Kemal Tahir'in Türk romanı düşüncesi

Abstract

Kemal Tahir (1910-1973) is one of the few writers who have remained outside of general tendencies relating to art and thought in a country where literature and ideas are dominated by imitation rather than authenticity. Tahir’s work as a novelist may be divided into two periods. In his essays about Anatolia, published in Geçit, an amateur literary journal of the 1930’s, in Göl İnsanları, stories serialized in Tan daily in 1941 and in his novels about Turkish peasant life based on his observations in several rural jails—where he served time for thirteen years—represent the first period during which he devoted his life to exploring the social reality of the Turkish people. This exploration, which was transformed into a genuine intellectual passion in the last decade of his life, led Kemal Tahir to focus on research into Ottoman history in the eai ly 1960’s. Consequently, Kemal Tahir experienced a transformation in his political interpretation of the history of the Ottoman Empire which marks his second period beginning specifically with the publication of his novel Yorgun Savaşçı (1965). In the second period, Kemal Tahir, having accepted and welcomed the historical and cultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire as a positive development, brings forward various polemical arguments. These arguments—based on the thesis that Turkish society is inherently different from Western societies—form the ideological background of Kemal Tahir’s idea of the Turkish Novel. In the nairative, he assigned a higher priority to “social drama’’ than to “individual drama” and argued that a novelist should conduct sound sociological research before embarking on his writing. The aim of this study, then, is to examine the theoretical validity of Kemal Tahir’s idea of the Turkish novel