I came to the Austrian German poet Trakl depressed and didn’t leave any happier. His short oeuvre, written in the final years before the first world war, is not for the faint of heart. There is very little joy to be found here, and what beauty there is in his poems is tainted by an overwhelming sense of decay. But what Trakl does offer, above and beyond his despair and endless talk of decline, is a unique view of the world, and a unique language of symbols for appreciating it. Each of his poems is a mysterious mood-piece, filled with images whose interpretations are never definite. Rilke’s view, that reading Trakl is like being “an outsider pressed against panes of glass”, looking into a space of experience which “like the space in a mirror, cannot be entered”, hits the mark.
Georg Trakl. Intensely sad, his poems reflect a sensibility that felt deeply the spiritual turbulence of his age. A turbulence that continues into our own and leaves his poetry mysterious and fresh even now.
Trakl is a strange poet, but he is also one whose work is tragically beautiful, and I hope to show that in these few translations below. His concerns seem perfect for our own age. The empty spiritual gulf left by religion’s decline, the feeling of foreboding as the world enters a new era without any ballast or sense that we are prepared for its challenges, and even the loss of a deep understanding of and connection to the natural world – all these are just as relevant now as they were as the First World War erupted. To face Trakl’s dark world is to be given a way of visualising the darkness of our own. So let’s begin.
The Poems
Trakl’s poems are made up of short and simple sentences, that are nonetheless often hard to understand. There’s a lot of ambiguity due to the syntax and punctuation, and whenever I’ve met something unclear, I’ve aimed to convey that same uncertainty in the English. After all, I’m trying to translate a mood and an atmosphere, not a technical document. If I have managed that, then I can be happy with how these have turned out. Following the poems is a bit about Trakl’s life and a conclusion.
Dark breath in green twigs. Blue blossoms float around the face Of the lonely one, his golden step Dying under the olive tree. The night is filled with the fluttering of drunk wings. So quietly bleeds out humility, Dew, which slowly drips from the blossoming thorn. The mercy of shining arms Embraces a breaking heart.
This painting (Starry Night), by Edvard Munch, strikes me as a good representation of my feeling as I read the final two stanzas of “Spiritual Twilight.” Munch was working at about the same time as Trakl and I feel like both of them are often similar in tone and image.
Spiritual Twilight (DE) Silence encounters at the forest’s hem Its dark quarry. On the hill the evening wind ends quietly,
The blackbird’s cries are stilled, And the soft flutes of autumn Go silent in their pipes.
On a black cloud You sail, drunk on the poppy, The ponds of the night,
The stars in the heavens. The sister’s lunar voice is always calling Through the spirit’s night.
The Sun (DE) Daily comes the yellow sun across the hill. The forest, the dark beast, man – hunter or shepherd – All are beautiful.
Reddish rises the fish in the green pond. Under the round heavens The fisherman quietly rows in his blue boat.
Slowly ripens the grape, the grain. When the day silently ends, A good and an evil is prepared.
When the world becomes night, The wanderer quietly lifts his heavy eyes; The sun breaks out of a gloomy chasm.
The Sun, also by Munch. I wonder if, had Trakl lived to grow older, he too would have found way of looking at and representing the world that moved beyond fear and anxiety.
In Spring (DE) Softly sank from dark steps the snow; In the shadow of the tree The lovers raise their rosy lids.
Star and night always follow The dark calls of the mariners; And the oars beat softly in time.
Soon on the ruined wall blooms The violet; The temples of the lonely one silently grow green.
Remembrance, a buried hope, Preserves this brown wood frame, Where dahlias hang above - An ever stiller homecoming; The ruined garden, the dark reflection Of childhood years, So that from blue lids the tears plunge Unstoppably. Now swim the glassy minutes Of gloom Over and into the night.
