Fire and soil. How could I harmonize these two militant ancestors inside me?

I felt this was my duty, my sole duty: to reconcile the irreconcilables, to draw the thick ancestral darkness out of my joins and transform it, to the best of my ability, into light.

The final lines of the book are its author's proud greeting to his grand-father:

Full of wounds, all in the breast. I did what I could, grandfather. More than I could, just as you directed. Now that the battle is over, I come to recline at your side, to become dust at your side, that the two of us may await the Final Judgment together...Grandfather, hello!

Pride of Nativity

As a son of the island of Crete, Kazantzakis, explains the book's title:

I...place myself soldier-like before the general, and make Report to Greco. For Greco is kneaded from the same Cretan soil as 1, and is able to understand me better than all the strivers of past and present.

The struggles which the island underwent in his lifetime, the "freedom or death" atmosphere which he describes in the book of that name, seem to have given him the faith that ours is a cosmic age. How different from the men "wandering between two worlds, one dead/And the other powerless to be born":

As faithfully and intensely as I could, I attempted to experience the important age in which I happened to be born.

Kazantzakis was, then, born of a race and land which encouraged him to live on a cosmic scale. And he eagerly accepted this scale, as his introduction to Report to Greco shows. Once one understands this, one can accept seeming pompousness which would otherwise be intolerable. Kazantzakis can use phrases like "my soul began to tremble" because Kazantzakis lived in these terms.

The reader experiences mixed feelings toward the contradictions which run throughout the book. The author speaks of reconciling the blood of his ancestors as his sole duty; later passages deny this. Such faults are partially excused by the fact that Kazantzakis did not have time to revise his book before his death. More important, however, is the fact that Kazantzakis habitually thought in emphatic, definite images--which he was forever changing and contradicting.

Kazantzakis's imagery and symbolism have frequently been criticized for being overdone and obvious. Kazantzakis paints gigantic, swollen passion-flowers--and he often paints them in black-and-white. He tends to write philosophy, not literature. It is certainly justifiable to censure him on these grounds, but if one does so one must also reject the world-view from which the passion-flowers spring. If one must accept the world-view, or at least offer a "willing suspension of disbelief" to Kazantzakis's peculiar world, in order to accept the style. Kazantzakis himself raises this problem in Report to Greco:

I know that what I write will never be artistically consummate, because I intentionally struggle to surpass the boundaries of art and thus harmony, the essence of beauty, is distorted... I wanted to be delivered from my own inner darkness and to turn it into light, from the terrible bellowing ancestors in me and to turn them into human beings. That was why I invoked great figures who had successfully undergone the most elevated and difficult of ordeals: I wanted to gain courage by seeing the human soul's ability to triumph over everything.

Report to Greco clarifies all of Kazantzakis's writing in quite a different way. One realizes how much of the material in his early novels was autobiographical, particularly if one extends the term "autobiographical" to the life of the spirit.

Report to Greco repeats some of the incidents from these books almost verbatim. In particular, it illuminates Zorba the Greek. Now, the movie version to the contrary, Zorba does not merely discuss flesh (Good) and spirit (Bad). Rather, it exalts the impulsive, the "valiant preposterous act" (Report to Greco) over the Buddha-like espousal of the peace with which becomes the Nothing. Report to Greco shows just how much of Zorba's joie de vivre was in Nikos Kazantzakis.

"I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability." Kazantzakis did not see life steadily, but, perhaps more than any other figures of our era, he saw it whole