Last Temptation of Freedom: Life and Wanderings of Nikos Kaatzakis’s Work in Censorship Times

Abstract

The strong relationship between Spain, its culture and history, and Nikos Kazantzakis, the renowned Greek writer and translator, creator of the mythical Zorba, is likely to be well-known. However, we know little or nothing about the long and tormented trajectory of his works during the Franco regime, when his heretodoxical pen had to struggle with the tough dogmatism of the censorship. The huge and significant amount of documents, kept in the Archivo General de Administracion of Alcalá de Henares, allows us, on the one hand, to precisely reconstruct the complex network of the circulation of his works, since the fifties and, on the other hand, provides us one more example of the patterns of the censorship on the publishing sector and its impact, in the medium and short term. Thus we could discover that, till the eighties, the Spanish reader could access Kazantzakis’s works, almost exclusively through his Obras selectas, published by Planeta, emended and modified in different ways.