RUSSIA: A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution

by Nikos Kazantzakis ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 1989

Three trips to Russia in the mid-Twenties and 1930 are mulled richly and squeezed for their juices by the Nobel-winning author (d. 1957) of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. Travel was wine to Kazantzakis' spirit and gave fullness to the vitalism that breathed through all his writing. While writing Russia, in his mid-40's, he was also composing Odyssey, his epic Homeric poem. The Russian journey fed into the energies of his poetry, since he gazed into the Russian soul with the same burning eye that sucked up Greek sunlight. More than a writer's writer, Kazantzakis was a lightning rod for the life force, however muddy that force might at times become in his fiction. Here the electric penman looks ever for the animating spirit of the Russians, not mere journalistic detail, and always lifts what might otherwise be a calendar shot of onion domes into an oozing soul-storm. His passion for the Bolshevik Revolution sometimes leads him into anti-Semitism (every Jew is ""cunning""), and only Kazantzakis would show us Russia's director general of prisons as ""overflowing with joy,"" ""governed by a large passion,"" ""happy and energetic""--a projection of the author?--while the only disbeliever in the new prison system is a cunning Jew whom Kazantzakis talks with. His portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Dostoevski, Tolstoi, and the poets Blok and Mayakovsky are brief but piercing. He draws peasant or courtroom judge with an eye for the germinal in each. When later reprinting this book in Greece, Kazantzakis reneged on its political opinions but let them stand to retain his prose's ""virginal fluff."" Great intelligence and an impatient, yearning gusto that rivals D.H. Lawrence's best travel-writing.

Pub Date: July 25, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Creative Arts

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989

Categories: NONFICTION