Who was Trakl? Biography and its Absence
Georg Trakl was born in 1887 and died towards the end of 1914, likely by his own hand. He was born in Salzburg to a family of not great financial means, but all the same this is where he was most happy. His relations with his sister Grete, herself a musical prodigy, may well have been incestuous. In his poems Trakl often writes about the “sister”, but it’s difficult to know what to make of that. What is more clear is that Trakl developed a drug addiction that he supported through becoming a pharmacist. Once war broke out Trakl joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer on the Eastern Front. By this point his mood was extremely unstable and the experience of the battle of Grodek, though it led to perhaps is most famous poem, also led to Trakl’s final breakdown and probable suicide of a cocaine overdose.
Yet all of this is almost irrelevant in the poems. As is clear above, Trakl hides himself from view. The experience of reading his work is rather like floating through a deep fog. There is nothing so solid as an “I”, even a lyrical “I”, to hold on to. The places of his life certainly make their appearances, including Grodek itself, but always more as symbols and maps of an internal world than as real settings, at least it seems that way to me.
The lovely German edition of Trakl’s work from Reclam which I’ve been reading also includes many of his letters. But these, too, are not of much use for understanding his poems. We can hear Trakl’s own voice, always in pain, and always suffering. It only caused me to feel a terrible and futile desire to help the poor man, but the poems remained – perhaps thankfully – impenetrable. “I was terribly sick for a few days, I think from a mourning that cannot be put into words”. Shortly before he dies he writes “I feel like I’ve already almost passed over into the beyond”. What I like about him so much is that his sensibility really does seem to belong to another world, no matter how much suffering seems to be involved.
“I feel like I’ve already almost passed over into the beyond.” The painting is Munch’s Self Portrait in Hell. Trakl’s work, like Munch’s, is filled with religious symbolism. Ultimately, any positive message in Trakl lurks within this Christian impulse.
Conclusion – Religion and the Poppy
Probably my favourite pieces here are the first two. The
image of the blackbird, of the innocent forced to suffer its way through the
world, lies at the heart of Trakl’s whole project, and the bird’s short and
brutal poem strikes me as being particularly beautiful. But it also contains
within it a rare hint at redemption. Trakl’s religious inclinations are, as
with so much else about him, not entirely clear. But for me at least, this poem
has a spiritual angle to it: the suggestion that for all our suffering there
may lurk at the end of the tunnel a kind of salvation. It’s not unlike
Dostoevsky, in its way.
As for “Spiritual Twilight”, I love its tone and sense of
mystery. For me it really conveys that world of abstract rumination we fall
into somewhere in the depths of our despair. It is a weightless poem, just as
we, in our thoughts, are weightless too. But one day we must open our eyes. And
that is where the challenge lies.
The last word on all this should go to Trakl himself. This
is how he describes himself, towards the end of his life: “Too little love, too
little justice and mercy, and always too little love; too much hardness, pride,
and all sorts of transgressions – this is me. I am certain that I only refrain
from evil out of cowardice and weakness and in doing so shame even that part of
me.”
I hope, having read a few of his poems, you have a sense that for all the mercy and love he did not receive himself, he was more than willing to give plenty of it out to those who needed it in his work. The strange thing is, for all his despair, I find myself feeling less alone for reading in his company. And that’s why I think he’s a fantastic poet.
I’ve always found it strange that to think, whether on the metro or while wandering through the streets of my beloved Petersburg, that not thirty years ago this all was a completely different country. By that time, of course, it was clear that the Soviet Union was on its way out. But what would replace it was anybody’s guess. Gorbachev, ever the idealist, hoped to reform the USSR into a new confederation – the Union of Sovereign States – that would alleviate many of that country’s worst failings by decentralizing its power structure. An attempted coup in August of 1991 put this proposal on ice and led to the collapse of the USSR in December of that year. But though the Soviet Union was no more, its people remained. Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time gives these people a voice.
