VERA MUTAFCHIEVA’S THE CASE OF CEM, tr. from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

A Postmodern Historical Novel Reimagines 15th-century East-West Politics

by Stiliana Milkova Rousseva 

Note: This is a guest post by our colleague Stiliana Milkova Rousseva, whose review is the inaugural piece in a new Turkoslavia series featuring reviews of translations from Turkic and/or Slavic languages, broadly conceived. You can pitch us anytime at turkoslavia@gmail.com.

Long before postmodern historical novels such as Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972), Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980), Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (Cassandra, 1983), and Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (2008) captivated readers with their imaginative, thoroughly researched, and carefully plotted envisioning of the past, there was Vera Mutafchieva’s Случаят Джем (The Case of Cem). 

Published in Bulgaria in 1967, this 500-page novel anticipates by two decades the genre that in 1988 Linda Hutcheon would term “postmodern historiographic metafiction,” whereby “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs is made the grounds for [the genre’s] rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (5). Adopting an experimental form, The Case of Cem narrates a nuanced vision of history along with a queer sub-plot that managed to bypass ideological censorship. And now, almost sixty years after its original publication, Mutafchieva’s superb novel has found an equally superb translator in English: Angela Rodel’s The Case of Cem (2024) performs miracles in bringing this masterpiece for the first time to Anglophone audiences. 

Mutafchieva’s novel is set in the late-15th-century Ottoman Empire and in Western Europe (France, the Vatican, Rome, Naples), reflecting on the binarized conflict between West and East, Christianity and Islam—the Ottoman Empire’s rapid westward expansion and Western Europe’s frantic attempts to curb its conquests. Mutafchieva grounds her narrative in a historical reality she then uses to interrogate both a more distant past and her present of the 1960s, hinged on literal as well as political and ideological barriers between Western Europe and its Eastern “others.” Mutafchieva, an erudite scholar of Ottoman history, is also a compelling storyteller. She uses her profound knowledge of the history, religion, modes, and manners of the 15th century to weave a fact-driven, detail-rich account of what is still one of the most fascinating episodes—yet generally neglected by historians—in the fraught relationship between the so-called Occident and Orient. 

The novel centers on Prince Cem (or Cem Sultan), the younger son of Sultan Mehmed II, who attempts, and fails, to overthrow his half-brother Bayezid II, the legal heir to the Ottoman throne. Allegedly the son of a Serbian princess (hence, half-Muslim, half-Eastern-Orthodox), a poet and warrior, and the favorite son of Mehmed II, Cem was 22 in 1481 when his father died. As the ruler of southern Anatolia, Cem had strong military support and quickly advanced to the old Ottoman capital of Bursa, pursuing his claim to the throne by minting coins and having the sermon at the Friday prayer read in his own name (Finkel 82-83). Meanwhile, his brother, Bayezid, arrived in Istanbul, where he was proclaimed the legitimate heir—whose right to rule, as Caroline Finkel explains, would be challenged thereon until Cem’s death in 1495 (81). Ultimately, Cem’s influence over the Ottoman Empire’s future lasted to the end of his days, the intricacies—and intimacies—of which The Case of Cem unravels.

A POLYPHONIC FORM

The plot unfolds within a precise timeframe, carefully tracked throughout the novel, from Mehmed II’s death in 1481 to Cem’s death in 1495 in Naples (at the age of 36), to the return of Cem’s remains to Bursa in 1499. Locations and settings are likewise meticulously charted: they follow Cem’s campaign in Anatolia, his defeat and retreat to Egypt and then to the island of Rhodes, and his subsequent 13-year exile in France and Italy. As Mutafchieva shows, Cem becomes a hostage and a pawn in Western politics, surrounded by guards, spies, and traitors, subjected to control and surveillance as he is transferred from court to court, and fortress to fortress, used as bait and leverage in Western Europe’s negotiations with Bayezid II. In fact, The Case of Cem is a novel about political exile and continuous displacement. 

The novel is structured as a series of metahistorical testimonies in front of a Universal Tribunal summoned to adjudicate the case of Cem but also to interrogate and rethink history more broadly (“the forms and contents of the past,” as Hutcheon puts it). Each participant in the Cem affair is called up to testify—centuries after the events—and offers their fragment of the events. Each chapter is narrated in first person by a witness, identified by their name and title and addressing an invisible yet omnipotent audience, a plural “you” whose questions and comments are implied but never heard. These many voices come from all ranks, social circles, and territories involved in Cem’s journey, elaborating—often critically and from the vantage point of later historical developments—on 15th-century European politics.

But Mutafchieva does not give the floor to Cem—indeed, he never speaks. Rather, his story is constructed piecemeal, through the many voiced perspectives of his political allies, opponents, lovers, secular and religious figures, each with their own particular rhetorical strategies. Dominant among these is Cem’s loyal companion, the poet Saadi, whose testimonies take up almost half of the text, providing the most detailed account of Cem’s life. Like all the speakers, Saadi has died long ago: “I cannot complain that fate has treated me cruelly. I truly suffered alongside Cem’s suffering, I met my death by drowning at the age of thirty-eight, but I lived an extraordinarily colorful life for a true believer—you will become convinced of that yourselves by the end of my tale” (51). Saadi is a charismatic, visionary witness whose testimonies not only recount Cem’s trials but also map the prince’s physical and psychological meanderings, his intellectual and political ambitions as well as his gradual decline and lapse into melancholy. For example, Saadi is first to describe Cem’s body, disclosing his love and admiration:

Cem was tall—a trait few of our folk can boast of. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a narrow waist and hips, wiry, agile—back in our days in Karamania, Cem always reminded me of an unbroken stallion. 

