Alexis Sorbas

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alexis Sorbas ( Greek original title: Βίος και πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά, Vios ke politia tou Alexi Zorba, Life and Way of Life of Alexis Sorbas ) is the most famous novel by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, written in 1946 . The 1964 film Alexis Sorbas by Michael Cacoyannis, based on him , won three Academy Awards.

action

Alexis Sorbas is a philosophical, a developmental and a picaresque novel at the same time . The focus is on the story of the friendship between the first-person narrator and Alexis Sorbas, between an intellectual who is plagued by self-doubt and an artist who trusts his feelings and instincts and lives in complete harmony with himself and the world.

The plot revolves around a coal mine in Crete , friendship, love, suicide and lynching. Sorbas' motto in life "love life and not fear death" is the theme of the novel. In it the author develops his philosophy, according to which true freedom consists in taking life as it is with all joys and calamities, struggling even when defeat is imminent, and making the best of every situation. This is contrasted with the village mentality, determined by superstition and traditional contempt for women, as an example of emotional bondage and alienation.

Emergence

Alexis Sorbas is a partly autobiographical novel. Both the title figure and the story of the failed mining project are based on real models. Kazantzakis only changed the first name of his hero and the location of the action.

During the First World War, Kazantzakis met Georgios Sorbas, a worker 13 years his senior, on the holy Mount Athos , whose free character impressed him deeply. In the spring of 1915 he asked him to take a job as a foreman in a lignite mine that he had leased in the small village of Prastova on the Mani Peninsula in the south of the Peloponnese . After several tunnels collapsed, Kazantzakis abandoned the project in the spring of 1916. At the beginning of the 1920s, he and Sorbas traveled together to the Caucasus to organize the repatriation of the Pontic Greeks to the homeland of their ancestors. This undertaking is also portrayed as a parallel plot in the novel, albeit without reference to Sorbas.

In the years after the Caucasus company, the two friends were only in contact by letter, as Georgios Sorbas settled in Serbia , where he married and had children. In the end, he ran a magnesite mine. He died there, and his grave is in Butel , one of the ten districts of the Macedonian capital Skopje . The news of Sorbas' death in 1942 prompted Kazantzakis to process the shared experiences in a novel and to erect a literary memorial to his friend. Some of Sorba's sons and daughters took offense at the characterization of their father, which they found too revealing and defamatory.

After visiting Crete, Kazantzakis decided to move the action there. He finished the writing in 1946 in his house on the island of Aegina .

reception

Kazantzakis' novel is one of the great works of world literature and has received multiple awards. Its first edition appeared in Greece in 1946 . 1952 followed the German translation by Alexander Steinmetz under the title Alexis Sorbas. Adventure in Crete. In 1954 the work was awarded for the first time at the International Book Exhibition in France and thereafter achieved world fame. In Germany alone, more than 60 different editions of Alexander Steinmetz's transmission had appeared up to 2004, 702,000 of which were book copies by Rowohlt Verlag . The total circulation in German has now exceeded one million.

Many visitors to Greece hoped to gain an insight into Greek society through the film and the book. The character of Alexis Sorbas is often instrumentalized as "typically Greek" and sometimes interpreted as hostile to Greece . The fictional character, lazy and cunning in traits, is the representation of a vagabond who at best can convey the Arcadian moments of Greek life.

Adaptations

Kazantzakis himself had suggested Michael Cacoyannis to make a film of his novel in the 1950s . But it wasn't until seven years after the author's death that the Greek director managed to secure the film rights and tackle the project. In 1964 he filmed the novel with Anthony Quinn in the title role. The plot has been shortened by a few narrative strands compared to the novel, but reflects its content and spirit exactly. Received extremely positively by both audiences and critics, Zorba the Greek, as the original English title was, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, of which it ultimately won three. The film contributed significantly to the further dissemination of the novel.

In 1988 Mikis Theodorakis reworked his film music for Zorba the Greek on behalf of the Arena di Verona for the ballet Zorba il greco .

As a musical with music by John Kander and texts by Fred Ebb based on the original work by Kazantzakis, the material was premiered on November 16, 1968 at the Imperial Theater in New York. See the article on Sorba .

Another musical by Alexis Sorba with the music of Konstantin Wecker premiered in Ingolstadt in 2010.

The radio play Sorbas under the stars (2018) by Wolf Reiser tells the story of Nikos Kazantzakis and Georgios Zorbas.

Work editions

Web links

  • Nikos Kazantzakis . Lecture in the Coburger Literaturkreis, by Hilmar Kormann, undated (linked as PDF, penultimate link). Focus on "Alexis Sorbas".

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Iota Myrtsioti: A portrait of Greece from a Berliner who knows his stuff.
  2. ^ Musical "Alexis Sorbas" in Ingolstadt. On: radio-kreta.de.
  3. ^ The story of Alexis Sorbas , Ö1 radio play, August 24, 2019