Its pages explore the lives of these people whose homeland evaporated before their eyes. The book is structured as a series of interviews, edited into monologues. “I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama”, Alexievich explains. These monologues are presented almost without judgement or comment, and are divided in theme between the end of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s years of power, and the time after the dawn of the new millennium when Vladimir Putin became dominant. But in contrast to the historic scope of much writing on this period, these stories are fundamentally human in scale. Love again and again comes up, alongside the pain of women and immigrants in a society that – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – became fundamentally reactionary and nationalist in terms of its culture.
Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2015, was born in Ukraine, is Belorussian, but writes in Russian. As you read Second-hand Time it’s worth remembering that Alexievich lost her homeland too. Photo by Elke Wetzig (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A lot of people will tell you it’s a miracle that the Soviet
Union collapsed bloodlessly. Second-hand Time goes against that clinical
view and shows that even the “little” violence that did take place had a real
and terrible human cost. Especially in the West, we also tend to take the rather
parochial view that the USSR was an “Evil Empire”, that its citizens were relentlessly
crushed under the wheels of a terrifying totalitarian regime. But the Soviet
Union outlived Stalin, and things got better than that. Second-hand Time does
not paint the closing days of the Union as filled with joy and plenty, but it
shows through its many and varied speakers how great the loss experienced by
its citizens in many cases was. The creation of the USSR may have been a
tragedy, but its collapse – in light of what’s come after – seems even worse.
Maybe Gorbachev had the right idea after all.
Hopes and Ideals
Anybody who has come into contact with Russia and its culture knows that Russia is special. It likes to tell you as much. “we’re so soulful, we’re so special” one speaker says without irony. It retains a belief in itself as a country of chosen people, with a unique path. A path of suffering, not of joy. The Soviet Union was created because of the great faith – and opportunism – of the communists. Its collapse, likewise, was a moment when Russia seemed to be special once again. Freedom meant everything to everybody, and people were soon disappointed. The nineties were a time of lawlessness and extreme poverty – Yegor Gaidar’s “shock therapy” brought capitalism to the masses, but not the money to take advantage of it. People died in the streets and the sheets, and few could afford the coffin to bury them in, or the ambulance to try to save them.
“Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket”.
Salami comes up again and again as this symbol of capitalism’s allure. In the
Soviet Union it wasn’t easy to get access to good meat – and impossible to get
to choose it. But people soon realised that meat isn’t a substitute for
anything good – especially when you don’t have the money to buy it. The first
section of Second-hand Time, The Consolation of Apocalypse, shows people
falling out of love with the changes brought about by the collapse of the USSR.
There is a continual lament for the values they have lost. In the Soviet Union,
people read books, people talked in kitchens – the atmosphere is decidedly
intellectual. The small guy was looked after.
But alongside of shock therapy the Russians were also
introduced to a new set of values, ones that were more suitable to the new
system. Buy buy buy – greed grew dominant. The poor weren’t to be pitied – they
had failed to show the skill and hard work that the rich (apparently) had. Instead
of discussing books, people get excited about new technology, blue jeans. One
speaker, a rich man who made himself in this system, says “money is a test,
like power or love”. It’s hard not to agree. And this early part of Second-hand
Time shows that the Russians weren’t quite ready to pass it. Next to the
chaos of the new free market, socialism is utopian: “Socialism isn’t just
labour camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world:
Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules”. One party
official tells Alexievich.
Faulty Memory and Greatness
We remember what we want to remember and, except for those
of us whose depression is particularly great, in the end the good memories rise
above the bad and we come to remember the past as a better place. For the
Russians of today, that innocent trick of the mind is potentially dangerous. It
leads to a longing for the Soviet Union. “You forget about the long lines and
empty stores faster than you do about the red flag flying over the Reichstag.”
Again and again, those interviewed mention the war with Germany as a high point
in their nation’s history. They were great; they saved the day.
The challenge that Russians face now, when the belief in
their country’s unique path is so strong, is to decide between “great history
and banal existence”. It’s not entirely clear which choice is best. One path
seems to hold the salvation of the soul, the other the salvation of the body.
“I can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can’t do without is the
past.” – these are not the words of a salami-lover.
