Murray - 2022 - The Nietzsche Pilgrimage of Nikos Kazantzakis and

Beitrag zur Rezeptionsforschung
Peter Durno Murray

The Nietzsche Pilgrimage of
Nikos Kazantzakis and Elli Lambridi
Abstract: After meeting in Zurich, Nikos Kazantzakis and Elli Lambridi undertook
a number of Nietzsche pilgrimages in Switzerland together in 1918, beginning with
a trip to Silvaplana. At the time, Kazantzakis had written a thesis on Nietzsche and
had translated The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85)
into Greek, while Elli Lambridi was enrolled in a PhD in philosophy at the University
of Zurich writing on Aristotle. They continually debated the nature of the philoso-
pher-type in relation to Nietzsche and Dionysianism, and this philosophical engage-
ment is the central topic of this paper. Lambridi envisaged a Dionysian philosopher
fully engaged in an ethical and natural life within a community of others and also
envisaged a derived politics of affirmative communal responsibility. Kazantzakis con-
sidered that the philosopher should take a much more Apolline, spiritually focused
and solitary path, continually ascending toward heroic self-redemption. As well as
examining their recorded exchanges, this paper also addresses the fictional resump-
tion of their relationship in The New People, a novel which Lambridi wrote some time
after Kazantzakis’ death. In the novel, they resume their discussion of the philos-
opher-type in 2118, in an eternal recurrence event. In the end, the male character,
Petros, learns that the grounding event of a Dionysian Nietzscheanism is an instinc-
tive promise of responsibility for the future of others.
Keywords: Nikos Kazantzakis, Elli Lambridi, Dionysian, Responsibility, Eternal recur-

rence of the same
1 The Nietzsche Pilgrimage (1918)

On 1 January 1918, five people set out from Zurich Central station heading south. The
party included the Greek Consul to Switzerland, Yannis Stavridakis and his girlfriend,
Myrsini Kleanthous (Kyra), Nikos Kazantzakis, who was staying at the consulate as a
long-time friend of Stavridakis, Michal Gunilakis, a young acquaintance from Crete,
and a young Athenian student writing a doctoral thesis at the University of Zurich on
Aristotle’s principles of knowledge: Elli Lambridi. This trip was one of many so-called
Nietzsche pilgrimages made by Kazantzakis over the course of his life.
Dr. Peter D. Murray, Freelance Philosopher, Athens 104-35, Greece,

