Vita Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians describes a famous explorer forced to perform as “the lion of the hour” in the drawing room of a great country estate. For this earnest scientist and adventurer, it’s a painful humiliation for him to don white tie and attempt polite conversation with idle aristocrats who have no clue where he has been or what he has achieved. Arminius Vambéry, who in the course of his life wore many different costumes, put on many masks and cycled through the world’s religions, enjoyed nothing better than regaling a society drawing room with his tales of the exotic orient. He made a career out of being “lion of the hour”. Anabel Loyd’s new biography of Vambéry painstakingly and thoughtfully explores how Vambéry pulled this off.
Born in 1832 into a poverty-stricken Jewish family in Hungary, the clever but lame young Vambéry earned a precarious living as a private tutor to the wealthy. He spent much of his pay on finishing school lessons for himself. This early exposure to high society made him determined to rise above his birth station. The memoirs of his youth bear the title, “My Struggles”, which remind one uncomfortably about another poor but ambitious youth from the Dual Monarchy. Vambéry convinced the Hungarian Scientific Academy to send him to Istanbul to investigate the linguistic connection between Hungarian and Turkish, and to compile a Turkish-Hungarian dictionary. In Istanbul, awash with ambitious foreigners and intriguing Turks, his growing mastery of Turkish opened many doors to his enterprising spirit. He became acquainted with judges, ministers and even the crown prince, later Sultan Abdul Hamid II. His Turkish connections, in turn, enabled him to meet on more equal terms European ambassadors and statesmen whom he could never have encountered back home. Vambéry was launched.
He could have stayed in Istanbul and become, like many Europeans, indispensable cogs in the Ottoman state machinery. Had he contented himself with lexicography, he could have become the Hungarian version of James Redhouse, a successful foreign expert, whose Turkish- English dictionary is still in print. Instead a certain wanderlust pushed him to disguise himself as a dervish, and to undertake a perilous journey, to the distant and unfriendly courts of Khiva and Bukhara. Many Europeans had recently paid with their lives for similar audacity. The slave-dealing emirs of Central Asia feared British, Iranian and Russian designs on their states, and concluded that the best way to maintain their independence was by isolating themselves as much as possible, and to execute unwanted visitors. Vambéry carried off his foolhardy wager, escaping from hunger, bandits, sandstorms and detection as an infidel. He spent three months in what is now Uzbekistan, meeting face-to-face with the redoubtable emirs. Not only did he live to tell about it, but he lived on telling about it for the rest of his life.
There is something very modern about the way Vambery managed his mediatic career. He quickly carried his story to London, realizing that the audience for tales of derring-do in the back of the beyond would raise his profile much higher in Great Britain obsessed with empire, compared to the potential audience in his native Hungary: a few specialists in Altaic philology. After his book launch, he embarked on a string of speaking engagements, and never failed to follow up with potential patrons in Britain’s clubs, in the parliament, or the foreign office. As Loyd writes about Vambéry’s new social circle:
The acquaintanceship[s… were] remarkable, figures whose ghosts have drifted through the lives of generations of British schoolchildren as the great heroes of the Victorian age.
These friendships made him the go-to-person for insight into Central Asia, Turkey and Iran, all key pieces in the chess game played by the Great Powers in the late 19th century.
Loyd explains Vambéry’s success in his new role by reminding us of how he navigated the courts of Tehran and Bukhara. “The Oriental’, wrote the false dervish, with unconscious irony, ‘is born and dies in a mask; candour will never exist in the East’.” Nor would it exist in the West. After all, Vambery had spent just a few months on his travels, and a couple of years altogether in Istanbul and Tehran. Nevertheless he had sufficient powers of persuasion and chutzpah to convince Britain’s great and good of his credentials. Other scholars tried to sound the alarm about Vambéry’s breezy scholarship and egregious errors, but his fame with the public provided a solid wall of defense.
