Aeschylus In The Mix: The Making Of Nikos Kazantzakis' Prometheus-Trilogy

Kazantzakis' two foundational works, Askitiki and The Odyssey, not only articulated the Cretan poet's credo but also crystallized his attitude towards his (classical) forefathers. Kazantzakis mythologized his own writing as an overhaul of ancient myth(s), Western as well as Eastern, in search of a new philosophical synthesis. He treated the great literary figureheads of the Greek classical past (Homer, Aeschylus, etc.) as 'ancestors' not in the irredentist sense of his day but in the spirit of Askitiki: as stepping stones in a great a1/4 nu I (R)phi IIII, ('uphill course') leading to the transubstantiation of spirit into flesh. This construct is projected back to the author, who is enmeshed in his own mythology - a 'great athlete' himself in the image and likeness of his heroes, especially Odysseus and Christ. Prometheus was no less important as a Kazantzakian alter ego than these two; in fact, he must be placed right next to them in terms of his symbolic prominence in the first two phases of Kazantzakis' oeuvre. The Titan has an important role in the Odyssey and is given pride of place among the mythological themes treated in Kazantzakis' Greek-style tragic drama. A close reading of ancient 'Aeschylean' material informed by German classical scholarship provided the immediate springboard for Kazantzakis' reconceptualization of the Prometheus myth. However, the Prometheus trilogy is an eclectic space of multiple intersecting receptions - much more than a straightforward reaction to Aeschylus. Kazantzakis' is an all-encompassing version of the ancient myth comprising elements not only from the Aeschylean but also from the Hesiodic, Platonic, and Ovidian accounts. Moreover, three centuries' worth of European literary receptions of Prometheus, most evidently the versions by Goethe and Percy Shelley, as well as Kostas Varnalis' twist in The Burning Light (1922), also informed Kazantzakis' perception of the Titan. And certainly Nietzsche, in whose theory of tragedy Prometheus looms large, left his indelible mark. Still, all intertextual material in the trilogy is tweaked and twisted to fit Kazantzakis' own central myth: the salvatio dei by the great, solitary desperado, whose ultimate prize is the Cretan Glance.