BookJack talks about the novel “Captain Michalis” also known as «Freedom or Death» by Nikos Kazantzakis, a Greek classic of the early 20th century, which was filmed more than once (including by Martin Scorsese).
Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek: Νίκος Καζαντζάκης ) was a prolific Greek writer, whose works include essays, novels, poems, tragedies, travel books, and translations of such classics as Dante's The Divine Comedy and J.W. von Goethe's Faust.
It so happened that the film by Martin Scorsese "The Last Temptation of Christ", filmed in 1988, obscured in the eyes of the public its literary fundamental principle - the novel by the Greek classic Nikos Kazantzakis. And twenty-five years earlier, a similar story happened with the Hollywood blockbuster Zorba the Greek by Michalis Kakoyannis, which completely replaced in the minds of the cultural society the book of the same name by the same Kazantzakis behind it. Perhaps only this involuntary marginalization, the displacement of one of the most important writers of the 20th century to the mental periphery, the replacement of his prose with cinematic images, can explain the outlandish fact that Captain Michalis, the main novel by Nikos Kazantzakis and the undisputed pinnacle of his work, remained untouched until last year. translated into Russian. And finally, thanks to the efforts of the translator Viktor Sokolyuk and the Vyrgorod publishing house, this injustice is eliminated and the Russian reader has the opportunity to get acquainted with Kazantzakis' opus magnum.
At this point, some forewarning is required - not to say a warning. The first and quite inevitable impression that "Captain Michalis" will make on you is something along the lines of "naive prose" and "belated Greek romanticism." Indeed, if we take seriously the author's preface, full of somewhat hypertrophied Cretan patriotism (Kazandzakis was born in 1883 and still found the time of Ottoman rule on his native island), and the first couple of chapters, then it may be difficult to find incentives for further reading. Charming ethnographism is hardly able to compensate for the straightforwardness and apparent sketchiness of the plot structure, which at first glance boils down to a confrontation between very good, heroic Greeks and very bad, vicious and pampered Turkish invaders. Cliched images, simple answers to difficult questions, trivial moves - it is almost impossible to subtract something else on the first fifty pages.
This impression is not only inevitable, but completely false. If you overcome the initial prejudice and still read Captain Michalis more thoroughly, it turns out that there can be no talk of straightforward predictability, let alone naive romanticism in relation to it. In fact, this is a very modernist in structure, unexpected in thought, powerful and strange text, extremely far from any clichés.
Unlike mainland Greece, which gained independence back in 1832, Crete remained under the rule of the Ottoman Empire until 1913. And throughout this time, bloody uprisings shook the island, ending in inevitable repressions and shaky, half-hearted concessions from the Turks.
Like his hero, Odysseus, Kazantzakis lived most of his artistic life outside Greece-except for the years of World War II. "I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear," Kazantzakis wrote in TODA RABA(1934).
The action of the novel starts in 1889 in the capital of the island, the city of Megalokastro (present-day Heraklion), just on the eve of another such turmoil, already hanging over Crete, but not yet realized in concrete actions. The protagonist, a gloomy rebel of a somewhat Byronic nature - in fact, Captain Michalis (his "captainship" has nothing to do with the seas - rather, it is an honorary title awarded to the leader of the people) languishes simultaneously because of hatred for Muslims and from a shameful attraction to his friend's wife -enemy - the Turk Nuri Bey, the beautiful Circassian Ermine.
However, what seems to be the main collision of the novel rather quickly goes somewhere to the distant plot outskirts. And the very status of Captain Michalis as the main character also turns out to be more than doubtful: next to him, sometimes intersecting with his line, and sometimes completely isolated, many large and small narrative sleeves unfold.