E-Mail: pdurnomurray@yahoo.com.au
Nietzsche-Studien 51 (2022), 305–329 Published online April 01, 2022
Open Access. © 2022 bei den Autorinnen und Autoren, publiziert von De Gruyter.
Dieses Werk ist lizenziert unter der Creative Commons Namensnennung – Nicht-kommerziell –
Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International Lizenz. https://doi.org/10.1515/nietzstu-2021-0045
306 Peter Durno Murray
We have few details of this first pilgrimage, but Davos is mentioned in his note-
book from the time and seems a likely first destination before they travelled on the
Albula/Rhaetian Railway into the Alps through Filisur and the spiral tunnels to Bever
in the direction of St. Moritz.1 There are a number of mentions of toasting Stavridakis’
name day (7 January), which is likely to have occurred at Pontresina. The summary
from the notebook, however, only describes their night of 9 January 1918 there, which
they spent discussing love,2 before travelling via St. Moritz to Silvaplana the next
day. Gunilakis left after a night, on 11 January, but it is uncertain how long the others
stayed before returning to Zurich.
Sils Maria is visible a couple of kilometres away to the south of Silvaplana. An
existing photo marked “Silvaplana, Engadine 11-1-1918” shows Kazantzakis standing
in the snow gazing up and across toward Piz Corvatsch.3 The profile of the moun-
tains behind positions him on Lake Silvaplana south of the town, near what is now
a camping ground, and basically opposite the Nietzsche stone on the far side of the
lake. They were possibly heading for Sils, as it seems that they visited the town at
some time during their stay. However, at this time of year, the Nietzsche stone would
have only appeared as a small bump in the snow, and the accounts of visiting Sils do
not suggest that they found the stone.4 The notebook mentions Tiefencastel, meaning
that the party returned to Chur on the line passing through Thusis. Back in Zurich,
Kazantzakis and Lambridi met on 13 February 1918 at the Halle Stubbe, which was at
Bellevue, for fondue and two bottles of Dezelay.5 Thus began their long relationship.
The two of them travelled south from Zurich on at least three other occasions in
1918. They travelled in March and April to Lugano, Gandria, Locarno, Ascona, and
possibly Lucerne.6 In May, they spent time in Braunwald, from where Kazantzakis
1 Helen N. Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on His Letters, trans. Amy Mims, New
York 1968. The notebook is in storage and unavailable; however, Helen Kazantzakis maintains in her
biography that the relevant “six pages torn from a school notebook, which I have before me as the
only testament of this brief interlude” (69). She also mentions Maran and Peter Molinis, but these are
on the line to Arosa where Kazantzakis had been in October 1917. See also Diether Roderich Reinsch,
“Nikos Kazantzakis’ Alexis Zorbas und Friedrich Nietzsche,” Nietzsche-Studien 13 (1984), 600–16: 602.
2 Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 68–71. A brief account of this occurs in Kazantzakis’ obituary for
Stavridakis, who died in 1920 (published in 1927), in Yiorgos Anemoyannis, Nikos Kazantzakis Writ-
ing … to Yannis Stavridakis: Unpublished Letters, Athens 1995, 104. This account appears to be the
basis for the elaboration in Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek, trans. Peter Bien, New York 2014,
337–9.
3 Anemoyannis, Nikos Kazantzakis Writing … to Yannis Stavridakis, 29. There is also a photo of Ka-
zantzakis with Kyra in the snow from this time (27) and a number of photos of Lambridi and Ka-
zantzakis around Switzerland.
4 Email from Peter Villwock, curator of the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria.
5 Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 71.
6 This trip is the subject of Lambridi’s short story Smoke (written 1948–54, first published as Καπνός
ήταν …, ed. Yolanda Hatzi, Athens 2019). See Yolanda Hatzi’s copious notes to Smoke regarding the
1918 pilgrimages, including maps of the pilgrimages.
The Nietzsche Pilgrimage of Nikos Kazantzakis and Elli Lambridi 307
wrote in a letter to Stavridakis that Elli was attempting to find a place in his “heart
and mind,” something which was to be hidden from Galetea, Kazantzakis’ first wife.7
In another letter, he mentions the “love of an extraordinary woman,” referring to
Lambridi, and responds to what seems to have been his friend’s disapproval.8 During
August and September, they stayed in Grächen near Zermatt, where a famous picture
of Kazantzakis and Lambridi was taken with a large white cow in the foreground and
a traditional mountain dwelling behind them.9
While it seems that Kazantzakis and Lambridi did not return to Sils in 1918, it is
hard to imagine that Kazantzakis did not find the famous stone at another time, and
there is evidence in Report to Greco (1961) of a visit to Sils Maria in spring. Despite this
being a fictionalized “biography,” the description seems too precise for him to have
not actually visited Sils in springtime.10
When spring arrived […], I embarked on a pilgrimage to find and follow the drops of your still
warm blood on all the ascents of your heroic struggle and martyrdom.11
How moved I was while searching beneath the springtime sun in the Engadine between Sils
Maria and Silvaplana, searching for the pyramidal rock where you were first overwhelmed by the
vision of Eternal Recurrence!12
On my way into Sils Maria I turned to my right with a shudder as I was crossing a small footbridge
with the humble cemetery next to it, because just as you had suddenly felt Zarathustra next to
you, so I in the same way saw my shadow divide in two as I looked down at it – and there you
were walking by my side.13
The description suggests that Kazantzakis entered Sils Maria through Sils Baselgia,
where the turnoff from the Silvaplana-Maloja road crosses a small bridge, the Inn-
7 Letter to Stavridakis, 29 May 1918 from Braunwald, in Peter Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Ka-
zantzakis, Princeton, NJ 2012, 74–5. In this letter, Kazantzakis refers to Lambridi as “the Lady,” which
is repeated in Zorba (the name Kyra also means lady). In his notebook, Kazantzakis refers to “finding
God” in his relations with Lambridi. This suggests something more Dionysian associated with sexual
difference as discussed by Vanessa Lemm, Homo Natura: Nietzsche, Philosophical Anthropology and
Biopolitics, Edinburgh 2020, 151, for example, but other remarks suggest that there was still a high
level of disassociation in this passion.
8 Letter to Stavridakis, 29 May 1918 from Gandria, in Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis,
73; see also 74, note.
9 This photograph was sent with a letter to Elli’s mother 14 August 1918, in Anemoyannis, Nikos Ka-
zantzakis Writing … to Yannis Stavridakis, 47.
10 As described in EH, Z 1. See comments by Peter Bien, Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, vol. II,
Princeton, NJ 2007, 526, 539–40.
11 Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, trans. Peter Bien, New York 1965, 321. The discussion of the
Nietzsche pilgrimage occurs on pages 318–39.
12 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 321.
13 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 321. A reference to Nietzsche’s poem Sils Maria in GS, Songs of Prince
Vogelfrei.
brücke, with the Kirche San Lurench, a small church with an adjacent graveyard, on
the bank of the Inn to the left.14
The travel book, England (1941), also provides an account of a trip to Sils:
One January in the winter sun of the Engadine, between Sils Maria and Silvaplana I was looking
with deep emotion for the pyramid-shaped rock where the vision of the Eternal Recurrence had
first struck you … And on entering Sils Maria, just as I was crossing the little bridge with its poor
cemetery nearby I turned to my right, shuddering with joy.15
In England, Kazantzakis states: “wherever I may be, I dedicate this day in its entirety
to a person I have deeply loved.”16 Kazantzakis is in London on 25 August 1939, the
39th anniversary of Nietzsche’s death. The account of the trip to Sils is in turn based
on that in an essay from 1926 marking the 26th anniversary; however, neither mention
that the visit was for a second time.17 Both the 1926 and 1939 accounts mention
January and the winter sun, the snowy mountains and a distant avalanche, presum-
ably based on the original visit. Each also suggest that he entered Sils Maria through
Baselgia, and that he did not find the Nietzsche stone at this time. It appears that
the springtime visit had not happened by the time of the writing and publication of
England in 1940/41 after Kazantzakis returned to Greece and Aegina in late 1939. So,
the account of visiting Sils Maria in spring seems to have only been recorded in Report
to Greco and is too similar to the others not to be based on them.
The situation is complicated by the final pages of Zorba (1946), which provide
homage to Stavridakis, and mentions that Kazantzakis (or the Boss) had returned to
the place which they had visited together in the Upper Engadine by himself, and had
stayed in the same hotel, presumably in Silvaplana.18 It seems that this account is
fictional or just expressing a hopeful desire to return to Sils while stuck on Aegina in
1942, with all the other details taken from the 1918 visit.
14 That he entered town this way also suggests he might have come from Italy or was just returning
from a walk as the coach presumably came into Sils Maria along the northern route. Again with con-
sultation with Peter Villwock, perhaps he is thinking of the small footbridge near the Nietzsche-Haus
in Sils Maria over the small stream of Fedacia which connects the glaciers of Val Fex with Lake Sil-
vaplana. The Baselgia bridge was not a footbridge at the time.
15 Nikos Kazantzakis, England: A Travel Journal, trans. Amy Mims, New York 1965, 188. He goes on
to describe the Sils Maria imagery, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Apollo and Dionysus and the horror of
eternal recurrence in a manner very similar to Report to Greco.
16 Kazantzakis, England, 186.
17 Kazantzakis, England, 186–99. This account is very similar to Nikos Kazantzakis, “Friedrich
Nietzsche,” Eleftheros Typos, 22 and 26 August 1926. See comments by Peter Bien, “Kazantzakis’
Nietzscheanism,” Journal of Modern Literature 2/2 (1971/72), 245–66: 245, and Bien, Politics of the
Spirit, 537.
18 Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek, 337–9.
After Kazantzakis left Zurich in 1919, he travelled to the Caucasus with Stavrida-
kis and Giorgos Zorba, where they were acting for the Greek government, organizing
the repatriation of Greeks following their persecution by the Bolsheviks.19 Stavridakis
died soon afterwards in Tbilisi in January 1920, an event which Kazantzakis refers to
in an obituary published in 1927 and in a similar passage in Zorba. The latter recalls
the name-day toast to Stavridakis, which we have suggested occurred on 7 January
1918 in Pontresina, but which, in Zorba, is set in Zurich in the company of “our Lady.”
The account does not mention a visit to Sils, but provides an account of the name day
celebration set in a dialogue with Stravridakis’ ghost.
“The greatest pleasure you gave me,” he said, “was once in Zurich. Remember? There was
another soul with us.”
“I do remember,” I answered. “She was the one we called our ‘Lady’.”
We remained silent. How many centuries have passed since then! I had delivered my friend’s
encomium as we three dear, loving companions sat around his name day table, enclosed as we
were in a warm room with the snow falling outside. […]
“I’m thinking about your final words. You raised your glass and said: “My dear ‘Lady,’ when
Stavridakis was a baby, his old grandfather held him on one knee, and on the other placed a
Cretan lyra and played some palikari tunes. Tonight let’s drink to his health. May fate grant that
he always sits on the knee of God.”
“Dear teacher, God did not take long to hear your prayer.”
“That does not matter.” I said. “Love conquers death.”20
That the account in Zorba is fiction is mere speculation. It could easily be the first
truthful, published mention of a return trip to Sils. Kazantzakis travelled widely in
Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and a visit to Sils Maria and the Nietzsche stone might
have happened during this time. He made a trip around southern Germany with Elsa
Lange and then to Naples early in 1924, but this was again in winter. After Naples,
Rome and Assisi, he travelled to Padua, Venice and Ravenna, again with Elsa Lange,
before reaching Brindisi on 29 April and returning to Greece on 3 May 1924.21 There
are no published letters between his leaving Naples and arriving in Greece and no
accounts in his travel book, Italy (1927). However, it is possible that he continued on
to Sils, and it would have been the right time of year.
Another possibility is 1930, when he travelled from Gottesgab in Czechoslovakia,
where he had been staying with Eleni Samiou (Helen Kazantzakis), to Paris in April
and then to Cannes and Nice in summer. It seems likely that 1930 was the occasion
19 Also mentioned in Kazantzakis’ obituary for Stavridakis published in 1927, in Anemoyannis, Nikos
Kazantzakis Writing … to Yannis Stavridakis, 101.
20 Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek, 338, translation amended. The account is again based on an ear-
lier passage from Kazantzakis’ obituary for Stavridakis which gives a brief account of the name-day
toast occurring in the company of two others: “we were four loved ones,” see Anemoyannis, Nikos
Kazantzakis Writing … to Yannis Stavridakis, 104.
21 Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 113.
that he travelled to Genoa, from which he visited the “heavenly paths” of Rapallo
on another Nietzsche pilgrimage. These are the two walks that Nietzsche describes
around Rapallo where the Zarathustra-type “overcame” him: the “glorious road to
Zoagli,” which is elevated above the coast, and around the bay between Santa Margh-
erita and Porto Fino.22 It is possible that he continued from Genoa up to Sils Maria. In
addition, Kazantzakis was in Paris on 12 June 1931, before travelling via Turraherhöhe
(around 30 June) in the Austrian Tyrol, back to Gottesgab (17 July), and could possibly
have made a detour to Sils.
There is also a photo of Kazantzakis in Zurich marked “1945,” but the date seems
wrong. Comparing the image to photos with Albert Schweitzer in 1955 and others from
around 1945, suggests the date for the Zurich photo should have been 1955.23 That
year, he briefly travelled “around Switzerland” in late July – early August, having
come up from Lugano, and was in Zurich with Eleni Kazantzakis (Samiou) before
meeting Albert Schweitzer on 11 August 1955 in the Alsace.24 He was writing Report to
Greco at the time – though not in springtime – but this could explain why the account
seems so fresh. A second visit in 1955 is very possible, on a train from Lugano to Zurich
passing through Chur, but there is no evidence of this visit so far.
Kazantzakis and Lambridi maintained their relationship on and off between
1918 and 1957, attested to by many letters.25 During this time, she translated two of
his works into English, Asketiki in 1927 and Aniforas around 1946, and while both
translations still exist, neither has been published.26 On a number of occasions,
Kazantzakis addressed Lambridi publicly using a secret nickname, Mudita, a Bud-
dhist name which means something like “unbounded joy without self-interest” or
“rejoicing in the pleasure of others.”27 Kazantzakis also wrote the article Mudita and
I (1926) and dedicated Nikeforos Fokas (1928) to her and, in addition, he published
a letter to his “Beloved Mudita,” in Journeying (Taxidevontas) following his journey
to Egypt (1928).28 In this letter, he talks about calmly facing the abyss with dignity,
without laughter or tears; hope or fear.29 The name Mudita also appears on a number
22 Kazantzakis, England, 187. See EH, Z 1.

