well as a brave warrior-he surrenders in order to get better peace terms and then stubbornly refuses to bargain; but Mihalis knows that his continued resistance belies the Turkish claim to the world that the Cretans have willingly stopped fighting. At the end, "A wild light haloed his face, which was filled with an inhuman joy. Was it pride, godlike defiance, or contempt of death? Or limitless love for Crete?" (p. 433). The making of myths, it is clear, did not die out in the eighteenth century.

The mythos of Freedom or Death provides a sense of historical continuity, a picture of Cretan life and customs that is meaningful to this day and a view of the relationship among man, God and nature that has a primitive force and immediacy. The framework of the novel is entirely naturalistic: animal imagery is applied to all the characters, and especially to Mihalis, the protagonist, who is described variously as a wild boar, a dragon, a lion, a bull and a minotaur, the descendant of "hairy ancestors out of the caves of Psiloritis" (p. 94). Various women emit a scent like animals in heat, and the men react to it as stallions surrounding a mare-the Circassian Emine moved half-naked to her window "and ardently stretched out her arms toward the Greek quarter.

27 In Kritika Hronika, a multi-lingual journal dedicated to Cretan affairs from Minoan times to the present, Cyril Mango traces the development of the Dhaskaloyannis legend from oral versions composed immediately after the revolt-in which he is seen more as a businessman frustrated by Turkish trade regulations than as a patriot-to the song written down in 1786 by Anaghn6stis Sephis, son of the priest Skordhilis, to the dictation of the cheese- maker Barba Pantzelio ("Quelques Remarques sur La Chanson de Daskaloyiannis," viii (1954), pp. 44-54).

28 Betrayal seems to have been an element common to nearly all the Cretan insurrections. In 1866, for example, the Sphakians themselves attacked other Cretans who were fighting against the Turks, "not for political reasons, nor for material gain, but simply out of spite, out of resentment against anyone else assuming revolu- tionary leadership, a privilege which the Sphakians chose to consider exclusively their own. It seems incredible now that such pettiness could ever have existed, yet in the history of Crete it crops up time and again"-Xan Fielding, The Stronghold: An Account of the Four Seasons in the White Mountains of Crete (London, 1953), p. 164. According to George Psihoundhakis, such incidents occurred as recently as the World War II resistance, when a special unit of Cretans was set up by Schubert, the Gestapo "Butcher of Crete"-The Cretan Runner, p. 173.

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She saw in the dark the eyebrows, beard and strong hands of Captain Mihalis, and whinnied like a mare" (p. 44). It is Nuri Bey's mare, co- quetting with Captain Mihalis in a kind of love play, which lures the Greek hero to the home of his Turkish counterpart, where he first sees the woman (p. 10). When Nuri dies, emasculated by the knife of Mihalis' brother Manusakas-Emine now calls him a mule (p. 204)- he asks only that the mare be killed over his grave, but the surviving Turks are unable to slaughter the beautiful animal. Later, Mihalis, dis- tracted from his duty to Crete by an ever-present vision of the Circas- sian woman, cuts her throat while she sleeps, thus fulfilling symbol- ically his blood brother's final wish. As an old Turkish landlord advises the Pasha, "'This Crete is a great savage beast. Let's not wake it up- it devours men!"' (p. 142).

All of nature, in fact, is anthropomorphic: the first spring air came to Crete in the night, "leaped over the fortress walls and, through the chinks of doors and windows, fell upon the women like a man and upon the men like a woman, allowing them no sleep. Malignant April came to Crete like a thief in the night" (p. 40). Man, too, is a force of nature-Mihalis, "like an earthquake" (p. 114), a "hard, knotty bough on the tree" (p. 421); old Sffakas, his father, "like a great oak tree" which has "breathed storms, suffered, triumphed, struggled, labored for a hundred years" and is still thirsty (p. 323); and Kosmas, in the rain, "like a rock, a Cretan rock. To the marrow of his spine he felt the joy of the rocks and the earth as they drank their fill" (p. 404). And the island itself seems to Mihalis to be "a living, warm creature with a speaking mouth and weeping eyes; a Crete that consisted not of rocks and clods and roots, but of thousands of forefathers who never died and who gathered, every Sunday, in the churches," bearing the banner on which "the undying Mother, bowed over it for years, had embroi- dered with their black and gray and snow-white hair the three undying words: FREEDOM OR DEATH" (p. 224).