His face was also foreign to us—too light, wheat colored as we like to say. The reddish, tightly curled hairs that had surrounded the face of our deceased sultan had in Cem transformed into smooth gold. Like every true believer, my master always covered his head, but I—his closest companion for nearly two decades—often saw him bareheaded, and I must admit that my eyes never feasted on another beauty such as Cem, with his long silky locks, with his not high but wide and slightly angular white forehead, with the delicate arch of his almost joined eyebrows, which were darker than his hair. As for his eyes—suffice to say they were like the morning sun dancing on rushing water. (48)

Saadi proceeds to outline the coordinates of an ideological conflict between East and West—one based not on politics but desire: “I understand—this is inexplicable to you. Your poems and songs tiredly praise female charms, as if all the beauty in the world comes together in woman. How blind you are! […] For you, such admiration passes as sick and shameful because you fill it with an expressly carnal content. Now I am the one who does not understand you; after all, we belong to different worlds” (49). Although over the next 500 pages this tension tends to recede into the background, overpowered by political aspirations and Machiavellian intrigues, Saadi’s words nonetheless articulate a resounding critique of Western notions of love and desire. 

A CRITIQUE OF “EAST” AND “WEST”

The novel encodes a critique of 15th-century history when much of the Balkan peninsula became a site of negotiation in Western Europe’s dealings with the Ottoman Empire. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman expansion westward seemed inevitable and so to contain it, Western Europe surrendered the territories in Eastern Europe and instead protected the borders of France and the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, the Venetian Republic, and the Italian states. In this way, the West also protected itself from any threat, like the one the second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1422)—with its Eastern Orthodox Christianity and powerful army—had posed for two centuries before the Ottoman invasion. In other words, the West authorized the conquest of the Balkans to ensure its own safety. Mutafchieva exposes the ensuing five-century Ottoman occupation as a deliberate Western European strategy to prevent the region’s potentially becoming a unified Eastern Orthodox state. In fact, in her foreword to the 1967 first edition, Mutafchieva formulates her critique of Western politics: 

In the case of Cem, which unfolded over a whole decade and a half at the tail end of the 15th century, the politics of the East and West were sketched out with utter clarity, with naked simplicity. Later some would call this “the beginning of the Eastern Question” and they might be right....

Let’s assume that the “Eastern Question” did not begin with Russia’s advance toward the warm seas and the West’s efforts to block this advance, but rather with attempts by that very same West to inhibit the development of the European East, leaving it behind, even condemning it to centuries of suffering. 

The liberation of the newly conquered Balkans would never again be as easily achievable as it was during the time of the case of Cem. The West did not fumble this opportunity by accident. Some think it resulted from bad strategy. That’s not true, the strategy was actually rather good. (12–13)

Besides this condemnation of 15th-century Western European politics, Mutafchieva’s novel conveys a surreptitious commentary on the then-present 1960s. Written and published at the height of the Cold War, the novel exposes the pervasive practices of surveillance and control, while weaving a story about political exile, emigration, and defection to the West. Mutafchieva’s brother defected to the West in 1963, as did her ex-husband some years later. Under Bulgarian communism, defectors were banned from returning, while their families who stayed back were marginalized and overtly punished (and often forced to collaborate with the Secret Services). Both Julia Kristeva (Юлия Кръстева, to use her Bulgarian name) and Tsvetan Todorov (Цветан Тодоров) emigrated to France in the ’60s to return to Bulgaria only after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. And, as Rodel writes in her translator’s note, “not unlike Cem, defectors were used as pawns by competing governments in propaganda campaigns, and a few such as Georgi Markov, were even assassinated” (10). 

But let me circle back to the extraordinary fact of this postmodern historical novel’s translation in English and its long overdue entrance in the terrain of world literature. Rodel’s masterful text does justice to Mutafchieva’s historically- and linguistically-complex narrative, brimming with idiolects as different as those of Grand Viziers and Cardinals, with contemporaneous terminology and geographic and political realia. And in a generous and moving gesture, Rodel coopts the covert protagonist of the novel, the poet Saadi, as her collaborator: “I felt as if Saadi was my co-author of this translation, the co-creator I found myself in constant conversation with” (9). In the novel, Saadi, having learned French, becomes Cem’s interpreter and translator, both mediator and stand-in for the Ottoman prince. It is Saadi, then, who bridges past and present, traveling seamlessly between centuries and languages.

Despite its historical specificity, The Case of Cem is ever more relevant today, when fundamental questions of global mobility remain unanswered on the backdrop of mass displacement, refugee crises, political exile, migrant hardships, and contested borders and territories. In the novel, when Cem is finally buried in Bursa in 1499, after four years of posthumous exile, his tomb becomes a symbol of homelessness and suffering: “Gifts are often left on the marble slab, even more than on Osman Khan’s grave. In life Cem was a foreigner everywhere: a Serb or nonbeliever here, a Saracen or Moor among Christians. Who knows why, but in his death, Cem belongs to everyone. Likely because there is nothing more universally human than suffering” (568). The novel concludes with this pronouncement on the applicability, then and now, of Cem’s destiny to the lives and fates of countless contemporary others.

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Stiliana Milkova Rousseva is a Bulgarian-born writer, scholar, and translator. She edits Reading in Translation.

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WORKS CITED

Finkel, Caroline. Osman’s Dream. The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Mutafchieva, Vera. Sluchayat Dzhem. Janet 45, 2024. 

—. The Case of Cem. Translated by Angela Rodel. Sandorf Passage, 2024.