23 Anemoyannis, Nikos Kazantzakis Writing … to Yannis Stavridakis, 63.
24 Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 534, and Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, 796.
25 See Yolanda Hatzi (ed.), Correspondence with Mudita: Nikos Kazantzakis – Elli Lambridi, 1927–
1957, Athens 2018.
26 Written 1922–3, published 1927. The former was eventually translated into English by Kimon Friar
and published in English as Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, New York 1960,
while much of Aniforas was used in Freedom or Death.
27 Translation of Mudita in Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, 258. Letter to Lambridi,
1927, in Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, 257–8. See also letter to Lambridi from Mur-
mansk, 20 July 1928, in Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, 317–8.
28 Nikos Kazantzakis, “Mudita and I,” Eleftheros Typos, 4 July 1926.
29 Nikos Kazantzakis, Journeying: Travels in Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem, Cyprus, trans. Themi Valsils
and Theodore Valsils, Boston 1975.
of letters to Lambridi and on a double page torn from the Selected Essays (1844) of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, presumably sent to Lambridi with a letter. The inscription on
the page provides the original dates and reminisces that Lambridi had been reading
Emerson while annoyed at the time, and again celebrates their travels in Switzer-
land.30 There are two dedications on the same page:
Της Mudita, για να θυμάται πως περάσαμε την ιερή Regenzeit στην Gandria
Μάρτης, Απρίλης 1918
[For Mudita, To remember how we passed the sacred rainy season in Gandria
March, April 1918]
Στο Braunwald το διάβαζες όταν είσουνα θυμωμένη. 19–24 Μάη 1918

[In Braunwald, you read it when you were angry. 19–24 May 1918]
Lambridi’s response is again annoyed, writing to Kazantzakis, who was in Nice with
Eleni in 1930, that it was to no-one’s good to revive the memory of Gandria.31 She also
writes that she is trying “to love her fate a little [ἀγαπῶ λιγάκι τὴ μοίρα μου / agapo
ligaki ti moira mou]” and seems to be suggesting that Kazantzakis cannot love the fate
of others.
They met again in London in 1946, when she was staying in what Kazantzakis
referred to as “that vile hole.”32 She stayed for another ten years, partly due to having
her passport revoked by right-wing governments. This happened again after her
return to Greece and the rise of “the colonels,” as described by Yolanda Hatzi, her
niece, who was assisting her to get a ferry to Italy when the passport was confiscated.
Around this time, she began The New People. Yolanda also describes her great suffer-
ing from cancer and her resolve to outlive the regime.33 This did not happen and she
died in 1970.
30 The date these pages were sent is uncertain. They are in the possession of Yolanda Hatzi.
31 Kazantzakis to Lambridi 8 July 1930, letter in possession of Yolanda Hatzi, and Lambridi to Ka-
zantzakis, 8 July 1930, letter in possession of Nikos Kazantzakis Museum, Crete.
32 Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, 639, letter to Prevalakis, from Paris, 24 February
1947. Kazantzakis wrote Aniforos in Cambridge in 1946 and it was translated by Lambridi sometime
before 1954. The manuscript also includes revised fictionalized parts of the travel book England and
hitherto unused parts of his notes concerning his visits to England in 1939 and 1946, as well as events
set during the Second World War on Crete, especially the kidnapping of Kreippe as related by the
character, Manolis, and the reprisals on Crete which Kazantzakis documented on site for the govern-
ment in 1945.
33 Yolanda Hatzi, “Emeis,” in Elli Lambridi, Introduction to Philosophy, Athens 2004, 25–6 (transla-
tions here and below by Ioannis Georganas).
2 Kazantzakis and Nietzsche, Politics and the State

In Report to Greco, Kazantzakis describes his “discovery” of Nietzsche in Paris –
where he was attending lectures by Henri Bergson in 1907 – and how this had deeply
affected him, leading to a postgraduate thesis on Nietzsche (1909) and the translation
of The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1912–3) into Greek.34 In Report to
Greco, he maintains not knowing who Nietzsche was at the time, but this is definitely
not the case. This is one of Kazantzakis’s well-known fictions concerning Nietzsche.
He also describes being mistaken for Nietzsche in a Parisian bookshop in 1907, and
again, in 1923, he describes a similar event in Berlin, around the time of another pil-
grimage to Naumburg and Röcken:
Passing through Naumburg, I saw the house in which Nietzsche was born [sic] and I was agitated
again by this tragic figure who is so akin to my psychic and physical constitution. A few days
ago in Berlin, a German whom I know ran up to me while I was stopping at the library to return
some books and said to me with emotion that suddenly, as he saw me, he thought that he had
seen Nietzsche. Several pictures of him really do resemble me unbelievably. But let’s hope that
I am healthier, that my parents did not transmit the seed of insanity to me, as Nietzsche’s father
did to him.35
Kazantzakis worked on Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State in
Paris in 1907–8 before publishing in Heraklion in 1909.36 Here, he introduces nihilism
as the most important issue to be addressed in modernity, defining it in terms of a dis-
parity between “the real and the ideal,” based in the collapse of the credibility of the
current tables of values.37 For Kazantzakis, there is a need to find values that transmit
“a heroic and joyous acceptance of life.”38 As an alternative to the destruction of life,
Nietzsche is found to pose an “optimistic or Dionysian nihilism” and a “pessimism
of strength” used against pessimistic nihilism.39 Kazantzakis calls for a new morality
concerned with concrete outcomes and individual strength. The notion of an equality
34 Nikos Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, trans. Odysseus
Makridis, Albany, NY 2006. Translation dates in Prevalis’ Bibliography. Bien reports that he refers to
Nietzsche in an essay from 1906. See Bien, Politics of the Spirit, 581, n. 13, and 539–40.
35 Letter to Galatea, Dornburg (Goetheschloss), 1 June 1923, in Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos
Kazantzakis, 178–9. In the account in England, he writes that he went to both the larger town with the
“great Gothic cathedral” and the smaller town where Nietzsche was born (Kazantzakis, England, 187).
36 See Odysseus Makridis, “Introduction to Kazantzakis,” in Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche, xvi.
Kazantzakis visited Elsa Lange in Dornburg a number of times in 1925 and perhaps she accompanied
him to Röcken.
37 Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche, 15.
39 Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche, 17, and BT, Attempt at Self-Criticism 1.
of human beings in terms of their fitness to rule is condemned in favour of forms of

rule by those prepared to affirm this notion of life.40
The new law tables are not for all, and those who cannot use them should
remain content with religion and other comforting stories. In what he considers
to be a Nietzschean world, there are two classes, noble and slave, with the nobles
renouncing the peace, rest and happiness of the slaves.41 The nobles become more
than good and evil, living beyond the Christian opposition of divine good and tempo-
ral evil.42 Kazantzakis finds a need for a stricter, more sincere morality, which must
be striven for by the most vulnerable, noble souls, as an undergoing of their nature
as human-philosophers expounding the primordial sense of affirmation.43 However,
this striving and warring is directed at oneself, violently forcing breadth and height
into one’s work;44 bringing Greek philosophy back into European culture;45 seeking
redemption from the narrow self-interest of capitalism and the false equality of his-
toricizing socialism – with all these actions “permeated with sincerity.”46 Kazantzakis
concludes Friedrich Nietzsche by advocating a global Dionysian law which promotes
life by forging human will to power into life-affirming new human types. He defines
life as the “intense longing for an externalization that is as broad as possible,” based
on a continual process of self-transcending.47
In Report to Greco, Kazantzakis provides another summary of Nietzsche’s work,
which is in part similar to the account in England.48 The latter is set in a London park
on the anniversary of Nietzsche’s death, 1939, and Kazantzakis calls Nietzsche to
account for a world already erupting into war and finds him to be broken and crying,
but to maintain his internal logic derived from the will to power, despite its mani-
festation in violence. Kazantzakis calls him “the Great Martyr,” and blames him for
the philosophy of the hammer – full of aggressive egoism. He finds that Nietzsche
affirmed such a world, though this was accompanied by his “screams of agony.”49
With Kazantzakis’ Nietzsche, we have a heroic vision of a poet philosopher and
warrior redeemer.50 The look of the philosopher is found to be “full of light,” despite
suffering, and with a “divine equilibrium” which can create a god as the life-justifying
descendants of human beings rather than their ancestral creator and prime mover.51

48 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 318–39, and Kazantzakis, England, 186–99.
49 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 330–1.
The maintenance of this vision of the heroic redeemer model of the philos-
opher-saint is essential for Kazantzakis. Key notions, such as the anguished cry,
stem from a continued attempt to achieve the state of this vision. To this anguish,
Kazantzakis adds the encounter with Lou von Salomé and “the fatal days of sepa-
ration” and solitude, in which he envisions Nietzsche to be strangled by the eternal
recurrence of the same, requiring a purpose for the world, in the form of the Über-
mensch, to “exorcise life’s horror.” For Kazantzakis, creating the Übermensch allows
us to surpass our nature and assume responsibility for the cosmos through mastery.
The Übermensch is found to be full of hope, thereby redeeming the hopelessness of
the eternal recurrence through brute will to power – what Kazantzakis calls the “will
to domination” and associates with the war.52 Resolving this politically is considered
impossible, and his interpretation of Nietzsche’s descent into madness is mixed up
with present events.
Kazantzakis also describes Nietzsche’s walk from Sils Maria and the revelation at
the Nietzsche stone at Lake Silvaplana as an event of horror rather than redemption.
However, he describes Nietzsche as “standing once more on that same rock” in an
identical recurrence, and while this is perhaps an issue with the translation, it could
also suggest that the visit in spring did not include a walk to the stone.
As you were walking one day in the Engadine, you suddenly halted. Terror-stricken, you had just
reflected that time is illimitable, while matter is limited. Of necessity, therefore, a new moment
would come when all these combinations of matter would be reborn the same as before. Thou-
sands of centuries from now a person like yourself, indeed your very self, would stand once
more on that same rock and rediscover that same idea. And not only once, but innumerable
times. Thus there would be no hope for a better future; there was no salvation. We would revolve
forever the same, identical, on the wheel of time … You plunged into an ecstasy of anguish. All
this meant that your suffering was endless and the world’s suffering incurable. But your ascetic’s
pride made you welcome the martyrdom joyfully.53
Kazantzakis’ philosophical incompatibility with Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal

return considered as an affirmation of the future rests on his inability to read the
Dionysian into the twofold sense of recurrence and return. He misunderstands that
the cyclic universe is considered by Nietzsche as a minimalist ontological position
made necessary by perspectivism in order to combat the association of truth and
beauty with purposeful temporality in Platonic-Christian teleology. “There was no
hope for the future to be better. There was no salvation. Always identically the same …
Nietzsche was plunged into an agonized ecstasy. And so his pain was without end and
the pain of the world incurable.”54

