Obituary: Lili Zografou

LILI ZOGRAFOU was a prolific journalist, novelist, dramatist, essayist, and political activist.

She was born in Crete in 1922 - daughter of Andreas Zografos, who published the Iraklio daily newspaper Anorthosis ("Recovery") - into the same intellectual environment that produced Galatea Alexiou (who became the first wife of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis).

Zografou's first book, Agapi ("Love"), a collection of novellas, was published in 1949. Epangelma porni ("Occupation Whore"), in which she attacked the colonels' junta, appeared in 1978. Most of her 24 books were political in nature, with especial emphasis on the status of women in Greek society, the horror of the Axis occupation of Greece (1941-44), and the equal horror of the 1967-74 dictatorship.

But she is likely to be remembered mostly for Nikos Kazantzakis: enas traghikos ("Nikos Kazantzakis: a tragic figure"), a destructive critique of the writer's life and works, published in 1960, three years after its subject's death.

D.H. Lawrence was attacked or defended by various women, each of whom assumed that she understood him best. Kazantzakis's fate was the same. His first wife Galatea pictured him as an egomaniacal ogre, his second wife Eleni Samiou as a misunderstood saint. Zografou stresses his alleged need to be superhuman. Men in the Crete of Kazantzakis's boyhood, she argues, dreamt of themselves as great fighters who would deliver their land from Ottoman control. They could not appear weak, or even tender; instead, they needed to be gods served by their "inferiors", especially their wives and daughters. This, Zografou insists, explains Kazantzakis's refusal to accept reality as it is.

It also explains his distortion of historical figures in his novels and plays, which Zografou treats in an always provocative and sometimes insightful manner. She attributes his attraction to Zorba in his Zorba the Greek (1952, first published in 1946 as Vios kai Politeia tou Alexi Zorba) to the fact that Zorba was truly strong and thus not ashamed to act with tenderness - precisely what Kazantzakis himself could not do. As for his elephantine epic Odyssey in 33,333 verses (1958, first published as Odyseia in 1938), she sees this as a desperate attempt to perform a superhuman feat. The epic's finale, she continues, displays the artificiality of grand opera, with Odysseus surrounded by the entire cast and engaged in protracted philosophical debate - even though he is half-dead.

Equally provocative is Zografou's treatment of Kazantzakis's various relationships with women. The only way he could respond to Galatea's affection, Zografou claims, was by writing sexual fantasies, by travelling obsessively in order to escape his wife, and by expressing himself tenderly in letters since he could not do so in person. Kazantzakis's first truly sexual relationship was probably with the Communist Jewess Rachel Lipstein, whom he met in Berlin when he was 39. But what Kazantzakis really wanted was a good typist. This he found in his second wife, Eleni, who added self-effacing devotion to her secretarial skills.

Zografou's most convincing arguments are reserved for Kazantzakis's politics. She insists that it is wrong to think of him as a Communist. He merely wanted to "ride the wave of history", in this case Leninism, in order to be carried along with it to immortality, but he misunderstood the Russians, who seemed hopelessly materialist to him while he to them seemed just hopelessly irrelevant. She recommends Toda-Raba (1929, published in translation 1964), Kazantzakis's novel on all this, as one of the few places where he recognises his own inadequacy.

Whether Zografou's one-sided book is libel or literary criticism is open to debate. Clearly, however, it influenced an entire generation against Kazantzakis, probably because its exaggerations are often so brilliantly true. How ironic that this impassioned woman is likely to be remembered not so much for her own creative work as for a destructive critique of another writer.

Peter Bien

Lili Zografou, writer: born Iraklio, Crete 1922; (one daughter); died Crete 2 October 1998.