“We all believed that the kingdom of freedom was right around the corner… But life just kept getting worse. Very soon, the only thing you could buy was books. Nothing but books on the store shelves…” Russians turned the wheel of history with the collapse of the USSR, but very soon their naïve hopes turned to bitterness and despair. Socialism was a way of looking at the world, and without it the ground fell out from under people’s feet. And few were ready to fly… There are a great many suicides in Second-hand Time.
“I cannot go on living while my Fatherland is dying and everything I heretofore considered to be the meaning of my life is being destroyed.”
Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. It’s hard not to feel sorry for those who truly believed in the Communist project and had their world fall apart. Ed Yourdon from New York City, USA (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The Butcher Returns
Each one of the stories in Second-hand Time is worth telling. It’s hard to decide what to mention here. Each one hit me in different ways, but some were so powerful – so frightening – that they left me speechless. The final story in the first part of Second-hand Time is such a story. It begins with the experience of a woman who had grown up in one of Stalin’s camps in Kazakhstan as she searched for the truth of her past, but ended even more shockingly with her son’s story of a betrothal gone wrong. He is a lieutenant in the army, about to get married. The girl and her family live well for Soviets. They have crystal chandeliers, porcelain, rugs. The old grandfather, the patriarch, is an honoured veteran. He’d speak at schools, get kids as visitors to hear his stories.
Before the wedding the lieutenant and the veteran go out to the family country house to get drunk. They’re completely alone, and the grandfather begins to talk about his past and his views. He’s an old man, and sounds like one… with a particularly Russian bent. He rails against the liberals, the new generations – they don’t need freedom, they need to work, to suffer. And he reveals he was in the NKVD, how he executed the Soviet people…
“I watch TV, I listen to the radio. It’s the rich and poor all over again. Some people gorge themselves on caviar, buy islands and private jets, while others can’t afford a loaf of white bread. This won’t last long around here! People will once again acknowledge Stalin’s greatness. The axe is right where it always was… the axe will survive the master. Mark my words…”
This idea of the axe, of the power of the state for mass power through fear – this for the grandfather is message of hope. Russia demands a strong leader, it demands control and violence and destruction – not cheese and salami and blue jeans.
It is too much for the lieutenant. He breaks off the
engagement without explanation. A note at the end of the story explains that he
and his family emigrated to Canada before he let Alexievich publish the story. He
adds “I’m glad I left in time. For a while, people liked Russians, now they’re
afraid of us again. Aren’t you?”
Support for Stalin is currently at a record high in Russia. In 2000 Vladimir Putin became president and the dominant political actor in Russia, the latter being a role he has not relinquished since then. The story is the perfect end to the chaos of the 1990s. Russia’s period of anarchy – everybody agreed – had to end some way. But it is only the angry old man, filled with hate, who understood fully what would have to happen – since he believed there had been no change to the Russian people, then just as before they needed to be crushed rather than raised up. Putin is no new Stalin, but the idea that Russia needs a strong leader is dangerously ingrained into the Russian idea of its own path that with hindsight it’s hard to see what else could have happened. The second part of Second-hand Time looks at the consequences.
“The Friendship of the Peoples”
The Friendship of the Peoples was a cultural policy
introduced under Stalin in 1935, designed to reduce the ethnic barriers between
the various peoples of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself was a Georgian;
Brezhnev was Ukrainian; and in the USSR as a whole the Russians only
constituted about half of the overall population. It was a good idea, but it
should be mentioned that Stalin was also responsible for large-scale population
transfers, genocide in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and generally was not exactly a
paragon of ethnically harmonious leadership. All the same, the policy continued
after his death, and a degree of unity began to form between the peoples of the
Union. A number of monologues in Second-hand Time serve as evidence for
the success of the policy.