53 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 326–7, and Kazantzakis, England, 194–5.
Kazantzakis’ account of the teaching of the eternal return fits with a certain pessi-
mistic explanation of the idea. It has been argued that these two aspects are contained
in the thought itself without the need for the redeeming Übermensch that Kazantzakis
prefers: “Eternal recurrence without hope, the Superman a great hope.”55 The respon-
sibility that both terms advocate, for Nietzsche, does not arise from the abyss, or from
grappling with the abyss, but from an affirmation of the future, which overcomes
one’s personal horror of the abyss of the spatio-temporal outside – eternal life, we
could suggest, or Nietzsche’s concept of “humanness” – and take up the responsi-
bility to create an affirmative future for others despite the events of the present.56
Kazantzakis adopts the model of the ascetic martyr. He reduces Nietzsche to madness,
considered as the outcome of overstaying his visits to the abyss. He projects his own
worst fears onto Nietzsche and can only suggest that an affirmative view of the future
can come from the heroic redeemer: Nietzsche as Jesus. “Which is the most dangerous
way? That is what I want! Where is the abyss? That is where I am headed. What is the
most valiant joy? To assume complete responsibility!”57
Kazantzakis finishes his chapter on Nietzsche in Report to Greco with a brief
account of the latter’s madness and death. Set in Paris, walking along the Seine,
Kazantzakis realizes that he has become a perspectivist and thus a friend to Nietzsche.
Nonetheless, he describes him as being like the hellhound in Z II, Of Great Events:
“always short of breath, gasping, and tinged with sulphur.”58
It occurred to me that he must be returning from hell – my own breathe caught in my throat and
I began to gasp. But we did not wrestle now; we had become friends. He looked at me, and I
perceived my face in the pupils of his eyes. Anguish is contagious, however. He had given me his
troubles. Together with him I had begun my own battle to match the unmatchable – to reconcile
utmost hope and utmost despair, and to open the door beyond reason and certainty.59
Toward the end of Report to Greco, Kazantzakis refashions Nietzsche’s “golden oars”
passage from The Gay Science (1882–87) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, describing
the fisherman as full of lament and carnal passion, and seemingly oblivious to the
gift-giving virtue of the golden light.60
Kazantzakis takes from Nietzsche the denial of consolation. He finds that we
should fashion a world that would not shame our hearts and assume complete
responsibility. He says that his eyes were opened by Nietzsche with respect to Chris-
tian notions of reward and punishment, in which he ceased to believe. He goes on to

56 GS 337. See GS 355, 358, 371, and 374 for examples of Nietzsche’s affirmative philosophy.
60 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 338, and GS 337; Z III, On Old and New Tablets 3.
express his affirmation of individual humanity on earth and for higher human crea-
tion,61 while keeping the abyss in clear sight, devoid of supernatural hopes.62
The response that Kazantzakis calls for is “the Cretan glance,” with which we
look the abyss of past and future suffering in the face:
I hear the savage cry, and I shudder. The agony that ascends within me composes itself, for the
first time, into an integral human voice; it turns full face toward me and calls me clearly, with my
own name, with the name of my father and my race.
This is the moment of greatest crisis. This is the signal for the March to begin. If you do not hear
this Cry tearing at your entrails, do not set out.
Continue, with patience and submission, your sacred military service in the first, second, and
third rank of preparation.
And listen: In sleep, in an act of love or of creation, in a proud and disinterested act of yours, or
in a profound despairing silence, you may suddenly hear the Cry and set forth.
Until that moment my heart streams on, it rises and falls with the Universe. But when I hear the
Cry, my emotions and the Universe are divided into two camps.
Someone within me is in danger, he raises his hands and shouts: “Save me!” Someone within me
climbs, stumbles, and shouts: “Help me!”
Which of the two eternal roads shall I choose? Suddenly I know that my whole life hangs on this
decision – the life of the entire Universe.63
3 Kazantzakis and Lambridi on the Dionysian

Philosopher
Kazantzakis’ philosophical disagreements with Lambridi are concerned with whether
a de-reification of immanence and transcendence can occur through the self-overcom
ing of the individual apart from others, or, as Lambridi maintains, requires a self-over-
coming of individuation occurring during ethical engagements with others, individu-
ally or in a community, through the interchange of dialogue, but in any case, occurring
as a straightforward and honest promise of responsibility for the future of others,
which we can interpret in terms of parrhesia and Redlichkeit.64 Kazantzakis sees the
highest will to power in terms of an ethical egoism striving to dominate and making
new conquests – by those who possess the capacity to create at the highest level. There

63 Nikos Kazantzakis, Askitiki, unpublished manuscript, trans. Elli Lambridi, 1927, excerpt from
Part 6 “The March.”
64 Elli Lambridi, The New People: A Story for Our Times, unpublished novel, transcribed 2021, 322.
See discussion of parrhesia and Redlichkeit in Lemm, Homo Natura, 17–8 and 32–3, as well as Venessa
Ercole, Nietzsche, Care of Self and the Risk of Dionysian Transfiguration, PhD dissertation, Griffith
University, Queensland, Australia 2019, 42–98.
is a suggestion in The New People that this could include “personal immortality,” or
perhaps the poetic sense of this.65 There is a continual need for unrest and expansion
in order to produce the new types of humanity, situated beyond the notion of human
being found in religion and science, and existing in a fuller, robust harmony with life.
This is accentuated in Asketiki:
There is a cry within which does not come from within. It does not know where it comes from, or
where it desires to go, but it cannot be ignored.
Addressed from the perspectives of the Ego, the Race, Humankind and Earth
The EGO: must hear the cry. Learn to command and obey. Love this responsibility.
The RACE: the cry as the ancestors speaking within you.
HUMANKIND: the cry as the whole of humanity within you. Learn to look at oneself through the
entirety of humanity, the earth flattened by its ashes, the huge Odyssey of which we are all one
immeasurable part. “Human matter,” he calls it.
The EARTH: the cry within you is the Earth.66
The question of how this cry of the earth can be understood philosophically is taken
up by Lambridi in the context of the model of the Dionysian philosopher. Lambri-
di’s Introduction to Philosophy (1962) describes an image seemingly derived from the
material evidence associated with ancient Greek Dionysianism, in which the god is
depicted seated, apparently in thought, while around him a group of satyrs is whirl-
ing and dancing.
In an old vase painting, Dionysus is depicted sitting among the satyrs. The satyrs dance franti-
cally, raging, but Dionysus remains calm. Dionysus with the satyrs, makes up the whole philos-
opher.
[Σε μια παλια αγγειογραφια παρασταινεται ο Διονυσος με το χορο των Σατυρων τριγυρω του΄ οι
Σατυροι χορευουν, ταραζονται, μαινονται, ο Διονυσος στη μεση τους θεωρει απολυτα ηρεμος. Ο
Διονυσος μαζι με τους Σατυρος, πρεπει να ειναι ολοκληρος ο φιλοσοφος.]67
While much of the description at this point is a summary of The Birth of Tragedy,
Kazantzakis continually differs from Nietzsche in giving precedence to the redeem-
er-type. He finds a model of the sublime redeemer standing “motionless,” “tranquil”
and “sure” among the turbulence of life, a characterization that Lambridi gives to
Dionysus. He writes to Lambridi:
65 Lambridi, The New People, 102.

