On the Trail of Kurban Said
On a cold November morning in Vienna, I walked a maze of narrow
streets on the way to see a man who promised to solve the mystery of
Kurban Said. I was with Peter Mayer, the president of the Overlook
Press, a large, rumpled figure in a black corduroy suit who wanted
to publish Said’s small romantic novel Ali and Nino. Mayer tended to
burst into enthusiastic monologues about the book: “You know how when
you look at a Vermeer, and it’s an interior, and it’s quite quiet,
yet somehow, what he does with perspective, with light, it feels
much bigger-that’s this novel!” A love story set in the Caucasus on
the eve of the Russian Revolution, Ali and Nino had been originally
published in German in 1937 and was revived in translation in the
seventies as a minor classic. But the question of the author’s
identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed on was that
Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from
Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a
nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags, or the dilettante son
of an oil millionaire, or a Viennese caf-society writer who died in
Italy after stabbing himself in the foot. In the jacket photograph
of a book called Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus, the mysterious
author is dressed up as a mountain warrior-wearing a fur cap, a
long, flowing coat with a sewn-in bandolier, and a straight dagger
at his waist. Mayer and I were on our way to a meeting with a lawyer
named Heinz Barazon, who was challenging Overlook over proper author
credit on the novel.
Barazon claimed to know the true identity of Kurban Said, and as the
lawyer for the author’s heirs, he was insisting that it be
acknowledged in the new edition of Ali and Nino or he would block
publication. At the lawyer’s address, next to a shop where some old
women were bent over tables with needle and thread, we were buzzed
into a lobby that could have had the grime of the Anschluss on its
fixtures. Mayer squeezed my arm with excitement and said, “It’s The
Third Man!” Barazon’s appearance didn’t do anything to dispel the
atmosphere of a Cold War thriller. He was a small man with a
gravelly voice, a stooped back, and a clubfoot that made a
tremendous racket as he led us down his book-lined hallway. “You
have both come a long way to discover the identity of Kurban Said,”
he said. “It will all soon become clear to you.” He ushered us into
a room where a gaunt and beautiful blond woman with enormous glassy
eyes was lying motionless on a couch. “Pardon me, this is Leela,”
said Barazon. “I hope you’ll forgive me,” Leela said in a fragile,
precise voice. “I must remain lying down because I’m ill. I can’t
sit for long.” Barazon came directly to the point: the novel Ali and
Nino was written by the Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof,
the second wife of Leela’s father, Baron Omar-Rolf von Ehrenfels,
and when Baroness Elfriede died, in the early 1980s, having outlived
her husband, all rights to the work had passed down to Leela.
Barazon produced a thick file of documents that backed up this
story: publishing contracts, legal papers, and author lists from the
late thirties, stamped with Nazi eagles and swastikas. Under the
entry for “Said, Kurban” in the author’s section of the 1935-39
Deutscher Gesamtkatalog-the Third Reich’s equivalent of Books in
Print-it said, in no uncertain terms, “pseudonym for Ehrenfels, v.
Bodmershof, Elfriede, Baroness.” The Nazi documents seemed to tell a
clear story-that Baroness Elfriede had been Kurban Said-but it was
one that I believed to be untrue. I had become interested in the
identity of Kurban Said in the spring of 1998, when I went to Baku
to write about the city’s new oil boom-virtually the first signs of
life since the Russian Revolution made time stop there in 1917. Baku
is the capital of Azerbaijan, a tiny country that prides itself on
being the easternmost point in Europe, though most Europeans
wouldn’t know it. Its proximity to Iran and the fact that the
majority of its citizens are Shiite Muslims can dominate your vision
of Azerbaijan until you realize that the most impressive public
building in Baku is not a mosque but a copy of the grand casino at
Monte Carlo. Baku is the sort of city that has been beyond rigid
ideologies and religions for a thousand years. Its name is said to
derive from a Persian expression, baadiyekubiden, or “blow of the
winds.” Being situated at the head of a desert peninsula jutting
into the sea, the city is in fact one of the windiest places on
earth-one dapper ninety-seven-year-old man told me how, as a young
man, he and his family had worn specially made goggles with their
evening clothes to stroll along the boulevards without being blinded
by the sands.
