Bartol, himself an ethnic Slovene from Trieste, studied in Paris and Ljubljana, eventually settling in the Slovenian capital to pursue a literary career. During his studies in Paris in 1927, a fellow Slovene who knew of Bartol’s ambitions as a writer recommended that he draw on the episode of the “Old Man of the Mountain” from The Travels of Marco Polo as material for a short story or novel. This tale, recounted to Marco Polo as he progressed along the Silk Road through Iran, had to do with a powerful local sectarian warlord who supposedly used hashish and a secret bower of kept maidens to dupe young men into believing that he had the power to transport them to paradise and bring them back to earth at will. Thus winning the youths’ fanatic loyalty, he was able to dispatch them to any corner of the world on suicidal missions of political assassinations that served to extend his power and influence. Bartol took the subject matter to heart and during the next ten years did extensive research into the broader historical background of the tale while inventing a novelistic plot and structure of his own. Completing the novel became his passion, his reason for being. In his diary he pleaded with the fates to let him live to finish the book and deliver it safely into the printer’s hands. After a long gestation of ten years, the novel finally took shape on paper in the course of four successive drafts during those intense, secluded months that Bartol spent in the town of Kamnik. By all accounts, Bartol was radiantly happy during this period, just as we might imagine a person who knows he’s creating a masterpiece should be.
Unfortunately, the timing of this masterpiece’s appearance in the world was less than perfect. Alamut’s trajectory was interrupted first by the German and Italian annexation of Slovenia from 1941 to 1945, then by the literary ideologies of Tito-led Communist Yugoslavia, where for some years the book was seen as a threat. What’s more, its subject matter and style were completely at variance with the dominant trends in Slovenian literature both before and after World War II. Writers of small, linguistically isolated nations often have an overwhelming need to write about life in that particular small nation, perhaps as a way of helping to validate and reinforce the nation’s very existence. Because there was nothing identifiably Slovenian about Alamut, except for its language, his fellow writers took to characterizing Bartol as “a mistake in the Slovenian genetic code.” Here was an adventure novel set in northwestern Iran, written in places to resemble Thousand and One Nights, and centered around the deep tensions between the indigenous Pahlavi-speaking Shiite Muslim inhabitants of the region and their Seljuk Turkish Sunni Muslim overlords—a thoroughly readable and well-researched novel that used a simple prose style to depict colorful settings and develop a suspenseful plot, rather than the usual tale of tensions among Slovenian peasants, landowners and townspeople. Bartol himself told of being approached on the street years later by one of his old schoolmates, who told him, “I read your translation and really enjoyed it.” “What translation?” Bartol replied. “That fat novel, the one that was written by some English or Indian author,” the man explained. “Do you mean Alamut?” Bartol asked. “I wrote that.” The man laughed at this and waved dismissively, “Go on, get out of here. You can’t fool me.” And then he walked away. Ordinary readers found it inconceivable that a Slovenian could develop a story so completely outside of their own historical experience—it had to have been written by a foreigner. Bartol himself saw the guild of Slovenian writers as divided into two categories: the nationalists, who were in the majority and expressed what he called “the anguished lament of their own time,” and the cosmopolitans, who had a broader sense of history but were in the minority. Needless to say, Bartol saw himself in the second, generally misunderstood, group.
One of Bartol’s strengths in Alamut is his ability to virtually disappear as a perceptible agent of the novel and let his characters carry the story. There is no authorial voice passing judgment or instructing readers which characters to favor and which to condemn. In fact, readers may find their allegiances shifting in the course of the story, becoming confused and ambivalent. Bartol certainly intended to write an enigmatic book. Literary historians have looked to Bartol’s biography, personality and other work for keys to understanding Alamut, but much in the author’s life still remains hidden from view. Its very openness to a variety of interpretations is one of the things that continue to make Alamut a rewarding experience.
Perhaps the simplest way to approach Alamut is as a broadly historical if highly fictionalized account of eleventh-century Iran under Seljuk rule. A reader encountering the novel from this perspective can appreciate its scrupulously researched historical background, the general absence of historical anachronisms, its account of the origins of the Shiite-Sunni conflict within Islam, and its exposition of the deep-seated resentments that the indigenous peoples of this area have had against foreign occupiers, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, for over a millennium. The author’s gift for populating this setting with sympathetic, complex, and contemporary-seeming personalities, whose aspirations and fears resonate for the reader at a level that transcends the stock expectations of the exotic scenic décor, make this historically focused reading of the novel particularly lifelike and poignant.
A second reading of Alamut anchors its meaning firmly in Bartol’s own time between the two World Wars, seeing it as an allegorical representation of the rise of totalitarianism in early twentieth-century Europe. In this reading, Hasan ibn Sabbah, the hyper-rationalistic leader of the Ismaili sect, becomes a composite portrait of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. In fact, Bartol originally intended to dedicate the first edition of his book “To Benito Mussolini,” and when he was dissuaded from doing this, suggested a more generic dedication “To a certain dictator,” which was similarly vetoed. Either dedication would almost certainly have been a bold exercise in high irony, but his publisher rightly saw the risks involved at that volatile time: lost readership, irate authorities. Some of the characters appear to have been drawn from real-life models that dominated the newsreels at that time. Abu Ali, Hasan’s right-hand man, is depicted delivering inspiring oratory to the men of Alamut in a way reminiscent of no one so much as Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The ceremonial nighttime lighting of the castle of Alamut could pass for an allusion to the floodlit rallies and torchlight parades of the Nazi Party. The strict organizational hierarchies of the Ismailis, the broad similarities between some characters and their corresponding types within the Fascist or National Socialist constellations, and the central role of ideology as a sop for the masses all resonate with the social and power structures then existing in Germany, Italy and Soviet Russia, as do the progressively greater levels of knowledge and critical distance from ideology that are available to Hasan’s inner circle.
More recently, yet another interpretation tries to persuade us that Alamut is a roman-à-clef representation of what should have been the ideal Slovenian response to the German and Italian totalitarianism then threatening Slovenia and the rest of Europe—in other words, a mirror image of the Hasan-as-Hitler reading. This interpretation looks to Bartol’s origins in the area around Trieste, and his undisputed anger at Italian domination and persecution of the ethnic Slovenes in those regions beginning in the 1920s. Bartol was indeed a close personal friend of the head of a Slovenian terrorist group, the “Tigers,” whose members conducted violent attacks on Italian institutions and individuals in the Italian-Slovenian border regions. (The group’s Slovenian designation “TIGR” was actually an acronym based on the names of four key disputed areas: Trieste, Istria, Gorizia, and Rijeka [Italian Fiume].) When his friend was captured by the Italians in 1930 and sentenced to twenty years in prison, Bartol made a laconic and ominous note in his diary, “Zorko, I will avenge you.” Hasan’s positive traits—his rationality, intelligence and wit—together with his revelatory confession late in the novel to his youthful alter ego, ibn Tahir, that his entire life’s work has been dedicated to liberating the Pahlavi-speaking population of Iran from foreign domination, would all seem to support this view of the novel as an Aesopian exhortation to oppressed Slovenes, focused around celebrating the charismatic personality and Machiavellian brilliance of the liberation movement’s leader, Hasan/Zorko.