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Vladimir Bartol: Far Ahead of His Time
by Slovenia News Staff
Excerpted from Rodna Gruda, English Section March 2003
Vladimir Bartol, the author of one the most widely translated
Slovenian novels, Alamut, would celebrate his 100th birthday
on February 24. When it was first published in 1938, Alamut
was received with considerable scepticism by critics. Now, decades
later, critics and readers alike talk about it with nothing
but superlatives.
Bartol was born in 1903 in a small village near Trieste into
the family of a post office worker, Gregor Bartol. His mother
Marica was a teacher, writer and the editor of the first Slovenian
women's magazine Slovenka. While his mother later largely renounced
her feminist views in practice, the young Vladimir was adamant
to pursue his dreams and become a writer. Not just any writer,
but a world famous man of letters. The undeterred self-confidence
that he showed as a youngster later helped him weather the storm
of criticism that he was exposed to due to his life philosophy
and writing. The family decided to move to Ljubljana when Vladimir
was in secondary school. After finishing school in 1921, he
went on to study biology and philosophy, and graduated with
a thesis entitled "On Factors that Enable Living Organisms
to React Reasonably to External Impulses".
The Formative Years
While at university, Bartol made friends with the young philosopher
and alpine climber Klement Jug. Jug was a fervent believer in
Nietzsche's "will to power" and, unlike many other
philosophers, he actually practiced what he preached. He undeniably
affirmed his philosophy of an uncompromising rise of willpower
when he died climbing the excruciating northern face of Mount
Triglav, Slovenia's highest mountain, in 1924. Jug left an indelible
impression on Bartol, the ultimate result being that his opponents
too often criticised him as a philosopher and ideologist, and
forgot about his literary work.
In the concept of "will to power", Bartol found what
he perceived as being the elementary characteristic that a small
and threatened national group like Slovenians need in their
struggle to persevere. He was sharply critical as he discovered
in Slovenians the characteristics of a weakened nation, brought
up in humility and fear of living. It was a nation defined by
the cult of goodness - a goodness unfortunately, of the feeble.
In a short story entitled "At the Crossroads" (1935),
where one of the characters can easily be recognised as modelled
on Klement Jug, Bartol says: "Bunglers achieve nothing.
Our nation has always been a nation of bunglers and a friend
of compromise". Although this was a veiled call for a rise
to arms in a national liberation struggle, the established intellectual
elite started treating Bartol with considerable criticism; even
more so after he published Alamut three years later. Bartol
initially wanted to dedicate Alamut to an "unknown dictator",
but the editors nipped his intention in the bud.
Alamut
Set in Persia in the eleventh century, Alamut is the story
of Hassan Ibn Sabah, an old man who becomes the head of the
Ashashini sect. Ensconced within his mountain citadel of Alamut,
the "Caligula of the East" wages a horrifying holy
war against the Turks who threaten to impose Sunnitism on the
Persian Muslims. At first, Hassan Ibn Sabah seems week and undermanned
compared to the superior enemy. Yet he achieves a breakthrough
with a small but utterly committed group of fedayee. They are
fanatic desperados fearless of death. He gets them high on hashish,
gives them a taste of what they believe to be heaven, and sends
them to suicide missions they are eager to fulfil.
The character of Hassan Ibn Sabah was strongly reminiscent
of the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, who were in power
when the novel was published. It could thus be interpreted as
a warning, but Slovenian critics were utterly perplexed by the
book's "nothing is real, everything is allowed" doctrine,
and Hassan Ibn Sabah's "alienation of the people"
method. "The lower the conscience of the group, the greater
its zeal", Hassan would say. People who want to fight by
his side must be in love with death.
All of Bartol's theses, as laid out in Alarnut, seemed far
out of the temporal and mental context of the time, at least
for the critics. This can hardly be said of 1988 and 1989 though,
when the novel was translated into French and Spanish. Alamut
was an immediate hit in France, and the 30,000 copies printed
were sold out in a matter of months. It was even more successful
in Spain: the first 10,000 copies sold out even before the book
was officially published. Alamut has since been translated into
15 languages, including Arabic. It also achieved its deserved
recognition in Slovenia, as it became assigned reading in secondary
school.
In the Spotlight after 9/11
There are at least two reasons why the novel is now immensely
popular in Slovenia and abroad: the rise of Islamic terrorism,
which took on a previously unseen form on September 11, 2001,
and (what is often forgotten) the simple fact that the novel
is a page-turner. The editor of the French edition, Jean Pierre
Sicre, explained his decision to publish Alamut with the words,
"There is a single principle: pleasure! There are no others.
A pure pleasure of reading". As is true of all great novels,
Alamut is multi-layered. It can be read as a historical, philosophical,
political or trivial text, or ultimately, as a metaphor that
seems less and less abstract after the political turmoil of
the recent years.
After the initial negative attitude towards Bartol, Slovenian
readers have become increasingly approving of his work. Hopefully
this is not because Alamut has been confirmed as a masterpiece
by others, who are bigger than us. This would only indicate
that not much has changed since Bartol complained about the
humility and low self esteem of Slovenians.
More than Just Alamut
After publishing the fourth reprint of Alamut in 2002 (the
book has been on the best-selling list for months) the publishing
house Zalozba sanje also reprinted a collection of Bartol's
short stories, entitled Al Araf, in December. The title, which
in Arabic means the wall between heaven and hell (the wall of
cognition), is a bit misleading as the 27 short stories are
a psychological and philosophical view of day-to-day problems
of urban life. The short stories bear distinct fingerprints
of psychoanalysis, which was unusual of Slovenian literary works
at the time. The only other contemporary of Bartol to apply
psychoanalysis in his writings was Slavko Grum; he too only
achieved critical acclaim after his death. Zalozba sanje has
already announced it will shortly publish a selection of Bartol's
lampoons.
Although disappointed at the less than rave reviews of his
work, Bartol never lost his faith in his literary genius. He
believed strongly in Alamut, and recalled on an occasion: "I
had had the feeling as if I was also writing for a readership
that would live fifty years from now". When he wrote the
final word of his masterpiece, he became paranoid about the
possibility of someone stealing his manuscript or losing it
to a blaze of fire. "Let them kill me; I will be immortal
in Alamut", he wrote. Vladimir Bartol died a non-violent
death in 1967. It seems that he has become immortal, and that
his writings are walking Al Araf, the wall of cognition.
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