Maria Kazantzakis. Nikos left Crete as a young man to attend the Franciscan School of the Holy Cross in Naxos and in 1902 started to study law at the University of Athens for four years. From 1907 to 1909, Nikos studied philosophy at the College de France in Paris and was greatly influenced by the teachings of Henri Bergson.
On returning to Greece, he began translating works of philosophy. Besides writing, Nikos dedicated a lot of time to public service. In 1919 he was appointed Director General at the Greek Ministry of Public Welfare. He was responsible for feeding and eventually rescuing more than 150.000 Greek people who were trapped in the Caucasian region of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
Since then Nikos traveled widely around the world, visiting Berlin, Italy, Russia, Spain, Cyprus, Egypt, China, Japan and other countries. While in Berlin, Kazantzakis discovered communism and became an admirer of Lenin. In 1945, he became the leader of a small party on the noncommunist left and entered the Greek government as Minister without Portfolio. He however resigned the post in the following year. In 1947-48, he worked for UNESCO. In 1957, he lost the Nobel Prize for Literature to Albert Camus by one vote.
He passed away later that year in Freiburg, Germany and was buried on the wall surrounding the city of Heraklion, since the Orthodox Church ruled out his burial in a cemetery. However, Nikos Kazantzakis did not become truly well known until the 1964 release of the Michael Cacoyannis film Zorba the Greek based on a novel by him.
Literary Work:
Kazantzakis’s first published work was the 1906 narrative; Serpent and the Lilly which he signed with the pen name, Karma Nirvami. In 1909, he wrote a one-act play entitled Comedy. In 1910, after his studies in Paris, he wrote a tragedy, The Master Builder based on a popular Greek folkloric story. Kazantzakis began writing The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel in 1924.
He wrote it seven times before it was eventually published in 1938. He considered it to be his best and most important piece of work. His other important works include Zorba the Greek (1948), The Greek Passion (1948), Last Temptation of Christ (1951) and Saint Francis (1956).
Throughout his life, Kazantzakis was spiritually inclined, constantly looking for answers. His thirst for knowledge made him travel around the world meeting numerous people with different backgrounds and ideologies.
The influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on his work is very evident especially in his atheism and sympathy for the superman. At the same time however, he felt bound by religion to a certain degree and at a point stayed in a monastery for six months. Many Greek religious authorities condemned his work to which his only response was, “You gave me a curse, I give you a blessing: may your conscience be as clear as mine and may you be as moral and religious as I”.
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