The Peasant Vision

A few writers in the past hundred years have been fortunate enough to have access simultaneously to the world of the peasant (on which European civilisation was first founded, and without which it may yet founder) and the world of modern technology, power politics and urban culture. An even smaller handful have been able to construct a lens through which they could see and record the profoundly fertile depths of peasant life without misrepresentation. I think of Tolstoy in Russia, de Maupassant in France, Mulk Raj Anand in India, and Kazantzakis in Greece. In some ways thepage 479 last writer is the most impressive. He shares Tolstoy’s unorthodox Christian humanism, de Maupassant’s clinical realism, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Marxist preoccupations, adding to these his own immense gusto.

In Christ Recrucified the peasants of a Greek village ruled by the Turks decided to enact a Passion Play; and one by one the participants, undergoing their spiritual preparation for the play, become like those originals whom they were chosen to represent. A wandering village of refugees, uprooted by the Turks, come to Lycovrissi in search of land and bread. The priests of the two villages clash; for the peasants of Lycovrissi, whose fields and olive groves are as much part of them as their hands or lungs, see the newcomers as robbers and supplanter. Manolios, the young man chosen to play the part of Christ, tries to help the people of the destitute village. And so the story rolls on, like a torrent of wine and blood and tears, with some holy war added for good measure. The greatest magnificence of the book lies in its characterisation. Everything Kazantzakis touches springs to life, sweats, curses, bellows and prays.

The Last Temptation is a fictional biography of Jesus Christ. In effect Kazantzakis represents him as a Greek and Cretan peasant. The motive is plain enough. Kazantzakis felt that the Christ of his Greek Orthodox Church lacked humanity (it is the old Byzantine tendency to represent him as more divine than human); and so he made a Jesus intensely human according to his (the author’s) experience of men, capable of human failings, though still the Son of God. One can see why the Greek Orthodox Church thought ill of Kazantzakis. The crux, the true cross of the novel is Jesus’s choice of death by torture instead of a good life as a family man. It is an extraordinary book, less down-to-earth than Christ Recrucified, yet still gripping, and full of life. Kazantzakis’s fictional presentation of Judas is peculiarly interesting. He shows him as a Zealot, a prototype of the modern revolutionary, the tough man among the disciples. A real love and reverence for Jesus, as the author understands him, shines through the struggle and paradoxes of the book.

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