For some people, the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t just mean the loss of their homeland – it also meant the loss of their homes as ethnic tensions tore the new states apart. Here are someAzeri refugees displaced from Ngoro-Karabakh in Azerbaijan – a territory that was predominantly ethnically Armenian, but only after the fall of the Soviet Union became almost homogeneously so – through violence. Oleg Litvin (CC BY-SA 3.0)
And all this success was destroyed by the collapse of the
USSR. In scenes that are reminiscent of the persecution of Jews under the Nazis,
so too we read here of families hidden in attics to avoid being murdered –
whether by Azeris, or Georgians, or Abkhazians, or Tajiks. Moldavia was split
in two, Georgia and Tajikistan underwent civil war, and even in those countries
that did not go to war there were still forcible expulsions.
Today there remain many Russians abroad, particularly in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, while in other former Soviet Republics there are almost none. Russia itself attracts immigrants from all over the former Soviet lands, but Second-hand Time shows that the dream of ethnic harmony remains as dead now as it was then. A particularly unpleasant interview deals with the lives of the Tajiks in Moscow in our own days and the ways they are treated by the Russians – killed, beaten, left unpaid. It’s something I’ve come to notice a lot recently in my own time in Russia – just how racist the Russian people are towards those who were once their equals. There’s a hierarchy here, one that’s almost invisible unless you look for it. It’s easy to live in Russia without meeting a single non-Russian. But you see them every day, cleaning the metro, manning stalls at the market.
I’ve travelled in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, and other former Soviet countries. The people I met there were no better or worse than the Russians are. It’s disappointing that after the collapse of the USSR the peace that very nearly existed was replaced by a revival of ethnic and religious tensions that nobody, really, needs or wants.
The New World and Its Heroes
“What’s the point of changing governments if we don’t change
ourselves?” People changed after the end of the Soviet Union – they had to
change or else die. Their values, as I’ve written above, were overhauled. But
their hearts were harder to change, and many of the characters in Second-hand
Time didn’t succeed in shaking off the Soviet past. But Alisa Z, one
interviewee, did succeed. She’s 35, an advertising manager, and the kind of
shark that found the new world one of endless opportunities. Her monologue is
fascinating… in a way, it’s like a deranged Dostoevsky character going on a
rant to explain their worldview. She took advantage of the “revolution of desires”
to desire everything. Sex, money, power. And she got it.
“Loneliness is freedom… Now, every day, I’m happy I’m free: Will he call or won’t he, will he come over or not? Is he going to dump me? Spare me! Those aren’t problems anymore! So no, I’m not afraid of loneliness… What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the dentist! People always lie when they talk about love… and money… They’re always lying in so many ways. I don’t want to lie… I just don’t! Excuse me… please forgive me… I haven’t thought about any of this for a long time…”
She’s repulsive; she’s free and completely hedonistic. Her confidence, her directness of experience and existence is mesmerising. She is the kind of person who needed, truly needed, the world of capitalism. She sleeps with oligarchs and eats and drinks and enjoys herself. The world is her oyster. In my own experience of oligarchs (bless the British public school system!) I’ve seen the same brutal hunger. I’m not sure it’s the best way to live, but there’s no denying that this is a type of life… just one that I find terrifying and alluring in equal measure. And when so few of us live, even a repulsive life is more attractive than death-in-life…
Love
History was taking place all the time these people were
speaking, but what almost always stands out is not the history, but the love
that tries to get in the way of it. A good friend of mine in Moscow is dating a
Ukrainian and – would you believe it! – both sets of parents have been trying
to keep them apart from the first day of the relationship. But that’s nothing
compared to the loves that are described here. There’s a woman who falls in
love with a murderer stuck for life in a prison, a woman who is separated from
her husband for seven years because his family refuse to let him be with an
infidel, and many other examples of loves that refuse to let anything stand in
the way.
Russia is a country of romantics, and it seems that love is one of the ways that the Russians – the women especially – were able to survive the horrors that the 1990s brought with them. It’s a way of living and loving that seems strange at best, and silly at worst, to us in the West. But giving oneself up truly to another person, just like giving oneself up completely to an idea like Communism, seems one of the surest ways to salvation of the soul. In any case, the passages of self-sacrifice in the name of love were regularly touching, even if it made me deeply sad to read about all the challenges these people faced, and perhaps ought not have had to.