Another hero of past and future uprisings falls in love with the fatal Circassian - the handsome and gallant captain Poliksingis. The young merchant Cayambis brings his wife into the house, and together they fall into the abyss of unbridled passion. Nuri Bey is tormented by the desire and inability to avenge his father, who was once killed by the brother of Captain Michalis. The local metropolitan, the head of the Cretan Christian community, sighs about the fate of his compatriots and goes to play chess with the local pasha, who is also weighed down by the ambivalent situation he has found himself in on the rebellious island. City fools - a Christian and a Muslim - are establishing something like a business cooperation. The centenary father of Captain Michalis, Captain Sifakas, decides to learn how to write in order to be able to display the patriotic slogan "Freedom or Death!" on all available surfaces before his death. The son of Michalis, the cruel mischievous Trasaki, sets a fire in the Jewish quarter, from which he bravely saves all its inhabitants. The local wise guy and polyglot Idomeneas, who knows seven languages (simple-minded townspeople regularly ask him to open his mouth to understand where such a number is placed), scribbles endless letters to European monarchs with a request to free Crete. And the younger brother of Michalis, a frail teacher with the anecdotal nickname Siezasyr (as a child, wanting to be clever, asked his father the grandiloquent question “What kind of cheese is this?”), exhausted by the unkindness of his wife, he decides to commit a crime ...
Several of the author's novels deal with the history and culture of his own country, and the mystical relationship between man and God. In 1957 he lost the Nobel Prize by a single vote to the French writer Albert Camus.
Dozens of heroes of the second, third, fourth plan on the pages of the novel breathe, quarrel, fall in love, imperiously involving the reader in their small local conflicts, become familiar, understandable, and then die - sometimes heroically, sometimes by accident and always contrary to the traditional narrative logic familiar to us . No storyline resolves the way we expect, no character allows for any kind of unambiguous interpretation, and is not classified as "good" or "bad". In essence, in "Captain Michalis" Kazantzakis recreates and fixes in the word the very life of Crete, wounded, torn apart by civil strife, in all its completely non-literary, not reducible to simple oppositions fullness.
Christians provoke Muslims, Muslims respond with murders, Christians do not remain in debt. Blood is constantly pouring from both sides, and at first thin streams merge into one big channel, heralding a new great storm, driven by an ineradicable, unreasoning thirst for freedom. At some point, the patience of both the Greeks and the Turks will come to an end, and Crete will again explode in a colossal, brilliant and fruitless uprising, the participants of which, sacrificing themselves and others, will be guided by anything but pragmatic considerations.
In one of her most famous essays, titled "The Gap Between Past and Future," the philosopher Hannah Arendt writes of the French Resistance during World War II: "They found that whoever 'joined the Resistance found his "search" ended, that he ceased to suspect himself of "insincerity", that he was "obtuse and suspicious actor of life", that he could afford to "be naked". It was naked, deprived of all masks, that for the first time in their lives the ghost of freedom unexpectedly visited them. According to Arendt, this incomparable, heady feeling of freedom was rooted not only and not so much in the fact that the Resistance fighters opposed the world evil of fascism, but first of all in the fact that they themselves made a choice, took responsibility for their fate and, rejecting worldly things (including responsibility to relatives, for example), rushed with all their being towards this royal ghost.
We observe something similar in Nikos Kazantzakis: through the petty rubbish of everyday life, obeying the trivial human laws in Captain Michalis, something great, inhuman, at the same time terrifying and dazzlingly beautiful, gradually emerges, and this something is freedom, which becomes self-sufficient, absolute for the heroes of the novel. value. A value for which you can literally sacrifice everything - not only your own life. It is no coincidence that in the English-language tradition the novel is known under the title "Freedom or Death" - perhaps this title conveys its content better than the neutral author's version.
Archaic in form and seemingly infinitely distant from the modern Russian reader in terms of material, in fact, Captain Michalis turns into a book that is unusually, almost painfully relevant. The unconditional imperative leading his heroes, if desired, can be discerned in a variety of events from the news agenda - from the confrontation between the people and the authorities in Belarus to protests in Kazakhstan. And understanding how it works, how it arises and what causes this seemingly irrational and at the same time irresistible impulse to freedom adds a lot to our vision of what is happening in the world today.
This article was sponsored by Robert Bachhuber
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