66 Kazantzakis, Askitiki.
67 See, for example, Ancient Agora Museum, Athens, or Louvre F 227, Isler-Kerenyi, 78, and Lambridi,
Introduction to Philosophy, 36. There is little doubt that both agreed that the philosopher should be
fully engaged in both life and ideas, the question concerned which ideas best represented life. The
image comes from her lectures of this time, around 1938.
I like Dionysus, the source of intoxication, who stands sober. Satyrs and maenads dance around
him. Only he knows what “still dance” and “silent cry” mean. This is the highest thought of the
Odyssey. I think that you’re the only one in Greece who can discover this and make it your own.
[μου αρέσει ο Διόνυσος, η πηγη της μέθης, που στέκεται αμέθηστος·γύρατου οι σάτυροι κ’ οι
μαινάδες κορδακίζουνται·αφτος μόνος ξέρει τι θα πει «ακίνητος χορος» και «βουβη κραβγη».
Αφτο είναι το ανώτατο πάτομα της Οδύσειας. Είσαι, θαρω, η μόνη στην Ελάδα που μπορεις να το
ανακαλύψεις και να το κατοικήσεις]68
Lambridi responds:
As I’ve told you at some point, I fear that the inner Dionysus is much too quiet, and not the source
of intoxication. This is not a criticism for God’s sake. I write this with much love.
[Ὅπως σοῦ εἶπα κάποτες, φοβᾶμαι πὼς ὁ μέσα Διόνυσος παραεῖναι ἥσυχος, ἀλλὰ ὄχι ὡς πηγὴ τῆς
μέθης. Δὲν εἶναι τοῦτο κριτική, γιὰ τὸ Θεό, σοῦ τὰ γράφω μὲ πολλὴ ἀγάπη.]69
The two latter excerpts are from letters between the two from early 1939 and again
apparently refer to their respective versions of this model, which can be seen in terms
of the two opposite points of view which take “suffering from superabundance” rather
than primal suffering from life to be fundamental, and the “higher glory” beyond suf-
fering to be within life rather than in a transcendence of life which signifies another
metaphysical existence.70 Another example of the debate occurs in Lambridi’s short
story, Smoke, which is an account of their trip to Gandria.71 It is spoken by Xanthos,
the male character, in the context of a discussion of the philosopher:
And in me, in the centre of all the turmoil, as in the centre of the circle where the satyrs jump and
rage, is an unfamiliar Dionysus, who is not known by the common believers, only the initiated,
and is quiet, serene, like the centre of the hurricane.
[Και μέσα μου, στο κέντρο όλης της ταραχής, σα στο κέντρο του κύκλου όπου χοροπηδούν και
μαίνονται οι σάτυροι, είναι ένας ανοίκειος Διόνυσος, που δεν τον ξέρουν οι κοινοί πιστοί, παρά
μόνο οι μυημένοι και είναι ήσυχος, γαλήνιος, όπως το κέντρο του τυφώνα.]72
68 Nikos Kazantzakis, letter to Elli Lambridi, 1 January 1939, the anniversary of the start of the first pil-
grimage, in possession of Yolanda Hatzi. See an alternative view in Charles S. Taylor, “Some Thoughts
on Nietzsche, Kazantzakis and the Meaning of Art,” Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983), 379–86: 383–6.
69 Elli Lambridi, letter to Nikos Kazantzakis, 8 January 1939. This passage is opaque, but it seems to
suggest disassociation or indifference despite the whirling of life. This is supported by Kazantzakis’
description in Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, 85: “If only human beings could maintain this intox-
ication! Yet not with screeches and Dionysiac capers, but with serenity, discipline, and immobility.”
Also he writes 14 November 1914, from Mt. Athos: “Down with philology … All my power concentrated
on Dionysos-Christ-Tha” (55).
70 For example, BT, Attempt at Self-Criticism 1 and 5, as well as BT 3 and 24.
71 Lambridi, Smoke, 66. The short story suggests that they also made a pilgrimage to Lucerne pre-
sumably to the site where the famous photo of Nietzsche, Rée and von Salomé was taken.
72 Lambridi, Smoke, 68.
The unfamiliar Dionysus seems to be described in England where Kazantzakis writes:

“Apollo dreamed and saw the beauty of the world in serene forms. Fortified within his
own individuality, even in the midst of the stormy sea of phenomena, he was able to
stand calm and confident, motionless, revelling in the tempest of the dream.”73
The model of half-satyr, half-god favoured by Lambridi is a complicated amalgam
of a more traditional model of the reflective philosopher, who rather than facing an
abyss of terrifying meaninglessness as an ascetic, is engaged in the complex rela-
tionality of nature, symbolized by the whirling satyrs. This relational engagement
with nature must be considered as a necessary aspect of all philosophical thinking
whether rejected or affirmed. It is expressed affirmatively by thinkers who compre-
hend that they are separate and sovereign insofar as they respond to others who, with
parrhesia and Redlichkeit, have called them to do justice to and for life. Rather than
searching for a reunion with nature, or a withdrawal into unity with an all-powerful
singularity, Lambridi requires that the philosopher responds to this community of
others with creative energy, working for a concrete human future rather than uttering
despairing cries of forsakenness. “Give me a god who can dance,” she seems to say,
“not one nailed to a cross.”
The debate concerns the use by Kazantzakis of terms such as “sober,” “still dance”
and “silent cry,” which Lambridi finds to be “too quiet,” too ascetic. For Lambridi, the
quiet model advocates that the philosopher attain an indifference to everyday life,
which Kazantzakis seems to adopt as a kind of Kantian safe place within the hurri-
cane. It is not that Nietzsche does not value solitude, but that there is a recognition
that some contemplation of a deeper association is required in order to be able to
successfully transmit an aesthetic response to life which is also “for life,” represented
by the face of Dionysus-Zagreus (following the Orphic Phanes) rather than to treat this
separation in itself as a source for abstract wisdom. For Nietzsche, we are all at sea,
whether we accept this or not, and we should affirm this. Kazantzakis becomes too
detached to be effectively inspiring. For Lambridi, there is also a need to be inspired
at a chthonic level and to transmit both sides together in philosophy.
Nietzsche is critical of the belief in the pathos of truth based in a capacity for
internalization and disassociation, which is more than a suspension of sensibility
but its actual negation in detachment and disinterestedness. This is to deny that
the Dionysian engagement in the uncertainty of life is perpetually overcoming and
transcending the will to reify the pathos of truth. The quiet Dionysus as a source of
intoxication in thought could also problematically refer to the sober Dionysus of early
Christian appropriations in which one is intoxicated by otherworldly spirit and which
could be related to the passivity attributed to Jesus rather than actively descending
73 Kazantzakis, England, 191. See page 192 where he describes the tragic hero as “sparkling calmly
in the grace of Apollo.”
into beauty.74 However, the socio-political engagement with others leads Kazantzakis’
model of “sober inebriation” to the heroic type, with the fiery evangelism of Paul
seeming closer to his meaning. This requires complete rejection of the significance of
the chthonic Dionysian, which is made into the metaphysical opposite of the good,
despite the argument proceeding from an event of an undergoing of pathos. Nietzsche
is clear that the feelings and the body, considered as the “great passion” (grosse Lei-
denschaft) determined by the Dionysian affects are the seat of “great reason” (grosse
Vernunft), of Dionysian wisdom and in turn of “great politics.”75 The possibility of a
basis for politics is another issue for Lambridi – how the satyr-dance can be brought
into the polis, something like the question posed in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, where the
answer given is to provide a place for the chthonic forces within society as a kind of
sanctuary: to worship them equally as part of life.
While Kazantzakis takes the model of the Dionysian into the personal ascent,
Lambridi uses it to affirm life with others. In Empedocles (1976), written in English
and published after her death, Lambridi further elaborates the model of the philoso-
pher, where authenticity requires conjoining the poetic to reason, as well as to admit,
in the face of eternity, to being baffled. Nonetheless, we must understand what we
are being asked of by the Sibyl, and this is not subservience, but justice for life.76 This
pre-Platonic Greek model of the tragic philosopher, which presents the philosopher
as half-animal, half-god, in love with life, is rejected by Kazantzakis.77
Nietzsche attempts to express an earthly transcending of the principle of indi-
viduation and the primacy of reason. He also attempts to overcome the culturally
determined model of an autonomous thinker approaching eternal truths. In undergo-
ing an interruption to this supposed autonomy – in undergoing delirium induced by
otherness – we are not left as organic non-conscious bodies, but as conscious bodies
operating in terms of our unique history, and we are also aware of this uniqueness
and separation from otherness at a basic but important level – beyond the opposition
of good and evil. This Dionysian mania, an obsession with the god, originates exter-
nally and pushes the subject into the self-overcoming of overfullness and the need
to replace the gift of dross with gold. Nietzsche describes the mania as the establish-
ment of a “bond […] renewed by magic,” and refers to “blissful ecstasy,” “innermost
74 Compare A 39 and 42, for example. See Courtney J. P. Freisen, Reading Dionysus: Euripides Bac-
chae and the Cultural Contestations of the Greeks, Jews, Romans and Christians, Tübingen 2015, 202–4.
An association with Hegel’s Dionysus passing over into Christian spirit would be too strong, though
an association with Kierkegaard has been made by Jerry H. Gill, “Kazantzakis and Kierkegaard: Some
Comparisons,” in Darren J. N. Middleton / Peter Bien (eds.), God’s Struggler: Religion in the Writings of
Nikos Kazantzakis, Macon, GA 1966, 169–88. It seems that both Kazantzakis and Kierkegaard could be
said to have gone too far with spirit and lost contact with the concrete conditions of life.
75 Z I, On the Despisers of the Body; cf. Z I, On the Hinterworldly; Z I, On the Joys and Passions; A 5.
76 Helle Lambridis, Empedocles: A Philosophical Investigation, forew. Marshal McLuhan, Tuscaloosa,
AL 1976, 1 ff., 34, 84–6, and 143–4.
77 Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, 259.
ground,” “to the point of complete self-forgetting,” “shivering in awe,” experiencing

