Spain and Kazantzakis’ travel writing

Abstract

This thesis will provide a close, critical and comparative reading of Nikos Kazantzakis' writings on Spain as a whole, namely both the ones included in the book Ταξιδεύοντας-Ισπανία and those published in the newspapers Eleftheros Typos and I Kathimerini. The focus will not be on their literary value, but on the extent to which these texts function as cultural, historical, political and ideological documents relating to one man's view of a country and an era. In the first chapter of my thesis I will refer to Kazantzakis' successive journeys to Spain and examine the transformation of his newspaper articles into a book. In the second chapter I will present the themes that recur in Kazantzakis' writings on Spain and the author's reflections on them. The third chapter will be devoted to Kazantzakis' coverage of the Spanish Civil War and his attitude towards it. In the fourth chapter Kazantzakis' writings on Spain will be compared with those of the Greek writers Kostas Ouranis and Zacharias Papantoniou who also visited the country in the same period and wrote about it. Finally, it will be demonstrated that Kazantzakis' writings on Spain deserve to be noticed, as they not only reveal things about the country in the crucial years 1926-1936, but about the author as well