'Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted': Dostoevskii, Nietzsche and the Most Famous Quote in Slovene Literature

Abstract:Vladimir Bartol's novel Alamut (1938) is currently the most famous Slovene novel. Its motto 'nothing is true, everything is permitted' has become part of global pop culture, especially thanks to its adoption by the successful video-game franchise Assassin's Creed, which cites the novel as its fundamental inspiration. In the literary-critical reception of Alamut, much attention has been paid to the origin of the phrase, which we find in nearly identical form in Nietzsche, and with greater or lesser variations also in Dostoevskii. This article traces the history of the statement and its interpretations — from Russian (Tolstoi, Merezhkovskii, Shestov, Berdiaev) via French (Gide, de Lubac, Sartre, Camus) to Slovene ones (Vidmar, Bartol) — and shows that even before Dostoevskii and Nietzsche, a decisive role in its formation and popularization in European thought was played by Orientalist debates in the first half of the nineteenth century.