Unknown Unknowns, Unknown Knowns, and the Repetitions of History

The Orientalist:  Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

There are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

--Donald Rumsfeld, 2002

In 1921, when Rudolph Valentino was captivating audiences as ‘The Sheik,’ a fifteen-year-old Azeri Jew named Lev Nussimbaum converted to Islam and assumed the name of Essad Bey.  He and his father had escaped turmoil in Azerbaijan and had knocked around the Caucasus, Turkmenistan, and Persia before landing in Constantinople, where the teenager changed his identity.  From there, they joined the masses of refugees and exiles caroming throughout Central and Western Europe . . . and Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey began his remarkable literary career.  Before his death in 1942, holed up in Fascist Italy, Lev had written dozens of articles and sixteen books, including Ali and Nino, a romance still considered a keystone of Azeri literature (published under a new pseudonym, Kurban Said).  This enigmatic, peripatetic author is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning Tom Reiss’s fascinating book, The Orientalist.

That’s my first ‘unknown unknown.’  Before my daughter brought this book to my attention a couple of weeks ago, I’d never heard of Lev Nussimbaum or his substantial literary output, which includes biographies of Lenin and Reza Pahlevi, studies of the Russian secret police and of Theodore Dreiser, articles published in Die Literarische Welt and Vanity Fair.  According to Donald Rumsfeld’s gnomic epistemology, this ‘unknown unknown’ changed for me to a ‘known unknown.’  I still haven’t read any of Lev’s works (thus the ‘unknown’ remains), but now I ‘know’ a good deal about his intriguing life – insofar as his deliberate, situational, and fabulous fabrications allow.  (And insofar as one accepts Reiss’s research:  there seems to be a vigorous counter-narrative in the pages of the Azerbaijan International that seeks to problematize and de-Azerbaijanicize Lev Nussimbaum’s life and authorship, particularly of Ali and Nino, and to delegitimize Reiss’s book.)

 Strategic Positionality:  Azerbaijan and its neighbors

 My second ‘unknown unknown’ was the history of Azerbaijan and of the Caucasus in general.  I could locate the country and the mountain range on a map, and that was about it.  I had no idea Azerbaijan was the turn-of-the-century oil capital of the world and a stunningly progressive Islamic state for the brief time of its independence, a place where Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and other religions co-existed in oil-profit-fueled harmony, a polity where women could vote, an East-West crossroads where European-styled opera houses, medieval palaces, and crusader enclaves existed side-by-side.  Lev Nussimbaum’s childhood home was a microcosm of the Azeri capital of Baku, a wealthy enclave in which the Alfred Nobel family and Joseph Stalin could share Caspian caviar, along with dreams and fears of revolution, in the company of the Nussimbaums’ eunuchs and German nannies. Nor did I have any idea of the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Caucasus . . . or its importance to the ambitions of larger European powers.

 Baku, Azerbaijan:  the Opera and Ballet Theater (1911) and a view of the Old City

The third ‘unknown unknown’ was the milieu of the Weimar Republic (Lev and his father landed in Germany, where the young man attended the Russian School in Berlin and used falsified credentials to pursue Oriental studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat).   Before I read The Orientalist, I’d thought of Weimar as the interval between World War I and Hitler.  Period.  The book discloses the seething Bolshevik vs. proto-Fascist struggles, the weird situation of White Russian émigrés, the vectors of Teutonic mythmaking, the vibrant literary culture enabled by cheap printing and ostensible freedom of the press, the precursors of Nazi ascendency, the precarious position of German and Russian Jews.