Protests in Belarus took place in 2010 as Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected to the office of president. The young generation in the former Soviet Union may not be placed well politically to enact changed, but from my experience of them their hearts are almost without exception in the right place. Things in these countries, which have suffered so much, will only get better. Photo by Isabel Sommerfeld (CC BY 2.0)
Conclusion – Future Hopes
The last chapter of Second-hand Time details the experience of a few students in the ill-fated protests in Belarus to Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election in 2010 to the office of president. Many of these people were put in prison and kicked out of university; others were simply beaten by riot police; Lukashenko won, of course. He also won a fourth term in 2015, and is standing for a fifth term in 2020 – although at the time of writing it’s not clear whether Belarus will be absorbed into Russia at some point after that. However much these people faced pain and disappointment, like the protesters in Moscow in 2011, the fact that they tried – Alexievich seems to hint – is already a huge achievement, and a step towards the future.
I’ve lived in Russia for two years now, and I intend to live
here after university. I can’t say I love the Russians, but for me they really
are a special people, just as theirs is a special country. And the times are
changing. The dreams of the 1990s are not yet dead. If there is one thing that
gives me more hope than anything else it is the young generation – here, and across
the world. People may complain about the present situation – regarding Russia, it’s
not my place to – but Russia’s youth will surely, once they come of political
age, change the world for the better. Perhaps the dream of love and brotherhood
that the Soviet Union held so dear may also, one day, prove not simply
idealistic twaddle, but something really worth believing in.
Alexievich’s book is probably the best book I’ve read all year. Both heartwarming and heart-rending, hopeful and hateful, it is a roller-coaster of real emotions. But most importantly, it’s making me go with reopened eyes into the world and realise yet again that every human carries with them their own story, like a cross. And if we do not listen to them, however misguided or deluded they may be, how can we hope to change the world?
Report to Greco was pretty much the last thing the great Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, and though it is complete in and of itself, it was only really a first draft. It is an autobiography, but not of the sort that most of us are used to. In spite of a fascinating life full of adventure and travels, in Report to Greco the focus is very much on the internal adventures of the mind. Kazantzakis explores the spiritual discoveries, challenges, and epiphanies that made him who he was as a person and, equally importantly, as a writer. It is a beautifully written book, challenging and rewarding in equal measure, and easy to recommend to one tormented by those accursed questions: what must we believe, and what must we do?
I loved it. For the truth is, except for the pressures of reading lists and friends’ recommendations, I read for the same reasons I live – to find a justification for my life, and a way of looking at the world that redeems it and all its suffering. In this journey many writers have helped me – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Whitman, and Rilke come to mind – but no author of fiction, in a single book, has been so determined to find answers as Nikos Kazantzakis in Report to Greco.
“My life’s greatest benefactors have been journeys and dreams. Very few people, living or dead, have aided my struggle.”
At times the dominant force is Nietzsche, at times Homer or
Bergson or Buddha or Lenin. To go through Report to Greco trying to plot
the exact nature of Kazantzakis’ growth is a fool’s errand. He contradicts
himself, forgets himself, and repeats himself. As we ourselves do, in our own
development through life. To read this book is to be bourn along a river whose
current and banks are ever-changing. The journey is more important than the
specifics precisely because it is Kazantzakis’ attitude that is most memorable
here. In Report to Greco he demonstrates how life can truly be lived
according to the injunction memorably stated by the dying Tolstoy “Search,
always keep on searching”.
It is not enough to know that Kazantzakis had engraved on
his gravestone: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free”. It is not even
enough to know his intellectual forebears. It is necessary to know the attitude
that could guide a man’s life such that at the end of his days he truly could
believe in those words and rest. That story of a life is Report to Greco’s
gift to us.
