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5.0 out of 5 stars
the spirit of solitude, May 22, 2008
Professor Peter Bien has worked for 50 years in Greek studies, translating Kazanzakis' work from modern Greek into English, and promoting the study of the modern Greek language("Greek Today: A Course in the Modern Language and Culture").
His "Kazantzakis, Politics of the Spirit" (V1- 1989, V2-2007) is his magnum opus. The book is a monumental exposition of the development of Kazantzakis' thought and its transposition into fictional works.
"Politics" is neither criticism nor biography, two forms which Bien skirts with intellectual discipline and tact. This does make a more cohesive and focused work, but at times the effect is to make the reader literally salivate for these two unsatisfied lines of thought. I suspect that Professor Bien did this, like a good teacher, to attract future would-be scholars to follow their own motivations in filling this gap.
For non-academic readers, "Politics" is a portal to one of the most rewarding expanded reading experiences a person can have in a lifetime. This assumes of course you read a good number of Kazantzakis' books, some 20 titles, novels, plays, dissertations, dialogues, spiritual tracts, and letters and published travelogues. The reading is generally easy, unlss you start thinking about the material, in which case its takes longer, much longer.
Suffice it to say that after you have read Kazantzakis and Bien, the cultural and political history of the entire first half of the twentieth century that you currently carry in your head will be re-written, or at least thoroughly annotated, according to your previous reading experiences. Especially revealing for American readers are the extreme bitterness and hatred of capitalism and bourgeois society Kazantzakis exuded all his life, and the irony of finding his greatest patron in the form of Max Schuster of Simon & Schuster in the United States, a country conspicuously absent from his entire oeuvre.
It was only on September 8, 1952, that Nikos Kazantzakis, then 69, met Schuster at the Hotel Carlton in Cannes, where Mr. Schuster was able to read from the English edition of John Lehman selections from "Zorba the Greek." Kazantzakis was destined to live only five more years, after a lifetime to journeying, writing, reversals and deprivations. As Helen Kazantzakis wrote in her "Biography": Ever since this initial meeting, Kazantzakis' work kept on appearing in America, book after book...We had never hoped for such understanding." "Zorba" appeared in 1953, followed by "The Greek Passion" (1954), "Freedom and Death" (1956, and "The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel" (1958).
In 1960, "The Last Temptation of Christ" appeared, translated by Peter Bien. Bien went on to translate "Saint Francis" in 1962, and "Report to Greco" in 1965, and write a Preface for the play Buddha (1982).
Though it can take the tone of a chain of written-out lectures, Bien's material depth (almost 800 pages) is staggering, 45 headings in Volume 1 and 29 Chapters in Volume 2. Bien holds fast to his purpose, producing a chronologically and intellectually unified work. Each section builds a part of Kazantzakis' thought and artistic development. Some chapters may seem tedious in their political detail (V2 5: Greek Politics). Others offer an intensity that is unavoidably gripping and rewarding (V2 28: St. Francis; V2 10-16: the period of confinment on the island of Aegina during WWII.
The two volumes are essentially one book. Volume 1 contains the only Chronology, and Volume 2 contains the only Preface, which reflects on the past readership of Kazantzakis, and so thoughts about the future. This alone deserves reproduction on the Amazon website, but the publishers have not seen fit to do this.
Bien likens Kazantzakis' image of himself as Shelley saw poets- as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." For me, Kazantzakis is well prefigured by Shelley in the Preface to his "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude" (1815). Though Kazantzakis was not exactly a "youth of uncorrupted feelings", he is "led forward by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self possessed. But the period arrives when those objects cease to suffice..."
While Shelley has his own character "blasted by disappointment", he still credits those who would follow such a course, however badly flawed. He summarizes what creative people experience in this back-handed comment about people who do nothing: "They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing in neither human joy nor mourning with human grief...they languish...because none feel with them, their common nature."
Among people who don't care, Shelley says "the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of the search [for their] communities, when [only after] the vacancy of their spirit makes itself felt."
This is the status of Kazantzakis today, and the general project of Peter Bien's book.
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