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LETTERS TO GALATEA
On communist teaching. "I have been an advocator of katharevousa, a nationalist, an advocator of demotic, an intellectual, a poet, a socialist, a religious maniac, an atheist, an aesthete - and none of these can fool me any longer."
Cherie, At the moment I'm gathering together all the communist schoolbooks that have been written and all the communist children's books and I'm going to set about an old plan of mine - to write a series of books for the children of the society to come. Later on I'll write stories based on the social struggle and the domination of a single class, never of the king, never of the nobles, clerics and bourgeoisie. About how civilisations are created and how they are overthrown, how we must now consciously lay the foundations of a new victory and a new civilisation. I am thinking of setting up a polemics group here, made up of different nationalities, and one of its aims will be to write such books, each person for his own people, with the same general polemics and creative direction.
I have not long returned from a famous Russian Jewish poet, who has translated Homer into Hebrew verse etc. God, whenever I meet those famous contributors to current intellectual activity, I can't tell you how much I gain in self-confidence and self-belief. I get the feeling that all of those I have met are inferior to me. I talk with them up to a point, and then they can go no further. Over the last few months my mind has been heading in a definite, decisive direction: from the secret, fertile theories in which my soul rejoiced up till now I can see my time and my duty more clearly.
The catastrophe, the catastrophe, the catastrophe! All this current wretchedness and vice must come to an end. Everyone in his own place must destroy, preach hatred, get the generations ready: if they were to let me do it in any place on earth, the first thing I would start would be to set up a school. To prepare the fighters, to teach them the history of Greece and Rome and of modern times, in line with the flame that burns within me. To teach them why they must become good workers, good scientists, good and productive fathers. To teach them how to read a poem, how they should look on the stars, on animals, people, ideas. Bias, conscious, merciless, uncompromisng bias. Not superfluous theories, general overviews: "this is good, its opposite is also good" - everything is good or everything is bad.
No, the world is divided in two - good and bad, above and below, God and anti-God. We are soldiers of God - what is that suppposed to mean? It is our duty to hate the direction half the world is taking and love the direction taken by the other half. Later, when equilibrium comes after (i.e. aftr our victory), let them teach men to be harmonius, universal and tolerant. At the moment all those virtues are weaknesses, yielding the shield in battle.
While I happened to be talking to a couple of people the other day, I suddenly felt myself so angry and vehement that I stopped, and I was glad that I am so possessed with faith. I am writing these things to you as portents of a deeper change within me. They are the portents of action. It may take some time yet, I have to rid myself of the remains of what perviously charmed me, I must free myself of the "Buddha" I am writing at the moment, have done with poetry. This must happen "from within", just as ripening fruit. I must see a few places, escape the temptation of them. Everything must be done following my own idiosyncratic system, i.e. slowly and exhaustively. That is the only way I can move forward without looking back. At the moment, when I am talking to someone and they trie to rebut me, I am in a rush to run through all their arguments and find them new ones they don't know. And why? Because I have lived their situation for years, and I know all its secrets. I have even been a cellarman. I have been an advocator of katharevousa, a nationalist, an advocator of demotic, an intellectual, a poet, a socialist, a religious maniac, an atheist, an aesthete - and none of these can fool me any longer.
[...]
on 18/30** February in Iraklion, Crete, then still part of the Ottoman Empire.
with his father and sisters