Just before I left for Baku, an Iranian friend had recommended
Kurban Said’s novel Ali and Nino as a kind of introduction to the
city and the Caucasus in general, saying that it would be more
useful than any tourist guide. I had never heard of it, and when I
tracked down a 1972 Pocket Books edition, I was a little surprised
by the cover. It featured two airbrushed lovers and an endorsement
from Life: “If Kurban Said can’t push Erich Segal off the bestseller
list, nobody can!” But there turned out to be something of the
eighteenth century about the book, as if Candide had been written
with realistic characters and the intention of sweeping readers off
their feet. Each scene continued only long enough to spring some
miniature gear that moved the mechanism forward. The reviewer in The
New York Times had written, “One feels as if one has dug up buried
treasure.” The novel revolves around the love between a Muslim boy
and a Christian girl and the progress of their relationship as they
grow up; in the culturally tolerant world of old Azerbaijan, their
courtship seems blessed, though they are constantly bickering: “‘Ali
Khan, you are stupid. Thank God we are in Europe. If we were in
Asia they would have made me wear the veil ages ago, and you
couldn’t see me.’ I gave in. Baku’s undecided geographical situation
allowed me to go on looking into the most beautiful eyes in the
world.”
Over the course of its history, Azerbaijan had been conquered by
Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the Ottomans, and the Persians.
Finally, its “undecided geographical situation” was resolved when
the Russians captured it in 1825. During the period of czarist
expansion in the Caucasus, so vividly recounted by Lermontov,
Tolstoy, and Pushkin, Europe discovered Baku and Baku discovered
Europe. And everyone discovered oil. Lots of it. In Baku you did not
need to drill for the stuff-it sat on the surface of the earth, in
black ponds, sometimes enormous lakes-and the flow could be so strong
that crude occasionally swallowed wholehouses along the Caspian
shore. The walled caravan outpost soon became the center of the
burgeoning global oil industry-supplying more than half the world’s
crude-and the result was a fabulous nineteenth-century city built on
the profits: extravagant mansions, mosques, casinos, and theaters
from the period when the city was home to the Rothschilds, the
Nobels, and dozens of local Muslim “oil barons,” as they were
called. There was Mir Babayev, a popular singer who, after
discovering oil on his land, spent the rest of his days searching
out his record albums and destroying them because he preferred to be
remembered as an oil magnate. And there was Haji Zeynalabdin
Taghiyev, who made his fortune when an earthquake struck his land,
flooding it with oil; he built the first school for girls in the
Muslim world. Building wars sprang up. Moorish palaces still sit
next to Gothic manses, and Byzantine cupolas next to bejeweled
rococo pavilions. The locals styled themselves cultured Europeans
and “modern Muslims,” right up to the point when the Bolsheviks
decided they were decadent bourgeois and swooped in to crush them.
But Baku oil fueled Stalin’s Five Year Plans, and during the Second
World War, Hitler wanted Baku’s oil so badly that he redirected the
entire Russian campaign to get it. In September 1942, his general
staff presented him with a giant cake in the shape of the Caucasus.
A newsreel of the occasion shows the fhrer cutting himself the
piece with baku spelled out in frosting. “Unless we get the Baku
oil, the war is lost,” Hitler shouted at a top commander, and he
sacrificed the entire German Sixth Army at Stalingrad rather than
redirect a single division out of the Caucasus to come to its aid.
If they had succeeded in grabbing Baku, the combined Nazi armies
would have controlled one of the greatest strategic energy reserves
in the world-not to mention one of the most strategic pieces of
territory, the land bridge between Europe and Asia-and, with the
Soviet Union deprived of its oil, the Nazis would have for all
purposes won the war. Instead of victory, the push for Baku brought
utter defeat on the Russian front, and less than three years later,
Soviet armored divisions, tanked up with Baku oil, were at the gates
of Berlin. After 1945, rather than being rewarded for having fueled
the Russian victory, Azerbaijan saw many of its citizens deported to
Siberia and its oil industry allowed to languish. The fin de sicle
oil-boom city was deliberately ignored, forgotten, taking on a
deserted, vaguely eerie quality, so that even today it is possible
to imagine that one has wandered into some unusually sooty Right
Bank neighborhood in Paris, mysteriously abandoned by its
inhabitants.
My guide to Baku was Fuad Akhundov, a muscular young fellow who
worked as an agent of Interpol, the international police agency, but
seemed to spend most of his time sleuthing his city’s hidden past.