a sense of “primordial unity,” and “higher community,” “like a god,” a “work of art,”
as taught by the Mysteries and spoken by an oracle (BT 1).78
The ideal of Dionysus among the satyrs becomes the exemplar for human exist-
ence occurring through an extension of thinking which Nietzsche calls “macrocos-
mic,” through the initiatory engagement with a Dionysian other who commands us
to speak to them with Redlichkeit.79 The communality of the event, as described by
Nietzsche, includes the “ideal spectators,” who are also cast in the role of Lambridi’s
Dionysus, and relies on the expression of a love of life at the same time as an unlimit-
able responsibility which could not be passed off to the gods.
In 1939, Lambridi wrote a long serialized critique of Kazantzakis’s Odyssey (1938),
in which she apparently has the Kazantzakis model of the sincere ascetic in mind
when she claims that the metaphysics which underlie the work are not compatible
with any believable notion of human being:80
Yet the mythical element is “artificial,” affected. The work is too serious for myth – too involved
with personal struggle. Yet if we take Odysseus as simply an individual man, then all the weight
of the events is unbearable and certainly unconvincing. The question is: does the poem work as
a story? It doesn’t – certainly not at first. We have to start not in the simple events, but with the
metaphysical meaning.
[…] the two world-views employed by Kazantzakis are incompatible […], the one refutes the other
and […] it is impossible, absolutely impossible, even for the most metaphysical mind, to consider
the first as a stage of the second.
The first is the logical consequence of European intellectual development – after all the theories
which cancel each other, one thing remains: action, even purposeless action. The second is the
Asiatic smiling denial of reality. Kazantzakis aspired […] to a synthesis of these two basic concep-
tions […]. I don’t see that he succeeded.
It is a maniacal reversal of values that springs from the scorn and impotent rage of the higher
[being] for who the earth and civilization that begot him now will not put up with him; it is the
obstinate supporting of unreason against the reason that suffocates; it is the cry of Nietzsche and
the despairing hours of Christ.81
Kazantzakis responded angrily later in 1939 with an “Open Letter to Elli Lambridi,”
in the journal Neohellenica Grammata, which bluntly and rudely asserts that she had
78 I have consulted the following Nietzsche translations: The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs,
Cambridge 2008; Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge 1986; The Gay Science,
trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge 2007; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian
del Caro, Cambridge 2006; The Anti-Christ, trans. Carol Diethe and Adrian Del Caro, Stanford, CA 2021;
Ecce Homo, trans. Carol Diethe, Duncan Large, Adrian Del Caro and Alan D. Schrift, Stanford, CA 2021.
79 The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. and ed. Greg Whitlock, Chicago 2001, 9, n. 6; PHG 3.
80 Elli Lambridi, “Commentary on Kazantzakis’ Odyssey,” Neohellenica Grammata, 4 March 1939, 11.
81 Notes from a transcription of Elli’s articles in Neohellenica Grammata, kindly provided by Peter
Bien in 2015. See Bien, Politics of the Spirit, 35–6.
misunderstood the book.82 In effect she is claiming that Kazantzakis fails to adhere
to the relational model of friendship based in both agape and logos toward which she
thought the two writers were striving together. It appears that, for Lambridi, this was
another form of betrayal. She writes to him “I did not betray you.”83
4 The Good European

In his early work on Nietzsche, Kazantzakis echoes Nietzsche’s negative claims about
socialist notions of equality and the politics of enfranchisement.84 It is suggested that
a healthy state would reject the notion of equality and democratic rule, considered as
sources of modern decadence and nihilism found in the notions of suffering as sin and
pleasure as sin; considered as a despising of philia within life.85 Kazantzakis accepts
one of the least palatable interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which, through
a spurious association of natural value, strength and right, ignores the possibility of
strong and justly created laws in any political system. In the early 1900s, Kazantzakis
seems not to oppose the uses made of Nietzsche’s work by differing forms of fascism.
This attitude has been taken as the basis for explaining Kazantzakis’s advocacy of
Italian fascism.86
Kazantzakis’s views changed soon afterwards, when he rejected these totalitarian
views. In Berlin in 1923, Kazantzakis had been taken through the poorer quarters of
the city with a young Bolshevik women, probably Rahel Lipstein, and – transfixed
by the poverty and neglect – underwent an epiphany of justice.87 Kazantzakis came
to advocate a form of perpetual revolution with ideals of varying degrees of concrete-
ness, including basic socialist elements, such as the redistribution of wealth and the
breaking down of capitalist power. In the preface to Askitiki, he writes:
A group of communists in Germany, most of whom were Jewish – Russian, Polish or German –
began feeling a strong urge for intellectual freedom. As they considered the absolute materialist
philosophy of Communism to be too narrow and not in keeping with the times, they endeavoured
to find a line parallel to the economic point of view, and a spiritual expression in accord with our
82 Nikos Kazantzakis, “Open Letter to Elli Lambridi,” Neohellenica Grammata, 22 April 1939, 2.
83 Lambridi to Kazantzakis, 1939.
84 Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche, 32. See Gunnar de Boel, “The French Sources between the Young
Kazantzakis and Nietzsche,” Historical Review 5 (2008), 107–20, for a discussion of Kazantzakis’ work
in Paris. In short, de Boel finds Kazantzakis to have substantially used the work of Henri Lichten-
berger, La Philosophie de Nietzsche, Paris 1898.
85 Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche, 42, 48.
86 To Galatea from Naples, around 21 January 1924, in Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis,
191–3.
87 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 370 ff.
conceptions of the time – beyond any religious or metaphysical hopes close at hand – that might
rally to it all those feeling the same way.
I took on the task to give expression to the abstract ideas that united our small heretical group
and distinguished it from the millions of orthodox Communists. I could not do this other than in
the form most befitting my temperament: the poetical.
Let this Ascetics [Askitiki] be considered the first attempt to express these ideas; the first attempt
to articulate a metacommunist creed.88
It can be argued that Kazantzakis was mistaken from the start about Nietzsche’s polit-
ical views. In the early works, Nietzsche rejects any form of central state government,
making him an opponent of left and right totalitarianism in much the same way as
he opposes state religion in European cultures. However, this is not to advocate elitist
aristocratism. Nietzsche, through his contact with the works of Alexander Herzen,
advocates something like the canton system of Switzerland for Europe rather than
any form of aristocracy or central government:
The practical outcome of this spreading democratization will first of all be a European league of
nations [europäischer Völkerbund] within which each individual nation, delimited according to
geographical fitness, will possess the status and rights of a canton [Cantons]: in this process the
historical recollections of the former nations will be of little account, since the sense of reverence
for such things will gradually be totally uprooted by the domination of the democratic principle,
which thirsts for innovations and is greedy for experiments. The corrections of frontiers which
prove necessary will be so executed as to serve the interests of the large cantons and at the same
time those of the whole union, but not to honour the memory of some grizzled past. (HH II, WS
292)89
Considered in a general sense, Lambridi also advocates a form of communalism

often associated with anarchism. In this, she is much closer to Nietzsche’s posi-
tion than Kazantzakis, with his interpretation of strength as domination. Her “new
people” come much closer to Nietzsche’s children’s land or Blessed Isles than does
Kazantzakis’ notions of right and state. Nonetheless, outgrowing borders and tran-
scending nations in becoming the Good European seems to reconcile Kazantzakis
with Nietzsche.90
88 Preface to Kazantzakis, Askitiki.

