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 | Kazantzakis: |
This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format Preface to the paperback editionThis paperback edition of Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit,Volume 1,is meant to accompany the newly published second volume, enabling a reader to survey the entire extent of Kazantzakis’s creative life. I have not made any substantive changes to the text even though certain sections, if I had written them now, would have been different. In discussing Askitikí, for example, I would have recognized the important advance in Kazantzakis studies pioneered by Professor Darren Middleton, who first indicated the extent of Kazantzakis’s contribution to process theology. I trust that Volume 2 will partially remedy this deficiency. In addition, I might have done more to present Kazantzakis’s inner life as a succession of traumas.These are all too evident in his letters, which frequently seem composed as if from a psychiatrist’s couch. Since my current project is to prepare an edition of his selected letters in English translation, however, I will let them speak for themselves. They will add a new dimension to the portrait of the man and his work presented in this book and its sequel. In sum, I have chosen to let this first volume keep saying what I meant it to say when I originally wrote it— namely, that Kazantzakis cannot be understood without politics, and that politics, for him, ultimately relates not to the flesh but to the spirit. "Terpní," Riparius, New York |