So many of the novel’s emotional sparks are generated not discursively through narration or dialogue, which is dominated by reason, but in the unspoken, subtle interstices of the spoken exchanges between some of the main characters. It is the fleeting, sometimes apparently throw-away depictions of their emotional affect—involuntary facial expressions, glances, blushes, body language, suppressed wellings-up of emotion—that express far more of the truth of their being than their words can do. These affective communications are generally left incomplete, partly because they represent ineffable moments, and partly because supposedly higher circumstances (ideology in the case of the fedayeen; duty in the case of the girls; “reason” in the case of Hasan) invariably manage to crush them before they can fully express themselves. Yet they are some of the novel’s most pronounced and revelatory moments of truth.
The personalist philosophers who were so influential between the World Wars would have seen these highly charged moments of honesty and vulnerability in human relationships as the primary medium in which the divine force manifests itself. In reaction to dogmatic religion and similarly reductive tendencies in the social sciences (at that time, notably, Freudian psychology and Marxism), personalism granted equal importance to a wide range of facets in the human personality, from the biological, social and historical to the psychological, ethical and spiritual. Bartol studied in Paris at the same time as a number of his young countrymen who would later become influential personalist intellectuals, including the psychologist Anton Trstenjak and the poet Edvard Kocbek. Although Freud and Nietzsche are most frequently mentioned as early influences on Bartol—and certainly Hasan embodies their lessons to perfection—the importance that Alamut ultimately places on the development of the integrated human being suggests that if any ideology still counted for Bartol, it must have been something akin to personalism.
In this light, the book’s dual mottos, apparently in conflict with each other and the source of a fair amount of frustration for commentators over the years, begin to make sense. If “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” stands as a symbol of the license granted to the Ismaili elite, then the unrelated subsidiary motto “Omnia in numero et mensura” acquires an ultimately cautionary significance. All things within measure, nothing too much. In other words, skepticism and rationality are important assets, but overdependence on them at the expense of compassion leads to the tragedy that engulfs Hasan as much as it does his witting and unwitting victims.
Bartol incorporated many of his own qualities and personal interests into his portraits of Hasan and the novel’s other characters. He was an avid student of philosophy, history, mathematics, and the natural sciences. He was an amateur entomologist and (like another Vladimir, four years his senior and the author of a book called Lolita) an avid lepidopterist. In a country of mountain climbers, Bartol literally climbed with the very best of them. Like a famous French writer three years his senior, he was an enthusiastic and skilled small aircraft pilot—and all of this just as a prelude to his career as a writer. An individual who is that inquisitive and that eager for experience is either driven and obsessed, or in love with life. In his private life, Bartol was an example of the latter personality type, but in his novel he chose to portray an extreme version of the former.
In a commentary on Alamut published on the occasion of a 1957 edition of the novel, an older Bartol, now more overtly solicitous of his readers, wrote:
The reader of Alamut will certainly have noticed one thing. No matter how terrible, inhuman and despicable the methods are that Hasan uses, the people subjected to him never lose their most noble human values. The sense of solidarity among the fedayeen never dies, and friendship flourishes among them, just as it does among the girls in the gardens. Ibn Tahir and his comrades are eager to know truth, and when ibn Tahir finds out that he has been deceived by the man he had most trusted and believed in, he is no less shaken than when he learns that Miriam’s love for him was a deception. And finally, in all his grim knowledge, Hasan is unhappy and alone in the universe. And if somebody wanted to find out from the author what he meant by writing Alamut, what his underlying feeling was as he went through the process of writing it, I’d tell him, “Friend! Brother! Let me ask you, is there anything that makes a person braver than friendship? Is there anything more touching than love? And is there anything more exalted than the truth?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
VLADIMIR BARTOL (1903–1967) was one of Yugoslavia’s leading intellects and the author of plays, short stories and theater reviews. After studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, Bartol spent much of his life in Trieste. He died in Ljubljana with most of his work out of print and virtually unknown among his countrymen.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
MICHAEL BIGGINS has translated works by a number of Slovenia’s leading contemporary writers. He currently curates the library collections for Russian and East European studies and teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, both at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Review
“First published sixty years ago, Alamut is a literary classic by Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol, a deftly researched and presented historical novel about one of the world’s first political terrorists, eleventh-century Ismaili leader Hasan ibn Sabbah, whose machinations with drugs and carnal pleasures deceived his followers into believing that he would deliver them to a paradise in the afterlife, so that they would destroy themselves in suicide missions for him. Flawlessly translated into English (and also published in eighteen other languages), Alamut portrays even the most Machiavellian individuals as human—ruthless or murderous, but also subject to human virtues, vices, and tragedies. An afterword by Michael Biggins offering context on the author’s life, the juxtaposition of his writing to the rise of dictatorial conquest that would erupt into World War II, and the medley of reactions to its publication, both in the author’s native Slovenia and worldwide, round out this superb masterpiece. An absolute must-have for East European literature shelves, and quite simply a thoroughly compelling novel cover to cover.”