The Structure and Messages
Report to Greco is not really an autobiography, and trying to read it as one is a little foolish. Comparing it even to Kazantzakis’s Wikipedia page is going to lead to a lot of confusion. In spite of the book’s length and variety, it seems that there remained a huge amount of Kazantzakis that he nonetheless conceals, or else thinks is not worth writing about – “rinds they were. You tossed them into the garbage of the abyss and I did the same”. The book’s introduction by Kazantzakis’s widow, Helen, explains that as Kazantzakis lay dying he was nonetheless remembering still more events, still more travels, which would have made it into a second draft. These passed away with him. But so much is here that we have little to complain about.
Report to Greco begins in Kazantzakis’ home in Crete. It talks of his quiet mother and warlike father, and of ancestors on both sides. The teachers who influenced him, the schoolfellows who first accompanied him, and later disappointed him, are all described lavishly. I have not been to Crete or even Greece, but after Report to Greco andZorba the Greek I feel like I need to go soon. Still, Kazantzakis doesn’t stay long in his homeland. Soon he begins the travels that make up the majority of the book. To Italy, to France, to Germany, Austria, Russia, the Caucasus, Jerusalem… the list is almost endless. And certainly, if Kazantzakis had lived longer, no doubt it would have been. His companions are monks and priests and poets and thinkers. Their conversations range widely, but always reflect Kazantzakis’s occupation with the big questions. What must we do, and what must we believe?
From everyone he gets a different answer. From the monks on
Mt Athos he gets one, from the monks on Mt Sinai another. The revolutionaries
of Russia give him faith in humankind – at other moments it disappears. At
times God exists, at times a void. And when we reach the end of the book I’m
not sure we’re all the wiser as to what Kazantzakis actually believes, except for
in those big ideas that would seem cheap without the whole of Report to Greco
to serve as their explanation and justification.
A young Nikos Kazantzakis. Report to Greco doesn’t follow a strict timeline, but flits between spiritual events in the author’s life to showcase his development.
Of freedom he writes:
“love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul’s enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosanct of the old moulds when they are unable to contain you any longer”
And then of his own life there is this cryptic message:
“I was becoming a sea, an endless voyage full of distant adventures, a proud despairing poem sailing with black and red sails over the abyss.”
God is not important, because “the very act of ascending,
for us, was happiness, salvation, and paradise.” But God, perhaps, lurks at the
end. The achievement of Report to Greco is to make God irrelevant by
showing how much of His creation can be enjoyed and savoured by us while we are
still among the living. Affirmation requires a creator, but it doesn’t require
a Beyond at all.
Travel and the Language of Affirmation
Report to Greco is a journey of the body as well as of the spirit. In some way, the journey of the latter needs the journey of the former. Through different people, and through different books, Kazantzakis comes to flourish. But as I reader I loved the places too, and though this is not a travel book, Report to Greco still has a lot to say about the locations Kazantzakis passed through during his life. We get the sense that places were inhabited by their ideas and beliefs just as much as they were by people. As he heads towards Mt Sinai Kazantzakis writes of the place: “This arid, treeless, inhuman ravine we were traversing had been Jehovah’s fearsome sheath. Through here He had passed, bellowing.” I too have had the experience, in the Himalayas and the desolate Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, of feeling a spirit passing in the wind.
Kazantzakis’ language also contributes to the feeling in Report
to Greco of being closer to these big questions. His prose is always
straightforward, and his images are influenced by his upbringing on Crete and
his love of the Classics. These images reflect the rawness of his passion in
searching for answers, and drag us after him. Our own images are often cliched
and soulless and keep listeners and readers from truly feeling the truth of our
own feelings, our own spiritual upheavals.
If you are going to try and track down a god, what better place to start than here? Mt Sinai. Photo by Mohammed Moussa CC BY-SA 3.0
Meanwhile, who can read something like this without feeling
its power, even if you do not believe it? – “Away, away! To the wilderness!
There God blows like a scorching wind; I shall undress and have Him burn me.”
