“I hope you have received my letter by now; write me often, speak to me, I will take on as much grief as I can, to lighten your load. Words can never shoulder a burden; but you know well that I am with You, night and day, that I lean over with You: staring into the abyss with another to whom you’re holding tight is the only consolation on this earth,” writes N. [Nikos Kazantzakis, 1883-1957] to the woman he calls Lenotschka [Eleni Samiou, 1903-2004], his “beloved Comrade” to the last.
They met in May 1924, on an excursion to Penteli with the Hiking Club. That same summer, they vacationed together in the remote village of Lentas on Crete. Nikos was still married to Galatea [Alexiou], from whom he would separate in 1926. From 1928, he lives with Eleni, whom he marries in 1945 in Athens, with Sikelianos and his wife as their best man and maid of honor. From their meeting until they moved in together, but afterwards also, they will correspond frequently whenever Kazantzakis is traveling alone. He writes to her from Spain, Egypt, Russia, Japan and Berlin, but also from Aegina, when he is there building their little “cocoon.”
“I never wished for a bolder companion than You. Onwards! We were not afraid of anything, and before we met, such was our nature,” he confesses. He dreams of their living together. Eight months of work and writing together, then four months of travel. Where will they live? “Madrid, 2) Aegina, 3) Paris? Where is Fate’s finger pointing?” he asks her. He has already imagined life with her in detail: shared labours, but journeys, too: “…we will share the work, you will start writing with me and helping me and we will, when we want and can, take trips to Spain or elsewhere. If you no longer want to breathe the same air, then leave me, free and with peace of mind, and I will sink into perfect desolation. I’m very strong, I can withstand anything, whatever happens, I’m perfectly ready.”
Private and approachable
The letters present the private Kazantzakis, making the visionary thinker, poet and author both accessible and approachable. Descriptive, lengthy, passionate, they shine a light on his emotional state and daily life, how he thought and worked, and on his relations with others.
This is where we find the political Kazantzakis: “I was writing my statement all day today. They called me to the police station over a revolutionary article I’d written and gave me 24 hours to explain myself“, he writes to Eleni from Heraklion in the autumn of 1924. Elsewhere, discussing his father, he confesses: “Especially since the day my father died, I have felt a freedom and an unexpected lack of fear.” Sometimes, he shares with her his enthusiasm for the “indescribable treasures” in the Cairo Museum; at others, he asks her for cooking tips: “Do me a favor and write me how jams are made. I tried to make some marmalade the other day, and all I got was boiled orange.”
He calls her “Lenotschka”, she calls him “My Nikos,” “My black cat.” He addresses her in the polite plural form and signs off with “I kiss Your shoulders and knees, always.” Eleni published passages from the letters in her biography of her husband, whose Greek title translates as “The uncompromising Nikos Kazantzakis.” Niki Stavrou, the daughter of Patroclos Stavrou, Eleni’s stepson, and her god-daughter, owner of the rights to Nikos Kazantzakis’ works in foreign languages, donated more than 400 of Nikos’ letters to Eleni to the Kazantzakis Museum in Myrtia, Crete—the model museum envisioned and founded with method and perseverance by the costume designer-scenographer Georgos Anemoyannis, whose father Anthonis was a childhood friend of Kazantzakis. Eleni helped him in this effort by providing material.
Narrative Concerto
An item from the museum’s Nikos Kazantzakis Manuscript Collection, the cover of a draft with the title “A year of loneliness” and subtitle “Letters to my wife”, gave rise to a narrative concert entitled Letters to Eleni, curated and directed by Nikolis Avramakis, which was presented on Sunday 20 July in the courtyard of the museum.
Avramakis played the role of Kazantzakis and Niki Stavrou, reading Eleni’s answers from the correspondence in her own personal collection, gave Eleni a voice to the accompaniment of Alexia Mouza on piano as Maria Papadakis‘ video art turned the words into images on the wall of the museum. Together, they captivated an audience that had traveled Myrtia from every corner of Crete. As the chairman of the museum’s Board of Directors, Andreas N. Metaxas, explained, all the museum’s cultural events will be held in Myrtia from now on—starting with a program entitled “Summer 2025, in Myrtia.” The aim is to promote Myrtia and the Cretan hinterland as a destination.
A thousand letters on the Internet
This first public presentation of the letters is the start of something bigger: “The letters donated by Ms. Niki Stavrou form part of an important research project that is being conducted by the museum: the digitization, transcription, translation and documentation of 1,000 of the author’s letters, with a view to their being posted on the museum’s website”, Paraskevi Vasiliadis, the curator of collections and deputy director of the museum, explains. “The project, which forms part of the Leader program of the Heraklion Development Agency, will be completed in September. We hope the result will be the ground-breaking digital edition bringing together all the author’s correspondence, which the museum team has been dreaming of for a decade now.”
Having invested in outreach activities and introducing a new public to Kazantzakis’ work and world, the museum is gradually evolving into an important archival institution. The manuscript of Paraskevi Vasiliadis’ unpublished novel The Ascent was discovered in its collections, while pleasant surprises await scholars of Kazantzakis’ correspondence. “The ongoing eleven-year sponsorship provided by the museum’s major benefactor, Evangelos Marinakis, has been invested in human resources, in organizing the collections, and in the design of educational activities. The museum is constantly developing and our aim is to evolve still further”, emphasizes its director Marilena Milathianaki, who is continuing the work done by Varvara Tsaka during her two decades in the post. Now equipped with the requisite facilities and equipment, to press on with the task of documenting, sorting and digitization its collections, the first private museum on Crete officially recognized by the Ministry of Culture, in 2022, is creating infrastructure for research. We made use of the new research tools ourselves, and experienced the joys of conducting research in the museum’s archives as we prepared the tributes to Kazantzakis to be published in the “Books” supplement of To Vima in August.
“The eternal complaint”
Eleni Samiou’s place in Kazantzakis’ life and work deserves to be thoroughly researched. Until then, we shall return to the tribute the author made to her in 1933:
“My beloved, I am going into Aegina Town now to post this letter. I have nothing to add, save my eternal regret that we are apart. If my letters of the last few months survive, anyone that leafs through them, yellowed as they will be by then, in search of material to add to my biography, will say I surely never loved anyone like that girl with the initials E.S. who must be … and then they’ll say Your name.”