89 Perhaps a reference to the Cantonal Revolution in Spain based in Proudhonian anarchism.
Nietzsche’s exposure to German socialism and anarchism through Malwida von Meysenbug or even
Wagner and the place of such ideas in his work has been little documented (see Karol Berger, Beyond
Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche, Oakland, CA 2017, 360). This is the only place that Nietzsche men-
tions such an idea, however, he is not an advocate of the nationalist-capitalist state (Z I, On the New
Idol).
90 Kazantzakis, England, 186. On the “Good European” see Katherine Graham, “Thus Spoke Zara-
thustra and a Europe Yet to Come,” in Marco Brusotti / Michael McNeal / Corinna Schubert / Herman
Siemens (eds.), European/Supra-European: Cultural Encounters in Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Berlin 2020,
107–16, and other papers of this volume.
Nietzsche’s political position on equality is more like “from each according

to their ability, to each according to their need,” arguing that there is necessarily
unequal participation of all in society, where all abilities and needs are unequal. All
abilities should work for the highest achievement, with material needs satisfied as
evenly as possible. This is an argument for advanced culture rather than econom-
ics. For Nietzsche, the most valuable aspects of society are its cultural heights of a
“transfigured physis” which requires working for the cultural conditions of the lives
of others while also working for the physical conditions of life. It is this kind of amoral
standpoint that he shares most closely with Herzen, who was a reader of Schopen-
hauer and not Hegel.91
It is arguable that Nietzsche adopted a good deal of Herzen’s worldview after 1872.
The major influence in this was Malwida von Meysenbug who had become governess
to Natalie and Olga, two of Herzen’s children. In Sorrento in 1877, elements of this
worldview went into the sections on politics in Human, All Too Human (1878–80).92
Nietzsche advocates justice rather than violent demands and sees this occurring
through an evolutionary process, with a key issue being the abolition of the very
rich and the very poor (HH II, WS 285). We can say that, at the very least, Nietzsche
opposes the ruthless irresponsibility of what we now call “absolute capitalism.” His
criticism of democratic processes raises the issue of how a government that could
address economic inequality would be formed. Moreover, though he does seem to
accept that democracy would be the only possible form of legitimate government,
he argues for the end of nation-states as strongly as he opposes the objective history
of revolutionary socialism (HH II, WS 292). Thus, when he talks of “a democracy […]
to come [Demokratie als von etwas Kommendem]”, its form is not limited to a repre-
sentative politics and especially not to a nation-state: “For the three great enemies of
independence in the above-named threefold sense are the indigent, the rich and the
parties. I am speaking of democracy as of something yet to come” (HH II, WS 293).93
91 For a summary of Nietzsche’s early engagement see Andrea Orsucci, “Im ‘Zeitalter der Verglei-
chung’: Nietzsche, das Problem der Wertschätzungen und das Erbe Feuerbachs,” in Brusotti / Mc-
Neal / Schubert / Siemens (eds.), European/Supra-Europea, 259–82: 262–3.
92 HH I 438–82. See also HH II, WS 285 and 286.
93 See HH I 472 as well as HH II, WS 230, 275, 281, and 292. See also Matthew P. Bennett, “On a Demo-
cratic Future: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Democracy to Come,” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Philoso-
phia 1 (2012), 103–20; Jörg H. Gleiter, “Die Cyklopenbauten und Saturnalien der Maschine,” Nietzsche-
forschung 21 (2014), 141–8: 145; Udo Tietz / Cathleen Kantner, “Staatskritik und Antiinstitutionalismus
bei Nietzsche und Marx,” in Steffen Dietzsch / Claudia Terne (eds.), Nietzsches Perspektiven: Denken
und Dichten in der Moderne, Berlin 2014, 133–62: 153; Nicola Nicodemo, “Die moralische Aufgabe der
‘guten Europäer’ und die ‘zukünftigen Europäer’,” in Dietzsch / Terne (eds.), Nietzsches Perspektiven,
385–406: 400; Werner Stegmaier, Orientierung im Nihilismus – Luhmann meets Nietzsche, Berlin 2016,
327; Werner Stegmaier, Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie: Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs
der „Fröhlichen Wissenschaft“, Berlin 2012, 347; and Iris Därmann, “Missverhältnisse: Nietzsche und
die Sklaverei,” Nietzsche-Studien 48 (2019), 49–67: 64.
5 Eternal Recurrence in The New People (2118)

The discussion of eternal recurrence in The New People develops slowly throughout
the novel with hints and ambiguity at first turning into fully blown and terrifying rec-
ollections.94 Halfway through the book, Petros asks:
P. “Do you really believe we are going to live again, sometime on this earth?”
T. “But I don’t like discussing these things. I prefer to leave myself in the hands of destiny,
or matter or spirit or whatever you like to call it. It does seem a pity and a waste, after all
the trouble the cells and electrons and protons have gone through the ages to produce me,
that they should let me – and their trouble – be wiped out in an accident or by an illness.
Or maybe they have kept the formula somewhere? That is what I would like to think: that
whatever presides over the world, may have found my formula worth repeating – identical
or amended. Amended is better, don’t you think?”
P. “And you would remember the previous […] formula? For if you didn’t it would be the same
as if you were obliterated.”
T. “Not quite, if we knew that we must live again and did all we could to help the amendment
of the formula. What would you like to be if you were to live again?”95
Petros responds by jokingly describing conquering emperors and licentious court

poets. Tatiana retorts with a model of one who works for the community. While, at
this stage, she is able to laugh off the notion of recurrence, later, with the visions
becoming stronger, she is almost unable to distinguish between the two lives:
She stopped, aghast. It was out at last. The thought nagging at her mind all these months. She
had tried to push it to the back of her consciousness, under the threshold, as the psychologists
put it. But it would rise again and again in unexpected guise, in unguarded moments. They had
both lived before, known each other, loved and suffered; he had felt it that first night he lay
beside her, shivering with his inner cold, calling her Helen, crying in delight and anguish, and
then falling asleep in an ecstasy of pain and recovered happiness. […] it had been in the twen-
tieth century. The details, at least some of them, stood out, some awe-inspiring and admirable,
others sordid and terrible. He had twice loved her and twice abandoned her to malicious gossip,
persecution, and public contempt, for no reason at all, without awareness of the enormity of
what he was doing.96
She, Tatiana, was perhaps destined to return to earth again and again in order to fulfil these old
velleities one by one, as she had done this time in imaginative literature […]. A great weariness
and at the same time an intense excitement seized her. Yes, she would accept the task, only she
prayed not to be burdened again with the memory of all the lives […]. Help! She wanted to shout,
let this not go on, I can’t stand it much longer.97
94 Lambridi wrote the novel on the back of election flyers from the 1963 election in which she stood
as a socialist candidate. The transcription of the 557 pages was completed in 2021.
95 Lambridi, The New People, 323–4.
The force driving the recurrence is remorse. If you caused deep suffering to another,
you would have to return and redeem this mistake. The relationship Elli/Tatiana had
with her daughter fills with her with remorse, and dictates to her the value of love
within life above all abstract thought. Shortly before Lambridi’s arrival in Greece
from England in 1945, her daughter, Niki, was injured by shrapnel during the violence
of Dekemvriana and was then killed when her ambulance was bombed by a British
plane. The New People describes Tatiana informing Petros about the event:
And later another great misfortune struck her, and he had again shown his insensibility, his lack
of humanity, by saying that god gave us to bear as much as we were able to.
Blast his God, she thought, angry at that centuries-old taunt.98
Tatiana describes the recollection of her daughter and her previous life:
Behind her beautiful oval face another face arose, younger, more perfect, equally handsome, the
face of the one to whom she had owed the supreme ultimate love and she had denied it to her
and she had died. She stretched her arms, invoking her from across the gulf of time, begging for
an impossible pardon which would be granted and would only add to the burden of shattering
remorse. “Tell me what to do,” she silently begged …99
By this stage, Tatiana has already met the equivalent of the Soothsayer in Zarathustra,
who tells her that her fate is to return again (for a third time):
“Where shall I be?”

