Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

I must admit, I was looking for something fluffy and easy to process when I picked up Zorba the Greek to deal with my autumn melancholy.

It turned out to be the complete opposite, deep and raw human behaviour with absolutely no filters applied. Set in the 1920s, in a picturesque Cretan village, the novel uncovers layer upon layer of social, spiritual and historical realities that deserve a proper, full review.

The first layer, for me, was frustration: the animalistic, diminishing attitude toward women. The book is written by a boy for other boys, i.e. direct, raw, and absolutely unfiltered for “tender female hearts”. The attitude and treatment of the “female species”, as described by Zorba, often made every emancipated nerve in me revolt.

But despite this display of masculinity, both Zorba and the narrator struck me as absolutely infantile, pathetic boys in different disguises. One is endlessly searching for transcendence, spirituality and abstraction, almost as a way to escape the ordinary responsibilities of adulthood. The other is forever chasing where to stick his lower body for what feels like exactly the same reason: to avoid the burden of becoming a fully responsible human being.

And yet, despite all my irritation, I could not completely dismiss either of them.

The same Zorba who speaks of women in the most humiliating way is also capable of startling compassion and tenderness toward them, which makes him impossible to reduce to a caricature. He is vulgar and deeply human at the same time.

The narrator, the intellectual, spiritual nomad, clearly standing in for Nikos Kazantzakis himself, frustrated me even more. Somehow, his weakness feels more disappointing than Zorba’s instincts. His passivity, especially when it comes to protecting the widow, becomes almost unbearable. The way she appears to stand at the emotional centre of the story, only to vanish from the pages once he finally reaches her, left me unsettled, not to mention the social cruelty that followed.

I also remained slightly confused by the narrator’s subtle emotional cues toward his old male friend and toward Zorba himself. At moments, there seems to be an intimacy, even an affection, that feels deeper than ordinary friendship. Perhaps I am reading it through a modern lens, or perhaps this is simply a form of male tenderness we rarely see expressed so openly.

And then there is the cruelty of the villagers. God, this part. I had to constantly remind myself: early 20th century, isolated village life, different moral universe. And still it shocked me, it is the 20th century, not the Middle Ages. Collective violence, injustice toward women compared to badass sinner men, unbelievable punishment executed almost as part of the natural order.

At the same time, the narrator is exploring Buddhist spirituality, Tibetan monks, metaphysics, and freedom from attachment. I was genuinely surprised to find this kind of philosophical depth embedded in a story set in a Cretan mining village of that era. The contrast is fascinating: brutality and transcendence existing side by side.

The historical references sent me into research mode. I only broadly knew the background before reading. The references to the Greek–Turkish conflicts and Crete under Ottoman rule suddenly made the emotional atmosphere of the book clearer: the tension, pride, violence, and displacement. And widows. Widows on almost every page, setting the tone of the era and its never-ending wars. One point I appreciated in Zorba’s monologues about war and love for country was the questioning of the meaninglessness of wars — killing others simply for belonging to another tribe or culture — and how the Almighty could justify this.

But the part that unexpectedly touched me most was the mention of Greeks in the Caucasus. I have often wondered how my own small town on the outskirts of Kazakhstan became home to a small Greek community. Like many minorities in the USSR, including my own, they became heavily Russianised: speaking Russian, believing in communism, Alexis becoming simple Lyosha. What else can you do but bend yourself enough to keep your bloodline alive?

They blended into the Soviet fabric like everyone else, and yet something distinct always remained, a certain fiery temperament, a trace of another sea and another history beneath the surface.

After some web research, I learned that these were most likely Pontic Greeks - Greek communities that had lived for centuries around the Black Sea, the Caucasus and parts of the former Ottoman world. Many were later deported across the Soviet Union under Stalin, including to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Suddenly, those brief references in Zorba stopped feeling literary and became strangely personal, one of those moments when a novel unexpectedly reaches into your own geography and childhood memory. Why Alexi is no one, but “Lyoha the Greek”- ah yes, that smart, troublesome child of an unknown father. Why is it easier “not to remember” your ethnic history? Because under the regime, proliferated everywhere, you were often better off knowing less if you wanted to live longer and happier.

And despite everything, the cruelty, the chauvinism, the chaos, I must admit: I laughed. At those ridiculous, childish, sometimes cruel jokes that perhaps only the male species could invent.

And I am left with the feeling that you cannot learn a culture through the first randomly picked book. There are probably countless others that would show the beauty of a distant, unexplored island instead of its wounds.