Nikos Kazantzakis and Spain

On 2 October 1936 the leading monarchist newspaper Kathimerini announced the dispatch of Nikos Kazantzakis to Spain as its war correspondent. This was the Greek author’s third trip to the country after visits in 1926 and 1932-1933. His first of a total of 45 dispatches was published on 24 November 1936 and the last on 17 January 1937. 

Although Kazantzakis pledged that his writings would be impartial, this was not the case. From the outset he was negatively disposed towards the Republicans and did not hide his sympathy for the rebels. In one instance, he openly praised Franco and his Nationalist Spain by implicitly but clearly comparing the siege of the Alcázar in Toledo with the siege of Messolonghi by the Ottomans in 1825-1826, during the Greek War of Independence. At the same time, he criticized the Republic ‘for bringing anarchy and dissolution’ and he underscored Republican violence while concealing the violence of the Nationalists. 

Subsequently, when he published his dispatches in a volume, also translated in Spanish, English, French, Turkish and Korean, he attempted to salvage the credibility of his writings by embellishing or removing several passages that were blatantly biased. Kazantzakis’s dispatches were literary chronicles rather than journalism, as they lacked first-hand news and commentary or a balanced discussion of the opposing forces. Moreover, while he offered rich information on Spanish culture, this was often out of context. Overall, his writings lacked political analysis, as Kazantzakis underestimated the role of political and economic factors and sought the causes of conflict ‘in the inherent violence of the Spanish race’.

Because of his existentialist and metaphysical anguish at the time, Kazantzakis translated García Lorca into Greek and introduced contemporary Spanish poetry to the Greek public. However, politically irrational, in his third trip to Spain he was consistent in his political leanings. Now he praised Franco, just as he had previously praised Lenin, Miguel Primo de Rivera and the ‘Nietzschean models’ of Hitler and Mussolini. 

His dispatches were in line with the prevailing political conditions in Greece. Long before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship (4 August 1936), the two leading Greek newspapers -the liberal/republican Eleftheron Vima and the conservative/monarchist Kathimerini- were warning about the danger that a leftist revolutionary drift of the Spanish type would occur in Greece as well. Then, throughout the Civil War the Greek press often published headlines about the excesses and the violence of the Republicans, as mandated by the censorship and propaganda of the Metaxas regime. 

DF