Or his words on a statue: “Just as a hawk when it hesitates at the zenith of
its flight, its wings beat and yet to us it appears immobile, so in the same
way the ancient statue moves imperceptibly and lives”. I myself can scarcely
differentiate a hawk from any other such bird, or the trees in the forest. I
lack that knowledge, that experience.
On his own style Kazantzakis writes “In vain I toiled to
find a simple idiom without a patchwork of adornments, the idiom which would
not overload my emotion with riches and deform it.” Kazantzakis’s regular use
of such natural images is part, I think, of the whole thread of affirmation in Report
to Greco. He lives in this world more closely than I do, and by using the
world in his images he shows the value he finds in it. The riches are in the
world, not in the virtuosity of the language he uses to describe it. As a
result, the language is breath-taking because it’s the product both of love and
of experience. Few modern writers have both, at least where nature is concerned.
A Few Complaints
There are problems here, and things that are out of date.
The contradictions and repetitions in Kazantzakis’s spiritual development would
probably be cut by a harsher editor, even though they likely reflect what he
actually experienced. The fact is, a repeated epiphany loses much of its value
to a reader. Still, I like the way that the current structure demonstrates just
how we can reach the same conclusions from many different circumstances. In
some way that reinforces what I feel to be one of the book’s underlying messages:
it is the attitude we take to things rather than the specific experiences we
have that count for becoming who we are.
Less easily looked past are the instances of old-school sexism, which is really just a little boring. (“Women are simply ornaments for men, and more often a sickness than a necessity”) This is a man’s spiritual journey, and it often feels like women are excluded from the peak Kazantzakis is climbing towards. All the same, the sexism here isn’t as bad as it is in Zorba. Much worse, however, is the tacit defence of Stalin. Report to Greco was written in the years immediately after Stalin’s death so there’s really no reason for Kazantzakis to be so silent on Stalin’s atrocities – in the Soviet Union Khrushchev hadn’t exactly kept quiet himself. I also cannot believe that Kazantzakis wasn’t aware of them either, since he travelled so widely in the Soviet Union. All he has to say, however, is these words, given to his female companion at the time.
“Lenin is the light, Trotsky the flame, but Stalin is the soil, the heavy Russian soil. He received the seed, a grain of wheat. Now, no matter what happens, no matter how much it rains or snows, no matter how much it fails to rain or snow, he will hold that seed, will not abandon it, until finally he turns it into an ear of wheat.”
Well, this, and a little story about Stalin’s bravery while he was a revolutionary in Tbilisi. Isn’t that great? The irony, probably not deliberate, is that Stalin might have had a much easier time growing his seed if he didn’t actively cause huge famines in modern-day Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Genocide doesn’t grow fruits, and I’m disappointed Kazantzakis leaves any dark from his portrayal of Stalin. It would be better not to mention him at all if this bad taste in the mouth is all we’re offered. Kazantzakis’ love of the Revolution’s ideals is perfectly understandable – the chapter taking place in Russia has a particularly memorable moment where Kazantzakis witnesses a large parade and feels a great unity with his fellows. But it’s a real shame he didn’t think Stalin could be separated from his revolutionary origins.
Conclusion
There are many reasons to read Report to Greco, but enjoying it demands an open mind. The book rewards those who are willing to let themselves be bourn across time and space through Kazantzakis’s life. If we ourselves are not searching for answers, Kazantzakis’s desire to find them will no doubt seem somewhat foolish. But if we are, then even if we don’t agree with his conclusions – and why should we? – we will appreciate the spirit that drove him to reach them. Kazantzakis’s attitude towards life is what inspires me most of all. The German-language poet Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet that we must “live the questions for now”; Kazantzakis shows what such a life can look like. This is the great gift of Report to Greco. The task now, for all of us searchers, is to go out filled with the same faith that animated him and find our own.
And then perhaps, we may come to have upon our headstones the same words that lie on his. “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free”.
Have you read Report for Greco? What did you think of
it? Let me know in the comments below.
