The Cretan Glance

Report to Greco, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Simon & Schuster, $7.50 The Fratricides, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Simon & Schuster, $5 The Sun of Death, by Pandelis Pre-velakis. Simon & Schuster, $4.50 On the twelfth of November 1926, a Friday, in Herakleion in Crete, the seven teen-year-old Pandelis Prevelakis, just graduated from high school, knocked on a door above a dressmaker’s shop. He had come to meet the greatest Greek writer of the twentieth century. Above the door was a death mask of Nietzsche; on the wall, a severe madonna by the icon painter Photis Kondoglou. The room was as bare as a saint’s cell, and the tall Nikos Kazantzakis, part Arabic, part Cretan, a sensual ascetic who looked to Christ, Buddha, Lenin and Homer for his spiritual welfare, rose and welcomed the schoolboy who was to become his closest friend and the inheritor of his mastery of the novel. Kazantzakis was then fortythree, a lifetime of travel, study and action (e.g., the repatriation of the Russian Greeks during the Revolution) behind him, his monumental continuation of the Odyssey and all his novels before him.

Kazantzakis died in 1957, at seventy-four; Prevelakis, whose talents are as diverse as those of his master, is professor of the history of art at the National College of Fine Arts in Athens. Modern Greek literature is rich in every quality needed for a great literature, as rich as Russia in the nineteenth century or Ireland in the twentieth. And Ireland is a useful analogy, for the brilliance of modern Greek letters comes from Crete, that rebellious island which, like Ireland, has a fabulous, bottomless past, and has kept her identity through the worst calamities nature and man can inflict. Kazantzakis without Crete would be Joyce without Dublin. And just as any Dubliner will tell you that Joyce was a bounder, so the Cretans regularly empty their chamber pots on Kazantzakis’ grave.

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Guy Davenport

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Report to Greco, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Simon & Schuster, $7.50 The Fratricides, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Simon & Schuster, $5 The Sun of Death, by Pandelis Pre-velakis. Simon & Schuster, $4.50 On the twelfth of November 1926, a Friday, in Herakleion in Crete, the seven teen-year-old Pandelis Prevelakis, just graduated from high school, knocked on a door above a dressmaker’s shop. He had come to meet the greatest Greek writer of the twentieth century. Above the door was a death mask of Nietzsche; on the wall, a severe madonna by the icon painter Photis Kondoglou. The room was as bare as a saint’s cell, and the tall Nikos Kazantzakis, part Arabic, part Cretan, a sensual ascetic who looked to Christ, Buddha, Lenin and Homer for his spiritual welfare, rose and welcomed the schoolboy who was to become his closest friend and the inheritor of his mastery of the novel. Kazantzakis was then fortythree, a lifetime of travel, study and action (e.g., the repatriation of the Russian Greeks during the Revolution) behind him, his monumental continuation of the Odyssey and all his novels before him.

Kazantzakis died in 1957, at seventy-four; Prevelakis, whose talents are as diverse as those of his master, is professor of the history of art at the National College of Fine Arts in Athens. Modern Greek literature is rich in every quality needed for a great literature, as rich as Russia in the nineteenth century or Ireland in the twentieth. And Ireland is a useful analogy, for the brilliance of modern Greek letters comes from Crete, that rebellious island which, like Ireland, has a fabulous, bottomless past, and has kept her identity through the worst calamities nature and man can inflict. Kazantzakis without Crete would be Joyce without Dublin. And just as any Dubliner will tell you that Joyce was a bounder, so the Cretans regularly empty their chamber pots on Kazantzakis’ grave.