Word: cretan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Report to Greco details the major events of Nikos Kazantzakis's life: his childhood on a farm in a Cretan village and at a school run by Franciscan monks, his years at the University of Athens, his journey to the monasteries on Mt. Athos in Macetonia. But the book concentrates on his intellectual and spiritual pilgrimages. For, as Kazantzakis emphasizes in his introduction...
...rinds are not missed, as the reader scrambles after the climber. There is the terrified Cretan youth, commanded by his father to kiss the feet of countrymen garroted by the Turks; the student in Paris, inflamed and impelled by Nietzsche's visions of the Superman; the pilgrim searching vainly for the future in Soviet Russia, for the past in Jerusalem, for the present in the clouds brooding over his native Crete...
...disgust. Zorba the Greek was having its first showings. What the audiences took most unkindly to were scenes that portrayed the people of a small village in Crete uniting to support the knife slaying of a young widow outside church and the robbing of a harlot on her deathbed. "Cretans should do something. This is disgraceful," declared Athens' daily Estia. The Pan-Cretan Union in Athens declared the film monstrous and insulting...
...whole thing was just a bit much for Eleni Kazantzakis, however. Widow of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of the book on which the movie is based, she angrily responded: "Greeks resent being told that 60 years ago in a Cretan village simple peasants behaved inelegantly toward a dead woman. They forget my dead husband, whose tombstone in Crete was covered with excrement every day for years...
...growing aware of it--when he encounters an intellectual young Englishman. Together they go to Crete. Or more accurately, Zorba invites himself with his usual impulsiveness and the Englishman accepts with an impulsiveness which is most unusual for him. Zorba meets an aging French courtesan, an outcast in the Cretan community, and makes her feel young again and watches her die. Meanwhile the Englishman meets a young widow, as beautiful and bitter as the ancient Greek heroines. He makes love to her. A young boy who loved her in vain drowns himself. And then the Englishman watches the community stone...