His whole work is local, which means universal to the extent that it describes the human existence; but to call hima Humanist in the Voltarian sense, is misleading.
One has in mind his great (semi-autobiographic wrk) "A letter to El Greco". In there he fought (in his mind of a yong Cretois, whose love for anything that smells, breath Crete anti-Turkish, who was the occupier: that is the true PARADOX of Iran: the Turkish-Muslim part, and the cleansing of Crete of Islam).
His literally "religious" adoration of Mont Atos (I wish an Israeli writer, I prefer the kind of A.B. Yehushua writing about our Har Meron, the way Kazantzakis wrote about his Godlike feature of MT. Athos), so he, Kazantzakis cannot be looked on as anti-clerical, just by reading his book of Anti-Christ.
In my childhood, after reading his books and Menahem begin`s "Hamered", I got the taste, as a Moroccan Jew, of what it is to savour freedom not only for me individually ala Dostoevski, but more as A;lbert Camus let it downin "La Pste". |
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