The relationship among Crete, man and God-a God of nature-is similarly anthropomorphic, suggesting the dealings between the Chil- dren of Israel and the God of the Torah. The nature and animal images are thus more than mere naturalistic description, more than a means of characterizing the harshness of Cretan life, more even than a kind of Homeric simile;29 they become a part of the religious symbolism

29 Like Homer, Kazantzakis uses familiar materials for the purpose of literary comparison; attimes, his similes strongly suggest those of Homer, e.g., "Through the open door into the house Captain Polyxfghis saw the loom- that docile domestic creature with feet, legs, pedals, metal feathers, tongues and combs. Its delicate rigging of warp and woof was like that of a frigate under full sail" (p. 127).

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of the novel, offering a view not of man degraded by his naturalistic surroundings, but of man rising above them, ascending perhaps because of them, because there is no hope in the natural scheme of things.

Like the representative naturalistic hero, Captain Mihalis ends up not only dead, but dead in the gutter-shot through the mouth and head, his brains splattering the stones-and his fate seems as pre- ordained as that of Hurstwood or McTeague. "'Don't you know,"' says the Pasha, "'that a true Mussulman is never disturbed? For he knows that everything that happens in the world has already been written, and no one can strike it out"' (p. 156). He adds, responding to a choice offered him by the Metropolitan, "'No, not as I will, but as it is written by God!"' (p. 157). But Kosmas rejects this Turkish view: "'There's no such thing as fate,"' he cries. It was he who "'grasped [his wife] by the hand that evening, nobody else'" (p. 358). His uncle seems to agree, for he fights on in the mountains so that the oppressor cannot claim that Crete had "gone back under the yoke of her own free will" (p. 425). In the conflict between Turkish fatalism and Cretan free will, between a naturalistic and a heroic view of man, it is the latter which somehow wins out, so that man is ennobled by his apparent defeat and not degraded. This surprising victory, built on naturalistic foundations, arises out of the union within the narrative of the all-pervasive religious metaphor with the Marxist view of the nature of man, the Freudian interpretation of dreams and the Jungian collective unconscious: a modern, highly personal, Cretan form of a primitive Christianity.

"There are peoples and individuals who call to God with prayers and tears or a disciplined, reasonable self-control-or even curse Him. The Cretans called to Him with guns. They stood before God's door and fired rifle shots to make Him hear" (pp. 58-9). The Metropolitan believes that he has failed in his religious duties because he has not been a good patriot: how many of his predecessors, he asks, "'will take their place before the Incorruptible Judge, bearing in their hands the gear of martyrdom-knives, axes, whips and stakes. And I shall stand there with empty hands. O God, grant me to die for Thy honor and for the honor of Thy poor daughter, [Crete]"' (p. 147). Mihalis calls out to God in anger over the state of his people (p. 134); old Sifakas complains to God about the mortality of great heroes who should have been made immortal (pp. 325-6); Bertodhuilos, the guitar teacher from the mainland, speaks of "'the great Maestro, whom the

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unmusical call God"' (p. 119); and Efendina, the saintly Turkish mad- man, carries about in his brain the flames of God, "with their heat, thirst, dirt and God-filled delirium" (p. 89). It is Efendina who saves his Greek neighbors during the massacre by evoking a vision of St. Minas on horseback, the patron saint and protector of the city riding out to save his children (pp. 261-2). God is no distant abstraction to the people of Crete; He is immediate, a force to be encountered in each man's daily life. He speaks through the voice of the Prophet to Efendina (p. 93) and through dreams to his neighbors; He appears to them as the Old Testament deity appeared to Moses and to Abraham, both concretely and as a symbol. And He is joined by His New Testament counterpart, for Christ, crucified and yet to be resurrected, is the perfect symbol of martyred Crete.

At the Mass honoring St. Menas, the Metropolitan preaches of the oncoming Easter season: "'My children,' the old man said, 'now comes a great time of fasting, the sufferings of Christ are approaching; fear must dominate' Man, and he ought to direct his thoughts only to the blood which was shed upon the Cross. And yet, God forgive me! I speak of the sufferings of Christ, and I am thinking of Crete"' (p. 97). In his drawer, wrapped in white linen, the priest keeps a painting of the Cruci- fixion which he shows to a visitor. "'But,' said old Mavroudhfs, 'that's not Christ on the cross. I am a sinner, my God, it's a woman, wearing cartridges and silver pistols.' 'It is Crete, it is Crete,' said the Metro- politan in a voice stifled by emotion. '. . . Crete is nailed to the cross in the form of a tortured mother in black, whose blood runs down on the remains of her children'" (p. 150). Martyred like Christ, some day to be resurrected like Him,30 Crete lives through the years in a kind of perpetual Passion Week: "In the whole of Christendom there was no people that shared so deeply, so bloodily, in so special a way, in the sufferings of Christ as the Cretans during these decades. In their hearts