Growing up in the Soviet era, Fuad had always wondered about the
lost culture that had built the decaying mansions all around him, so
he began investigating the city’s history, mansion to mansion, house
to house. Fuad seemed to know the decaying mansions of Baku like
members of his own family. “I entered these edifices, asking if
anyone knew the descendants of the owner,” he told me as we drove
around the city in his battered Russian car. “As a policeman, I knew
that often people who think they know nothing can provide vital
information, so I used the crafts of interrogation, getting people
to recall things their dead grandparents or parents mentioned to
them over the course of the years.” Fuad spoke fluent English that
made him sound a bit like a nineteenth-century novel. When he needed
to go somewhere, he would say things like “Now your humble servant
must beg to take his leave, as he must attend to some pressing
police matters.”
As we explored Baku’s medieval ramparts, nineteenth-century
mansions, Zoroastrian temples, and palace gardens straight out of
The Arabian Nights, Fuad rarely stopped talking. “From here I could
see my world, the massive wall of the town’s fortress and the ruins
of the palace, Arab inscriptions at the gate,” he rhapsodized.
“Through the labyrinth of streets camels were walking, their ankles
so delicate that I wanted to caress them. In front of me rose the
squat Maiden’s Tower, surrounded by legends and tourist guides. And
behind the tower the sea began, the utterly faceless, leaden,
unfathomable Caspian Sea, and beyond, the desert-jagged rocks and
scrub: still, mute, unconquerable, the most beautiful landscape in
the world.” It took me a while to realize that he was quoting, and
that the passage was from Ali and Nino. The mere smell of the air in
a certain part of town would cause Fuad to launch into a quotation
from the novel, and often we would stop in front of some Viennese
imperial-style edifice-with holes where stone portraits of famous
Communists had once been added to the design-and he would say, as
though describing an event from history: “That is the girls’ school
where Ali first saw Nino with his cousin Ayeshe. We can be sure
because of this doorway, which is approximately four hundred paces
from the original door of the old Baku Russian Boys Gymnasium, which
was destroyed during the fighting in 1918 …”
It could have been like one of those morbid literary tours of places
mentioned in Chekhov or Pushkin, but Fuad’s love of Ali and Nino
seemed of an entirely different order. “This novel made me discover
my country, it made me discover the whole world that lay beneath my
feet, buried by the Soviet system,” he told me one night as we sat
in the empty Interpol headquarters at three in the morning. “Only
this one book-this Romeo and Juliet story at the height of the oil
boom, between a Christian girl and a Muslim boy, it tears away the
fabric which has covered me growing up here in Soviet Baku like a
shroud, like a funeral veil dropped by the bloodiest version of the
West, the inhuman Bolshevik Revolution, upon this fantastic world of
the highest cultural and human aspirations-the hope of the total
merger of East and West into something new and modern-which existed
for but a moment in time. Can you imagine it?” Fuad said. “Kurban
Said is like my lifeline. Without him, I would be trapped here in my
own city and not really be able to feel or understand the beauty and
yet tragic forces that are beneath my very nose.” Fuad’s obsession
with Ali and Nino was shared by many people in Baku.
Educated Azeris I met seemed to consider it their national novel,
telling me that they could show me the street, square, or
schoolhouse where almost every scene had taken place. There was a
resurgence of interest in the late 1990s in this small romantic
novel from the late 1930s, though nobody seemed exactly sure why. I
paid a call on an Iranian film producer who occupied a lavishly
refurbished suite in a collapsing old mansion, and who explained to
me his plans to make a movie of the book. (When the money didn’t
come through, he instead produced the Baku location scenes for a
James Bond movie.) Another day I visited the National Literary
Society, a Stalin-era building, where the chairman filled me in on
the simmering dispute in Azeri academic and government circles over
the novel’s authorship. Kurban Said’s identity had long been a
subject of speculation, he explained, but fortunately, the issue had
now been resolved: Kurban Said was the pseudonym for Josef Vezir, an
Azeri author whose sons, the Veziroffs, had been very active in
making sure his memory was preserved, and that he receive credit for
Azerbaijan’s national novel.
But when I got a copy of some short stories and novellas by Vezir, I
was surprised that anyone could give this theory credence. Vezir was
clearly an ardent Azeri nationalist whose novellas openly stated
that ethnic and cultural mixing was a bad idea and a betrayal of the
motherland. In Ali and Nino, Kurban Said offers nothing less than a
passionate endorsement of ethnic, cultural, and religious mixing.
Continues…
Excerpted from The Orientalist
by Tom Reiss
Copyright © 2005 by Tom Reiss.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2005
Tom Reiss
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-6265-9
