Kazantzakis Nikos: Pismo Grecu

Nikos Kazantzakis: Letter to Greco

Books like this one are rare and precious. Brilliant and enchanting, Kazantzakis's fictionalized autobiography will not leave the reader indifferent. On the contrary, if he agrees to follow the author in his search for the Answer to the Question, if he agrees to lay bare before himself to the extent that Kazantzakis lays bare before him, if he allows him to touch him, if he agrees to follow him while - on his colorful travels in Greece and European metropolises, through his dialogues with Homer, Buddha, Christ, Nietzsche, Lenin and Zorba, with hermits on Mount Athos and revolutionaries in Moscow - wrestling with those fundamental questions that many do not want to know anything about, after reading this strange and unusual book, they will discover that they are no longer the same person.

In addition to the programmatic work Askes by the great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), the novel Fraticide and Liberty or Death, in the Sandorf edition of the Selected Works of Nikos Kazantzakis, we bring the author's book about self-knowledge Pismo Greco.

"First I wanted to find some answer, my answer to all my questions, and only then I would decide what I wanted to become. If I don't find out what the meaning of life on earth is, how can I know what the meaning of my tiny insignificant being is? And if I don't give some meaning to my to life, how can I begin to act? It was not important for me to find the true meaning of life, but what I gave to my psychological and spiritual desires. It was important for me to find a meaning that would be in harmony with me, so that, by following it, I should live in harmony with universe."

"Each man in himself, in the heart of his heart, has a mystical center around which everything revolves. This mystical vortex unites our plans and actions and helps us to find or invent the harmony of the world. Some have love, others thirst for knowledge, others goodness or beauty, or the desire for wealth and possessions. And they submit all of this and subordinate it to this central passion. A poor man is one who does not feel that he is ruled by it. absolute monarch. Life is given to him by all winds. Our center, which has captured the visible world, is this: our struggle with God? The wild peak of man's soul, where we are constantly rising. "Does anyone fight with God?" they once asked me sarcastically. "And who else would you fight?" I answered. Indeed. With whom else?"

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), author of poems, novels, essays, plays and travel books, one of the most important and most translated Greek writers and philosophers of the 20th century. Kazantzakis' most famous novels are Zorba the Greek (1948), Captain Mihalis (1950) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1955).