The Neue Synagogue in Berlin, 1859-1855, severely damaged during World War II

And the fourth ‘unknown unknown’ – a protean Orientalism that predates, but in U.S. academia was largely eclipsed by, Edward Said’s formulations.  Jewish Orientalism: Benjamin Disraeli’s novels, Moorish-style synagogues, and certain  Zionist principles based on a capacious idea of Semitism and a romantic concept of desert people’s affinities.  Pan-Turanianism: the ‘Young Turks’ concept of a modernized Ottoman empire focused on Russia and Central Asia, a sort of tolerant Orientalized lebensraum.  Lev Nussimbaum’s self-fashioning:  the adoption of a fantasy identity as a Moslem prince, an identity rooted in an idealized Baku (and Caucasus, and Middle East, and Central Asia) where political, ethnic, and religious strife does not exist.

The ‘unknown unknown’ is Donald Rumsfeld’s third term (after the self-evident ‘known-known’ and the should-gather-more-information ‘known unknown’).  Slajov Zizek added a useful fourth term, the ‘unknown known.’   This category encompasses things we know, or kind of know, but have decided not to acknowledge (or, perhaps, have repressed).  It seems that Lev Nussimbaum’s life was an exercise in operating within the ‘unknown known.’  He knew, for example, that his father Abraham was a Jew from the Pale of Settlement (as was his mother); since for most of his life he lived with his father, who made no efforts to hide his identity (and who ultimately was murdered in Treblinka). Lev’s adherence to his fabricated Muslim heritage is a remarkable instance of ‘unknowing’ the known, as is his stubborn belief that he could flourish in Fascist environments, as is his conviction that monarchy or revived Khanates were viable alternatives to the revolutionary terrors he experienced.

 Reading this remarkable book, I felt as if I were falling into an uncanny (or Lacanian Real) rabbit hole of repeating history driven by the ‘unknown known.’  Lev’s early life was shaped by failed or failing states and empires threatened by extraordinary instances of terrorism and the political fragility it feeds on and causes – threat and collapse that motivated his construction of an imaginary Orient, with himself as the Scheherazade who kept these Arabian Night-dreams afloat with his words. These years seem like scary funhouse mirrors of contemporary geopolitics, ‘unknown knowns’ that could perhaps help us negotiate today’s crises with the help of a few more acknowledged ‘knowns.’

Let’s go back to the year 1921.  Eastern Europe in chaos (German Freikorps fighting Polish forces in Upper Silesia, for instance).  Russian troops stamping out dissent in its remnants of Empire (then Bolshevik rather than Czarist or neo-Czarist).  The Jaffa riots in newly mandated Palestine.  Political assassinations.  Thousands of dead in political and religious massacres.  Resuscitation of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and White (Teutonic/Aryan) supremacy ideologies.  Oil.  Rampant terrorism.  Gigantic refugee populations.  Shia vs. Sunni warfare, plus persecution of minority groups, including the Yazidi (yes, they also make an appearance in The Orientalist). 

Let’s fast forward to the year 2014.  It’s as if history repeats itself not as tragedy to farce but as tragedy to tragedy, in part because current history ‘unknows’ its potentially known past.

To me, the greatest value of The Orientalist is the way it pries open ‘unknown knowns’ as well as how it reveals ‘unknown unknowns’ that deserve to be known.  I can’t remember a book that made me think more about issues ranging from authorial to biographical (and the art of biography) to historical to geopolitical, past and present.  It may not be to everyone’s taste, as the issues I’ve tried to comment upon here do intrude on the primary story – discovering the ‘known’ about Lev Nussimbaum, who functions as an Orientalist Zelig more than as an investigative focus.  That said, it’s a book I can’t recommend highly enough.

The Orientalist:  Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.  By Tom Reiss.  New York:  Random House, 2005.  Hardcover, paperback, electronic format.

[Side note:  the Azerbaijan capital of Baku was known for its polycultural architecture in Lev Nussimbaum’s day, and it is now known for its futuristic building projects, projects that represent its imaginary future just as Lev’s depictions of the city represented its imaginary past.  Here are a few examples that try to out-Dubai Dubai but also have roots in Baku’s multi-ethnic and multi-aesthetic history.]

The Flame Towers   The Hotel Full Moon   The Concert Hall