Early 20th-century Turkish literature

Further information: Poetry of the Ottoman Empire, Prose of the Ottoman Empire
Most of the roots of modern Turkish literature were formed between the years 1896when the
first collective literary movement aroseand 1923, when the Republic of Turkey was officially
founded. Broadly, there were three primary literary movements during this period:
the Edebiyyt- Cedde ( ; "New Literature") movement
the Fecr-i t ( ; "Dawn of the Future") movement
the Mill Edebiyyt ( ; "National Literature") movement
The New Literature movement

Tevfik Fikret (18671915), poet and editor of Servet-i Fnun

Journal of Servet-i Fnun, edition of 24 April 1908
The Edebiyyt- Cedde, or "New Literature", movement began with the founding in 1891 of the
magazine Servet-i Fnn ( ; "Scientific Wealth"), which was largely devoted to
progressboth intellectual and scientificalong the Western model. Accordingly, the
magazine's literary ventures, under the direction of the poet Tevfik Fikret (18671915), were
geared towards creating a Western-style "high art" in Turkey. The poetry of the groupof which
Tevfik Fikret and Cenb ehbeddn (18701934) were the most influential proponentswas
heavily influenced by the French Parnassian movement and the so-called "Decadent" poets. The
group's prose writers, on the other handparticularly Halit Ziya Uaklgil (18671945)were
primarily influenced by Realism, although the writer Mehmed Rauf (18751931) did write the
first Turkish example of a psychological novel, 1901's Eyll (; "September"). The language
of the Edebiyyt- Cedde movement remained strongly influenced by Ottoman Turkish.
In 1901, as a result of the article "Edebiyyt ve Hukuk" ( ; "Literature and Law"),
translated from French and published in Servet-i Fnn, the pressure of censorship was brought
to bear and the magazine was closed down by the government of the Ottoman sultan
Abdlhamid II. Though it was closed for only six months, the group's writers each went their
own way in the meantime, and the Edebiyyt- Cedde movement came to an end.
The Dawn of the Future movement
In the 24 February 1909 edition of the Servet-i Fnn magazine, a gathering of young writers
soon to be known as the Fecr-i t ("Dawn of the Future") groupreleased a manifesto in which
they declared their opposition to the Edebiyyt- Cedde movement and their adherence to the
credo, "Sanat ahs ve muhteremdir" ( ; "Art is personal and
sacred").
[18]
Though this credo was little more than a variation of the French writer Thophile
Gautier's doctrine of "l'art pour l'art", or "art for art's sake", the group was nonetheless opposed
to the blanket importation of Western forms and styles, and essentially sought to create a
recognizably Turkish literature. The Fecr-i t group, however, never made a clear and
unequivocal declaration of its goals and principles, and so lasted only a few years before its
adherents each went their own individual way. The two outstanding figures to emerge from the
movement were, in poetry, Ahmed Him (18841933), and in prose, Yakup Kadri
Karaosmanolu (18891974).
The National Literature movement

Cover page from an issue of Gen Kalemler
In 1908, Sultan Abdlhamid II had instituted a constitutional government, and the parliament
subsequently elected was composed almost entirely of members of the Committee of Union and
Progress (also known as the "Young Turks"). The Young Turks ( Jn Trkler) had
opposed themselves to the increasingly authoritarian Ottoman government, and soon came to
identify themselves with a specifically Turkish national identity. Along with this notion
developed the idea of a Turkish and even pan-Turkish nation (Turkish: millet), and so the
literature of this period came to be known as "National Literature" (Turkish: mill edebiyyt). It
was during this period that the Persian- and Arabic-inflected Ottoman Turkish language was
definitively turned away from as a vehicle for written literature, and that literature began to assert
itself as being specifically Turkish, rather than Ottoman.
At first, this movement crystallized around the magazine Gen Kalemler ( ; "Young
Pens"), which was begun in the city of Selnik in 1911 by the three writers who were most
representative of the movement: Ziya Gkalp (18761924), a sociologist and thinker; mer
Seyfettin (18841920), a short-story writer; and Ali Canip Yntem (18871967), a poet. In Gen
Kalemler's first issue, an article entitled "New Language" (Turkish: "Yeni Lisan") pointed out
that Turkish literature had previously looked for inspiration either to the East as in the Ottoman
Divan tradition, or to the West as in the Edebiyyt- Cedde and Fecr-i t movements, without
ever turning to Turkey itself.
[19]
This latter was the National Literature movement's primary aim.
The intrinsically nationalistic character of Gen Kalemler, however, quickly took a decidedly
chauvinistic turn,
[20]
and other writersmany of whom, like Yakup Kadri Karaosmanolu, had
been a part of the Fecr-i t movementbegan to emerge from within the matrix of the National
Literature movement to counter this trend. Some of the more influential writers to come out of
this less far-rightist branch of the National Literature movement were the poet Mehmet Emin
Yurdakul (18691944), the early feminist novelist Halide Edip Advar (18841964), and the
short-story writer and novelist Reat Nuri Gntekin (18891956).
Republican literature
Following the Ottoman Empire's defeat in the First World War of 19141918, the victorious
Entente Powers began the process of carving up the empire's lands and placing them under their
own spheres of influence. In opposition to this process, the military leader Mustafa Kemal
(18811938), in command of the growing Turkish national movement whose roots lay partly in
the Young Turks, organized the 19191923 Turkish War of Independence. This war ended with
the official ending of the Ottoman Empire, the expulsion of the Entente Powers, and the
founding of the Republic of Turkey.
The literature of the new republic emerged largely from the pre-independence National
Literature movement, with its roots simultaneously in the Turkish folk tradition and in the
Western notion of progress. One important change to Turkish literature was enacted in 1928,
when Mustafa Kemal initiated the creation and dissemination of a modified version of the Latin
alphabet to replace the Arabic-based Ottoman script. Over time, this changetogether with
changes in Turkey's system of educationwould lead to more widespread literacy in the country
[21]
albeit the access of new generations was broken off with immense corpus of written culture
of 1000 years.
Prose
Main article: Prose of the Republic of Turkey

