Kazantzakis, Volume 2 Politics of the Spirit [Hardcover]

Putting Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis's vast output into the context of his lifelong spiritual quest and the turbulent politics of twentieth-century Greece, Peter Bien argues that Kazantzakis was a deeply flawed genius--not always artistically successful, but a remarkable figure by any standard. This is the second and final volume of Bien's definitive and monumental biography of Kazantzakis (1883-1957). It covers his life after 1938, the period in which he wroteZorba the GreekandThe Last Temptation of Christ, the novels that brought him his greatest fame.

A demonically productive novelist, poet, playwright, travel writer, autobiographer, and translator, Kazantzakis was one of the most important Greek writers of the twentieth century and the only one to achieve international recognition as a novelist. But Kazantzakis's writings were just one aspect of an obsessive struggle with religious, political, and intellectual problems. In the 1940s and 1950s, a period that included the Greek civil war and its aftermath, Kazantzakis continued this engagement with undiminished energy, despite every obstacle, producing in his final years novels that have become world classics.

Peter Bienis Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. HisKazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, Volume 1was first published by Princeton in 1989 and was translated into Greek in 2001. It will be published in paperback by Princeton in February 2007. Bien has translated Kazantzakis's booksThe Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, andReport to Grecointo English, and is the author ofKazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature(Princeton). Although others have tried to account for Kanzantzakis's life and literary art, no other book so comprehensively and insightfully captures it likePolitics of the Spirit. Readers will marvel at Bien's tirelessly attentive approach to historical detailÓl