30 Mr. Idomeneas, who spends much of his time writing letters to European monarchs imploring aid for his fallen nation, envisions the arrival of a savior in a Crete free of Turks: "'Suddenly Saint Menas' Easter bells will start ringing loudly, and the Christians will run madly into the streets strewed with myrtle and laurel. Men and women will stream to the harbor, to greet the Greek king's son. As he steps from the ship, they will kiss one another and shout: "Crete is risen! Really risen again!"'" (p. 211). When Prince George of Greece arrived on Crete in 1898 to become High Commissioner, he received such a welcome. Eight years later, when it seemed that he was delaying enosis for his own personal gain, the Prince was driven out by Venizelos, a new savior. For a very different view of this incident, see Prince George's memoirs, in A. A. Pallis, ed., The Cretan Drama (New York, 1959).

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Christ and Crete were mingled, the sufferings of both were the same: the Jews crucified Christ and the Turks Crete. ... The Jews [of Meghalo Kastro] always bolted themselves in early during the sacred and danger- ous time of Passion Week" (p. 162). The central events of Freedom or Death take place in springtime, before Lent or at Easter.

There is even a sense in which Crete need not wait for freedom in order to be reborn, in which she is resurrected anew with each new generation. Looking at the grandsons gathered around him, old Sffakas, a patriarch out of the Old Testament, smiles. "Everything's in order, he thought, I have confidence. The old go under the earth and come again out of the earth. Made new. Crete is immortal" (p. 278). Later, just before his own death, he sends an order to the pregnant wife of his eldest grandson, "'Call him Sifakas, d'you hear? That's how the dead rise again!"' (p. 387). But there will be no easy rebirth for him, for Noemi miscarries-struck in the stomach by the specter of her husband's dead father (p. 420)-at almost the same instant that Kosmas himself is killed, his severed head thrown at the face of Mihalis, who raises it like a banner and rushes to his own death (p. 433). The symbolic union that might have come about through their son-the grand- child of a Russian rabbi and of the hero of Arkadi-is aborted; in this fertility cycle, death is as omnipresent as life. And so the body of Sffakas is carried round the village, and at each crossroads "the girls threw basil and marjoram onto the corpse, as if it were a picture of the Cru- cified One" (p. 401). And Mihalis calls out to his remaining men before the final Turkish attack, "'We who are dying are doing better than they who will live. For Crete doesn't need householders, she needs madmen like us. Such madmen make Crete immortal"' (p. 428). Most mad of all is Kosmas, whose death accomplishes no practical end but whose continued life would have served Noemi, his wife, his unborn son and Crete, his homeland. But he is much more than a Westernized Cretan: his coming after so many years has been an "annunciation" of his grandfather's death (p. 364); he is a Christ figure who must die in the autumn so that Crete can be reborn in the spring.31

This rebirth, of course, will be political, and it will presumably reflect

31 The novel opens with Captain Mihalis reading a letter and concluding, "He won't come (he understood) this Easter either.. ." (p. 3). We soon recognize that the letter is from Kosmas, but the momentary ambiguity is the first connection between him and Christ, the image of Cretan freedom.

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in some way the Marxist view of the regeneration of man through revolution. For Kosmas, like Kazantzakis, is a follower of Bergson and Nietzsche, a Marxist sympathizer who has been educated in Germany and traveled through Russia. The Metropolitan has faith in the continued Orthodoxy of the Russian Church and its people; Kosmas, however, believes in "a new godhead, a cruel, great-power one," that is, in science and the revolution of the masses (p. 357). But the Cretan revolution has few social or economic roots, or even-except in the broadest sense of the word-political ones. Its concept of freedom is in no way theoretical, but a vital force to be experienced sen- suously, one of the essential forces of life. And so, when Kosmas dies alongside his uncle, it is not because of any dialectical belief; his death is an inevitable and necessary act of his life. Marxism for him is not a cause of Cretan revolution, but a manifestation of it; he has found in this seemingly alien theology not a cause for dreaming of freedom, but an intellectualized, Western version of this ancient Cretan dream.32