“I don’t know,” said the old lady uneasily.
“Shall I be dead?”
“There is no death really, not in the sense people talk about it. For the time being, you will be
nowhere, then in some hundreds of years – not many, two or three at most, you will be there
again, but different.”100
While their models of eternal recurrence are significantly different, the philosoph-
ical point of adopting any such model is the same: to encourage responsibility and
Redlichkeit in engagements with others, regardless of the nature of the recurrence.
Nietzsche considers that the belief in the eternal recurrence of the same is a require-
ment for the affirmation of life. Without the minimalist ontology of the spatio-tem-
poral whole provided by cycles of the same, it is not possible to avoid a sense of
transcendent purpose without a collapse into nihilism. Only when one has adopted
and affirmed this minimal ontology can one situate oneself within life according to
Redlichkeit, considered as spoken straightforwardness transmitting inspired speak-
ing for the future represented by the benevolent face of Dionysus. As the calmly
98 Lambridi, The New People, 383 (the reference is possibly to Paul, 2 Cor. 9:8).
seated Dionysus, now accepting the necessity of the purposeless flux, humanity
assumes a form of benevolence occurring as a philosophical sensibility of separa-
tion, and the identification as one whose primary engagement with life is as one who
is responsible for others. Through this authentic separation and the impossibility of
determining a measure for responsibility for the other, an ethos of responsibility is
extended to all humanity. It is to have become the expression of the affirmation of
life through the human; an expression which can be preserved following the event
and is expressed as an enthusiasm and inspiration based in a heightened sense of
the value of life in the terms noted: aesthetic, religious, scientific, political, philo-
sophical. Such a stance is to be true to the earth, or to extend the ethical sensibility
associated with Dionysian interruption to the planet and beyond; to consider the
outside as such a Dionysian alterity, and clearly associate oneself with “planetary
alterity.”101 At the end, however, Tatiana feels she can only face the eternal return
alone and rejects her community. Is the affirmative ethical sense then a noble lie?
Does it exist Mudita? Is it real?
As things were now, at this stage of the world, people were not ready to accept even the remotest
possibility of the eternal return. No, she had to bear this alone. […] She had to live with it, with
the memory and the sorrow and the remorse and the longing. It was an awful penance; but to die,
to escape, was cowardly. She had been cowardly before, but never in the great things, which one
could not, should not, shake off.102
Despite her failure, Tatiana recognizes the possibilities for the future, which exceed
her failures. This possibility of affirming eternal recurrence beyond one’s own life is
exemplified in the characters of the “new people”:
There was a different quality here; a subtlety; a delicacy. Something undefinable and impalpable
permeated the atmosphere. No one was indoctrinating them about what to do, or how to cor-
rectly respond to the actions of others, or what to aim for. Tatiana remembered their movements
around Svetlana on the day she left. Surely they had not practiced that beforehand, but they
were in complete harmony. It was not formulaic, or blind instinct. Perhaps it was instinct filtered
through both thought and the highest feelings that human beings were capable of: an ethical
sense. She felt her heart lightening, expressing a wordless belief that something fundamentally
new was developing in this remote isolated place, renounced and denounced by the sorry rem-
nants of the previous age.103
101 A term inspired by Jean Wahl, Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings, ed. Alan D.
Schrift and Ian Alexander Moore, New York 2017, 161.
Bibliography
Anemoyannis, Yiorgos: Nikos Kazantzakis Writing … to Yannis Stavridakis: Unpublished Letters,
Athens 1995
Bennett, Matthew P.: “On a Democratic Future: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Democracy to Come,” Studia
Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Philosophia 1 (2012), 103–20
Berger, Karol: Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche, Oakland, CA 2017
Bien, Peter: “Kazantzakis’ Nietzscheanism,” Journal of Modern Literature 2/2 (1971/72), 245–66
Bien, Peter: Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, vol. II, Princeton, NJ 2007
Bien, Peter: The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, Princeton, NJ 2012
Boel, Gunnar de: “The French Sources between the Young Kazantzakis and Nietzsche,” Historical
Review 5 (2008), 107–20
Därmann, Iris: “Missverhältnisse: Nietzsche und die Sklaverei,” Nietzsche-Studien 48 (2019),
49–67
Ercole, Venessa: Nietzsche, Care of Self and the Risk of Dionysian Transfiguration, PhD dissertation,
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia 2019
Freisen, Courtney J. P.: Reading Dionysus: Euripides Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of the
Greeks, Jews, Romans and Christians, Tübingen 2015
Gill, Jerry H.: “Kazantzakis and Kierkegaard: Some Comparisons,” in Darren J. N. Middleton / Peter
Bien (eds.), God’s Struggler: Religion in the Writings of Nikos Kazantzakis, Macon, GA 1966,
169–88
Gleiter, Jörg H.: “Die Cyklopenbauten und Saturnalien der Maschine,” Nietzscheforschung 21 (2014),
141–8
Graham, Katherine: “Thus Spoke Zarathustra and a Europe Yet to Come,” in Marco Brusotti / Michael
McNeal / Corinna Schubert / Herman Siemens (eds.), European/Supra-European: Cultural
Encounters in Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Berlin 2020, 107–16
Hatzi, Yolanda (ed.): Correspondence with Mudita: Nikos Kazantzakis – Elli Lambridi, 1927–1957,
Athens 2018
Hatzi, Yolanda: “Emeis,” in Elli Lambridi, Introduction to Philosophy, Athens 2004, 25–6
Kazantzakis, Helen N.: Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on His Letters, trans. Amy Mims, New
York 1968
Kazantzakis, Nikos: Askitiki, unpublished manuscript, trans. Elli Lambridi, 1927
Kazantzakis, Nikos: England: A Travel Journal, trans. Amy Mims, New York 1965
Kazantzakis, Nikos: “Friedrich Nietzsche,” Eleftheros Typos, 22 and 26 August 1926
Kazantzakis, Nikos: Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, trans. Odysseus
Makridis, Albany, NY 2006
Kazantzakis, Nikos: Journeying: Travels in Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem, Cyprus, trans. Themi Valsils
and Theodore Valsils, Boston 1975
Kazantzakis, Nikos: “Mudita and I,” Eleftheros Typos, 4 July 1926
Kazantzakis, Nikos: “Open Letter to Elli Lambridi,” Neohellenica Grammata, 22 April 1939
Kazantzakis, Nikos: Report to Greco, trans. Peter Bien, New York 1965
Kazantzakis, Nikos: The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, New York 1960
Kazantzakis, Nikos: Zorba the Greek, trans. Peter Bien, New York 2014
Lambridi, Elli: “Commentary on Kazantzakis’ Odyssey,” Neohellenica Grammata, 4 March 1939
Lambridi, Elli: Empedocles: A Philosophical Investigation, forew. Marshal McLuhan, Tuscaloosa,
AL 1976
Lambridi, Elli: Introduction to Philosophy, Athens 2004
Lambridi, Elli: Καπνός ήταν … [Smoke], ed. Yolanda Hatzi, Athens 2019
Lambridi, Elli: The New People: A Story for Our Times, unpublished novel, transcribed 2021
Lemm, Vanessa: Homo Natura: Nietzsche, Philosophical Anthropology and Biopolitics, Edinburgh
2020
Makridis, Odysseus: “Introduction to Kazantzakis,” in Nikos Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche on the
Philosophy of Right and the State, trans. Odysseus Makridis, Albany, NY 2006
Nicodemo, Nicola: “Die moralische Aufgabe der ‘guten Europäer’ und die ‘zukünftigen Europäer’,”
in Steffen Dietzsch / Claudia Terne (eds.), Nietzsches Perspektiven: Denken und Dichten in der
Moderne, Berlin 2014, 385–406
Orsucci, Andrea: “Im ‘Zeitalter der Vergleichung’: Nietzsche, das Problem der Wertschätzungen
und das Erbe Feuerbachs,” in Marco Brusotti / Michael McNeal / Corinna Schubert / Herman
Siemens (eds.), European/Supra-European: Cultural Encounters in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,
Berlin 2020, 259–82
Reinsch, Diether Roderich: “Nikos Kazantzakis’ Alexis Zorbas und Friedrich Nietzsche,”
Nietzsche-Studien 13 (1984), 600–16
Stegmaier, Werner: Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie: Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs
der „Fröhlichen Wissenschaft“, Berlin 2012
Stegmaier, Werner: Orientierung im Nihilismus – Luhmann meets Nietzsche, Berlin 2016
Taylor, Charles S.: “Some Thoughts on Nietzsche, Kazantzakis and the Meaning of Art,”
Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983), 379–86
Tietz, Udo / Kantner, Cathleen: “Staatskritik und Antiinstitutionalismus bei Nietzsche und Marx,”
in Steffen Dietzsch / Claudia Terne (eds.), Nietzsches Perspektiven: Denken und Dichten in der
Moderne, Berlin 2014, 133–62
Wahl, Jean: Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Ian
Alexander Moore, New York 2017

Murray - 2022 - The Nietzsche Pilgrimage of Nikos Kazantzakis and

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Murray - 2022 - The Nietzsche Pilgrimage of Nikos Kazantzakis and

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beitrag zur Rezeptionsforschung

Peter Durno Murray

Keywords: Nikos Kazantzakis, Elli Lambridi, Dionysian, Responsibility, Eternal recur-

1 The Nietzsche Pilgrimage (1918)

Dr. Peter D. Murray, Freelance Philosopher, Athens 104-35, Greece,

Nietzsche-Studien 51 (2022), 305–329 Published online April 01, 2022

22 Kazantzakis, England, 187. See EH, Z 1.

Στο Braunwald το διάβαζες όταν είσουνα θυμωμένη. 19–24 Μάη 1918

2 Kazantzakis and Nietzsche, Politics and the State

of human beings in terms of their fitness to rule is condemned in favour of forms of

40 Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche, 59.

Kazantzakis’ philosophical incompatibility with Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal

52 Kazantzakis, England, 197.

55 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 328.

3 Kazantzakis and Lambridi on the Dionysian

61 Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 334.

65 Lambridi, The New People, 102.

The unfamiliar Dionysus seems to be described in England where Kazantzakis writes:

ground,” “to the point of complete self-forgetting,” “shivering in awe,” experiencing

4 The Good European

Considered in a general sense, Lambridi also advocates a form of communalism

88 Preface to Kazantzakis, Askitiki.

Nietzsche’s political position on equality is more like “from each according

5 Eternal Recurrence in The New People (2118)

Petros responds by jokingly describing conquering emperors and licentious court

“Where shall I be?”

You might also like

1 The Nietzsche Pilgrimage (1918)

Nietzsche-Studien 51 (2022), 305–329 Published online April 01, 2022

2 Kazantzakis and Nietzsche, Politics and the State

3 Kazantzakis and Lambridi on the Dionysian

4 The Good European

5 Eternal Recurrence in The New People (2118)