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Epilogue
proud of him. His burial was a big affair, and a room in the Historical
Museum has been made into a replica of his study. On the stone over
his grave there was inscribed ‘I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am
free.’ – a quotation from his own works. But the inscription was not
allowed to survive. It was deleted, as being hubristic and atheistic,
through the pressure of the church, which waged intermittent war
on Kazantzakis all his life. He was an unorthodox sort of Christian. It
is a pity that after his death he was still shown no charity.
The last of this Cretan triumvirate of novelists is Pandelis Prevelakis,
born at Rethymnon in 1909, and as one might expect of a Rethymniot,
a man of letters. (The proverb goes, ‘Canea for weapons, Rethymnon
for letters, Heraklion for wine.’) Prevelakis was a close friend of
Kazantzakis, and wrote a study of him. He has also written a biography
of El Greco. Also The Chronicle of a City, an account of his home town
Rethymnon; Desolate Crete, an account of the 1866 insurrection; and a
large three-volumed novel The Cretan, which covers the fifty years
before independence. Personally I would much rather hear Prevelakis
quietly and reflectively musing on Rethymnon than narrating the
revolts of Crete. The Chronicle is a beautiful book – it is available in
French – and tells of an unfamiliar side of Crete; whereas the revolts
are staple diet. But the important thing to note is that although
Prevelakis has studied and worked and lived in Paris and Salonika and
Athens, almost all his works are devoted to things Cretan. He carried
Crete around within him as his City; and, as he wrote himself, it was a
consolation to him in his exile.
All three of our novelists, then, were animated by an extraordinary
love for Crete and her history, her ‘myth’ – the sort of love which in
England has been unfashionable since about the middle of the First
World War. And these three are not exceptions. Cretans, I am sure
from meeting them in all sorts of places, love their island even more
than other Greeks love their own particular place. The pages of the
Cretan periodical Cretan New Year are always full of articles ranging
from intense patriotism to a fairly crude nationalism. The three novelists
not only draw on myth, they help create and preserve it. And this
being so, it is a pity that Kazantzakis’s work is read while the other
two are neglected, for they complete the picture. Between them they
provide a rich and comprehensive panorama of a hundred years of
Cretan history. But this vein has now been worked enough. No Cretan,
I guess, will write importantly about that heroic age again. For the
writers as well as the ordinary Cretans there must be a revolution of
attitudes.
M* 173