All the residents of Meghalo Kastro dream, and their dreams are realistic rather than symbolic, deriving from the specific nature of their individual lives: the tavern keeper Vendusos dreams of the Virgin as a wine goddess (p. 84); Efendina, sanctified by his pilgrimage to Mecca, dreams of sinning on pork and wine (p. 44); young Thrasaki, son of the fiercest hero on the island, dreams of violence (p. 35); the Pasha, frustrated by Mihalis' fearlessness, dreams of combat between him and Suleiman the Arab, the Turkish champion (p. 113); and Mihalis dreams of Crete's freedom and of Emine (p. 83). When the Pasha awakes from a nightmare of an olive tree bearing "guns and cartridges and daggers and black headbands" instead of fruit (p. 154), the Metro- politan - like Joseph before Pharoah -i nterprets politically: "'The olive tree hung with weapons that you saw is Crete. You stood under the lightning-scorched tree, and your face darkened. Here your destiny begins to be troubled.... It is in your power to bring love to the island. God sent you the dream at the right moment!"' (pp. 156-7).

32 "1 am not a Marxist," Kazantzakis wrote Victor Serge, "first of all because the metaphysical sense is not sufficiently to the fore in me; I cannot content myself with hypersimplified affirmations and negations. Next, because I am not a man of action. If I were a man of action, Marxism would be very suitable for me and for our own time, a most rigorous and seminal rule of action. The only one."-Gottesgab, August 10, 1929; cited in Helen Kazantzakis, pp. 222-223. In his acceptance speech for the International Peace Prize in 1956, he declared, "During the first moments I hesitated, and it was finally only in the name of Crete, the island of my birth, that I allowed myself to accept this honor. She alone... having won peace so dearly, deserves a reward like this"-Helen Kazantzakis, p. 544.

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But not all dreams are such welcome visitors. To Mihalis, sleep is "a Turkish creature, a mad one" (p. 41), and dream a "demon" (p. 120) intent on "dishonoring" him (p. 159). He fights against the demonic intruder and warns his brother Manusakas, recently killed by Nuri Bey, not to bedevil him: "'Don't come into my sleep to accuse me and make me wild. I know my duty. Have no anxiety"' (p. 196). But the dead man's image does appear at night to his son Thodores, to reproach the youth for not seeking vengeance (pp. 213-4). It was a similar reproach from his dead father that had led Nuri to lie in wait for Manusakas: "His father now visited him in his sleep regularly. He did not speak and no longer even remained standing over him. He did not turn to look at him, but went past him with bare feet and long, dragging steps, in his rags. He went and yet was never out of sight; all night he was there with averted face, inexorably present" (p. 175). On the night after Nuri has decided on his revenge, "he fell into sweet, unbroken sleep. That night his father did not visit him" (p. 176).

But it is Kosmas, absent from his homeland for so many years, who is most haunted by the image of his long-dead father. As his ship reaches the harbor of Meghalo Kastro, he feels "that his father had struck roots within him that would not be destroyed. Abroad, he had often thought of him, and a trembling would come over him at these times. But never had he felt the dead man so near as at this moment- or so menacing" (p. 352). He walks through the narrow streets to his home "as in a dream" (p. 352), and that night, the first in many years in his parental home, he comes downstairs to sit in his father's place: "He wanted to challenge the dead man, to drive him from the house and courtyard to which he clung, and to bolt the door behind him so that he might never come back and harm his wife. Ancient dreads had awakened in him. It was in vain that in the land of the Franks he had tried to free his mind from them. His heart was still a dark cave full of specters" (p. 362). He hears the tread of the dead man climbing the stairs and stopping before Noemi's door at the same moment that she wakes from a nightmare (p. 363). For it is she who will have to live alone in this strange room, who will hesitate to shut her eyes for fear that she might dream, but who will nonetheless be found lying on the floor in a pool of blood, her child stillborn. "Did sleep overcome her?" Did she dream? "She did not know" (p. 420).

There is a dreamlike quality to much of this harshly realistic land- scape, and there is a sensitive core within each Cretan that responds

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profoundly to each dream. It may not be the footsteps of his dead father that Kosmas hears, or his blow that Noemi suffers, but some force within each of them makes the dead man seem very much alive. It may be an Oedipal impulse that is reawakened in Kosmas by his return to his father's home, or a memory of the pogrom in which her father died that recurs to Noemi; but this is irrelevant. For it is of Crete that men dream ultimately, and not of themselves, and this dream is really the same for all of them, the source of the dream imagery of Spritual Exer- cises, the dream of all Cretans through the centuries: Freedom or Death.

