Sjeme smrti

The novel provides a precise picture of the dramatic era in which Khayyam lives – the collapse of the Arab Empire, the appearance of the Crusaders and the West on the historical stage, the encounters of great cultures, the appearance of steppe peoples who bring “fresh blood” into Islamic societies, where they appear mainly as conquerors, only to relatively quickly cultivate and immerse themselves in the culture they “conquered”.

In the foreground of the novel’s plot stands the figure of Omar Khayyam, surrounded by a series of famous historical figures from his era. Just as these historical figures enable the novel to thematize everything that was conceived in the era being discussed (terrorism, fundamentalism, attempts to realize communist ideas in the form of a state) so that it still accompanies us today as the cultural and political reality of the era in which we live, fictional characters provide insight into the intimate life of the hero.

Khayyam knows an awful lot and is constantly learning, but it is precisely his immense knowledge that forces him to see that a person cannot acquire reliable knowledge; Opposite him stand his contemporaries, who, presumably because they live in times of great upheaval and destruction, construct a single solid point in their minds – their fundamentalist faith in something, from which they then draw the illusion of security in a time of general uncertainty.