There is a darker side to this story. Vambéry managed to keep his name in the public eye for over 40 years, by playing to Britain’s imperial vanity and paranoia. He became a bellicose opponent of Russia’s expansion into Central Asia. He cajoled the British to take up the White Man’s burden in this distant realm. He warned that Russia aimed to overthrow Britain’s Indian empire. He deprecated Russia’s capability of performing its own civilizing mission. His constant speech-making and pamphleteering was music to the Tory Party, which argued for a muscular foreign policy in the East. The Liberals abhorred him, but for decades could do little to reduce his popularity or his influence. Perhaps Vambéry sincerely held his views, but it is also possible that he knew that he could dine out on Russophobia for a long time.
In some respects Vambéry indeed had insights into Russia, whose language he spoke and history he had studied. He saw the inevitability of Russia’s expansion into the steppe. The Russians felt that “all these peoples of various races feel themselves drawn to us, and are ours, by blood, by tradition, and by ideas.” The emperor, who addressed his European peers as mon cher frère, “in presence of the Tartar princes of Central Asia’ behaves “not as Emperor of all the Russias but as a Khan on the Neva”. In the end Russia did annex Khiva and Bukhara, just as Vambéry had warned, and the stage seemed to be set for the climactic showdown between the two empires with the Hindu Kush as the battlefield.
But then, Russia and Britain suddenly concluded that Kaiser Wilhem II’s Germany was a bigger threat to either of them than they were to each other. The Liberal Party sent Vambéry’s good friend King Edward VII to Reval (now Talinn) to woo his cousin Emperor Nicholas II into an alliance. Britain and Russia agreed to split Iran into spheres of influence and recognize an official border between the Russian Empire and Afghanistan, then under British protection.
Vambéry’s star faded quickly. An old man now, he was reduced to begging the Foreign Office to pay him a pension of 500 pounds a year, hinting that his voluminous correspondence with the great and the good could fall into compromising hands without these payments.
Still, in the last years of his life he dabbled in a number of fields. He lobbied his one-time student Sultan Abdul Hamid II to receive in audience the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, in hopes of establishing a Jewish colony in Palestine. He himself received Bahaullah, the world-traveling prophet of the new Baha’i religion. Loyd adroitly characterized his last years:
In his own country he was always the outsider and, finally, in his cantankerous old age, the not- quite-revered-enough academic, who may have been trying to find peace or redemption in the recapture of the faith of his birth – or some other.
Scholars of Central Asia inevitably read Vambéry’s early books for information about Khiva and Bukhara before Russian conquest. Loyd judges his later output harshly:
His original Travels might have lacked the ironic humour inherent in much of the literature of nineteenth-century exploration, but it was still a good story. Once he began writing as the scholar and authority, however, most of his writing became pompous, portentous, and redolent of self-importance, as over-furnished with extraneous furbelows as a bourgeois Victorian drawing room. And the musical box in the corner played the same tune ad infinitum, even after the British marching band had joined in and, later still, gone home.
What then to make of Vambéry’s legacy? He left no important scholarly works, besides some dictionaries and translations. If this is yeomanry work, he is no more important than James Redhouse, who did not spend his life in self-promotion. He trained a number of students, including Ignać Goldziher. He never solved the problem of how Hungarian and Turkish might be related, but his views, ahead of their times, seem perspicacious, as Loyd writes: “With regard to Hungarian ethnogenesis, he chose [..] to point out that the ‘prosaic derivation from a confused ethnical group’, ‘patched and pieced together from the most diverse elements’, like every ‘single nation in Europe’, was far more likely than any romantic legend of origin sought by ‘Magyar patriots’”. This did not make him especially popular in Hungary, but his homeland, as we have seen, was not the theatre for his performances.
Loyd’s book is full of careful and judicious appraisal of this complex and ultimately unlovable person. She provides extensive content on the personalities and places mentioned in the text, without which the reader would be lost. However she is more comfortable with Victorian Britain than with Central Asia, so she commits a few solecisms. Chagatai was not a “dead language” in Vambéry’s times, but the literary language of the eastern Turks. A Sart is not someone of Persian origin settled in Central Asia but an indigenous Central Asian urban dweller. She says Vambéry spoke Uzbek, but this term did not exist in his day. Saadi’s Gulestan is not an epic. These are minor quibbles which could be fixed in a second edition, in what is otherwise a compelling portrait of one of the 19th century’s most characteristic heroes—the imperialist explorer and lion of the hour.