The persistence of their ancient customs into modern times, the long history of their suffering land that is part of every Cretan, the sameness of their dreams-all these suggest a continuity of Cretan experience that is suggestive of Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. It is not only that this experience has become archetypal; the same ancient specters that fill "the dark cave" of Kosmas' heart are active within his uncle: "These demons were savage voices; most of them were not human voices, but bestial ones, bellowing inside him as soon as the portcullises below opened, letting ancient images spring forth: a tiger, a wolf, a wild boar, and after them the hairy ancestors out of the caves of Psiloritis" (p. 94). Mihalis-"Captain Wildboar" to those who fear him-a figure out of the pre-human past of his people, is a creation of both his father and his father's father-Mad-Mihalis, who continually watched the coast for the Muscovite fleet and who carried on his shoulder the bow and arrows of his grandfather (p. 5). Kosmas, too, despite his European culture and sophistication, is the creature of his father, of the pallikar who blew up the monastery of Arkadi to save it and its defenders from the besieging Turks.33 He has gone to Mihalis' camp to convince his uncle to withdraw, "But Kosmas did not rise. Smeared with powder and blood, he was listening now to his heart, which had gone wild. In his breast his father, the terrible leader in battle, had awakened, and his grandfather, and Crete. This was not his first battle: for a thousand years he had been fighting, a thousand times he had been killed and had risen again" (p. 430).

If all of this seems to suggest a lack of free will, if the continuity of Cretan history into the present seems to deprive the living of the power

33 At one time the most beautiful of Cretan monasteries, the "rent Arkadion" celebrated by Swinburne was actually blown up by the Abbot in 1866. As recently as 1941, the monks were involved in fighting against German paratroopers. See the notes by Fielding and Fermor to The Cretan Runner, p. 209n.

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not to rebel-if the memory of Dhaskaloyannis and Arkadi, of the revolts of 1821 and 1866, of generations of martyrs, is as ever-present as the plane tree on the square and the Kule prison-the suggestion is misleading. For Mihalis and Kosmas do choose their fates. Just as old Sifakas learns the alphabet so that he can write before he dies- and virtually to die as he writes-the ages-old motto of Crete, so his son and grandson write their own slogans. "'Freedom or death,' [Mihalis] muttered, shaking his head fiercely. 'Freedom or death! O poor Cretans! "Freedom and death"-that's what I should have written on my banner. That's the true banner of every fighter: Freedom and death! Freedom and death!"' (p. 426). So he and Kosmas die, not as Nuri does or the Pasha will, because of external forces which control their fates, but as free men, the wielders of their own destinies.

In the end, it is this insight which most distinguishes Kazantzakis' life and art: in an age whose fictional characters become heroes only in spite of their insignificance-as Joyce's Leopold Bloom does-or because they acknowledge their insignificance in an insane world-as Mann's Hans Castorp does-his characters are heroic because they refuse to accept the fact of their insignificance: the Western sources are finally overwhelmed by the Cretan. All of this may seem hyperbolic to a Westerner-Kazantzakis himself "had judged his own art severely and had mistrusted his liking for color and ornamentation"34-but it does conform to the realities of Cretan life. Perhaps the history of their martyred nation should have taught them otherwise, but Kazantzakis' Cretans attest to the ultimate nobility of the man who will not be defeated by his surroundings, who will not be ruled by history or fate or even by God. Their lesson, the artist tells us, is universal. Captain Katsirmas, an ancient pirate, has come at his friend's call to be at the deathbed of Sffakas, who asks what he has learned in his long life. "'I've made voyages,"' he responds. "'I've seen the whole world. I've slept with women of all kinds, I've pushed far down into Africa, where the bread is toasted by the sun. I've been in great harbors and little ones, I've seen millions of black men, millions of yellow men- my eyes have brimmed over with them! At first I thought they all stank. I said: "Only Cretans smell good; and of the Cretans only the Chris- tians." But slowly, slowly, I got used to their stink. I found - I found that

34 Prevelakis, p. 123.

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we all smell good and stink in the same way. Curse us all!'" (p. 395). The Cretan experience is unique, and yet it is the experience of all men; it is precisely because he is so unique that Kazantzakis is so representative: he speaks not just for Crete, but for mankind. Like the "grandfather," his ancestor and townsman, to whom Report to Greco is addressed, Kazantzakis "inscribed [his] name wide and broad on [his] paintings, and below it, with magisterial pride, the title CRETAN."

Honor guard at Kazantzakis' burial spot at Iraklion, Crete, on the day of his funeral, November 5, 1957.

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