Memed, My Hawk
(1955), by Yaar Kemal
Tutunamayanlar
(1972), by Ouz Atay
Stylistically, the prose of the early years of the Republic of Turkey was essentially a continuation
of the National Literature movement, with Realism and Naturalism predominating. This trend
culminated in the 1932 novel Yaban ("The Wilds"), by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanolu. This novel
can be seen as the precursor to two trends that would soon develop:
[22]
social realism, and the
"village novel" (ky roman). alkuu ("The Wren") by Reat Nuri Gntekin addresses a similar
theme with the works of Karaosmanolu. Gntekin's narrative has a detailed and precise style,
with a realistic tone.
The social realist movement is perhaps best represented by the short-story writer Sait Faik
Abasyank (19061954), whose work sensitively and realistically treats the lives of
cosmopolitan Istanbul's lower classes and ethnic minorities, subjects which led to some criticism
in the contemporary nationalistic atmosphere.
[23]
The tradition of the "village novel", on the other
hand, arose somewhat later. As its name suggests, the "village novel" deals, in a generally
realistic manner, with life in the villages and small towns of Turkey. The major writers in this
tradition are Kemal Tahir (19101973), Orhan Kemal (19141970), and Yaar Kemal (1923 ).
Yaar Kemal, in particular, has earned fame outside of Turkey not only for his novelsmany of
which, such as 1955's nce Memed (Memed, My Hawk), elevate local tales to the level of epic
but also for his firmly leftist political stance. In a very different tradition, but evincing a similar
strong political viewpoint, was the satirical short-story writer Aziz Nesin (19151995) and Rfat
Ilgaz(19111993).
Another novelist contemporary to, but outside of, the social realist and "village novel" traditions
is Ahmet Hamdi Tanpnar (19011962). In addition to being an important essayist and poet,
Tanpnar wrote a number of novelssuch as Huzur ("A Mind at Peace", 1949) and Saatleri
Ayarlama Enstits ("The Time Regulation Institute", 1961)which dramatize the clash
between East and West in modern Turkish culture and society. Similar problems are explored by
the novelist and short-story writer Ouz Atay (19341977). Unlike Tanpnar, however, Atayin
such works as his long novel Tutunamayanlar ("The Good for Nothing", 19711972) and his
short story "Beyaz Mantolu Adam" ("Man in a White Coat", 1975)wrote in a more modernist
and existentialist vein. On the other hand, Onat Kutlar's shak ("Isaac", 1959), composed of nine
short stories which are written mainly from a child's point of view and are often surrealistic and
mystical, represent a very early example of magic realism.

Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature
The tradition of literary modernism also informs the work of female novelist Adalet Aaolu
(1929 ). Her trilogy of novels collectively entitled Dar Zamanlar ("Tight Times", 19731987),
for instance, examines the changes that occurred in Turkish society between the 1930s and the
1980s in a formally and technically innovative style. Orhan Pamuk (1952 ), winner of the 2006
Nobel Prize in Literature, is another such innovative novelist, though his workssuch as 1990's
Beyaz Kale ("The White Castle") and Kara Kitap ("The Black Book") and 1998's Benim Adm
Krmz ("My Name is Red")are influenced more by postmodernism than by modernism. This
is true also of Latife Tekin (1957 ), whose first novel Sevgili Arsz lm ("Dear Shameless
Death", 1983) shows the influence not only of postmodernism, but also of magic realism.
The Republican establishment and later corporate sponsors strictly controlled the literary
environment by employing poets and writers as bureaucrats, providing subsidies to journals,
arranging publishing opportunities for the works of the favored names. Many of the names above
were favored by the Kemalist establishment by making them deputies, advisors and public
servants.
Today similar biased tendency still persists. Most of the names quoted above have secular and
pro-western ideology. Yet there have been and still are traditional and religious literary figures
with huge following who have been kept out the literary circles. The zealous poet and polemicist
Necip Fazl Ksakrek is known for his lifelong struggle against the one party rule and Kemalism
and spent years in prison as a result. Nuri Pakdil, Cahit Zarifolu, Erdem Bayazt, Mehmet Akif
nan are other notable poets in the way of Muslim-traditional lineage. In the short story field,
Rasim zdenren, Mustafa Kutlu and Ramazan Dikmen have become prominent.
Only recently the secular, pro-establishment authors and poets began to utilize traditional and
native imagery partly as a result of the western curiosity towards an exotic "Orient", mysticism
and Sufism. Pamuk's novels exemplify this tendency a lot.
The effect of the cultural change especially thanks to alphabet change impacted vastly imagery
and style of the Turkish Republican literature.
A recent study by Can and Patton
[24]
provides a quantitative analysis of twentieth century
Turkish literature using forty novels of forty authors ranging from Mehmet Rauf's (1875-1931)
Eyll (1901) to Ahmet Altan's (1950-) Kl Yaras Gibi (1998). Using weighted least squares
regression and a sliding window approach, they show that, as time passes, words, in terms of
both tokens (in text) and types (in vocabulary), have become longer. They indicate that the
increase in word lengths with time can be attributed to the government-initiated language reform
of the 20th century.
[25]
This reform aimed at replacing foreign words used in Turkish, especially
Arabic- and Persian-based words (since they were in majority when the reform was initiated in
early 1930s), with newly coined pure Turkish neologisms created by adding suffixes to Turkish
word stems. Can and Patton;
[26]
based on their observations of the change of a specific word use
(more specifically in newer works the preference of "ama" over "fakat", both borrowed from
Arabic and meaning 'but', and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant); also
speculate that the word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of
authors.
Poetry
Main article: Poetry of the Republic of Turkey

Nazm Hikmet (19021963) introduced the free verse style into Turkish poetry.
In the early years of the Republic of Turkey, there were a number of poetic trends. Authors such
as Ahmed Him and Yahy Keml Beyatl (18841958) continued to write important formal
verse whose language was, to a great extent, a continuation of the late Ottoman tradition. By far
the majority of the poetry of the time, however, was in the tradition of the folk-inspired
"syllabist" movement (Be Hececiler), which had emerged from the National Literature
movement and which tended to express patriotic themes couched in the syllabic meter associated
with Turkish folk poetry.
The first radical step away from this trend was taken by Nzm Hikmet Ran, whoduring his
time as a student in the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1924was exposed to the modernist poetry
of Vladimir Mayakovsky and others, which inspired him to start writing verse in a less formal
style. At this time, he wrote the poem "Alarn Gzbebekleri" ("Pupils of the Hungry"), which
introduced free verse into the Turkish language for, essentially, the first time.
[27]
Much of Nzm
Hikmet's poetry subsequent to this breakthrough would continue to be written in free verse,
though his work exerted little influence for some time due largely to censorship of his work
owing to his Communist political stance, which also led to his spending several years in prison.
Over time, in such books as Simavne Kads Olu eyh Bedreddin Destan ("The Epic of Shaykh
Bedreddin, Son of Judge Simavne", 1936) and Memleketimden nsan Manzaralar ("Human
Landscapes from My Country", 1939), he developed a voice simultaneously proclamatory and
subtle.

Orhan Veli Kank (1914-1950) was the founder of the Garip Movement in Turkish poetry.
Another revolution in Turkish poetry came about in 1941 with the publication of a small volume
of verse preceded by an essay and entitled Garip ("Strange"). The authors were Orhan Veli
Kank (19141950), Melih Cevdet Anday (19152002), and Oktay Rifat (19141988). Explicitly
opposing themselves to everything that had gone in poetry before, they sought instead to create a
popular art, "to explore the people's tastes, to determine them, and to make them reign supreme
over art".
[28]
To this end, and inspired in part by contemporary French poets like Jacques Prvert,
they employed not only a variant of the free verse introduced by Nzm Hikmet, but also highly
colloquial language, and wrote primarily about mundane daily subjects and the ordinary man on
the street. The reaction was immediate and polarized: most of the academic establishment and
older poets vilified them, while much of the Turkish population embraced them wholeheartedly.
Though the movement itself lasted only ten yearsuntil Orhan Veli's death in 1950, after which
Melih Cevdet Anday and Oktay Rifat moved on to other stylesits effect on Turkish poetry
continues to be felt today.
Just as the Garip movement was a reaction against earlier poetry, soin the 1950s and
afterwardswas there a reaction against the Garip movement. The poets of this movement, soon
known as kinci Yeni ("Second New",
[29]
) opposed themselves to the social aspects prevalent in
the poetry of Nzm Hikmet and the Garip poets, and insteadpartly inspired by the disruption
of language in such Western movements as Dada and Surrealismsought to create a more
abstract poetry through the use of jarring and unexpected language, complex images, and the
association of ideas. To some extent, the movement can be seen as bearing some of the
characteristics of postmodern literature. The most well-known poets writing in the "Second
New" vein were Turgut Uyar (19271985), Edip Cansever (19281986), Cemal Sreya (1931
1990), Ece Ayhan (19312002), Sezai Karako (1933- ), lhan Berk (19182008).
Outside of the Garip and "Second New" movements also, a number of significant poets have
flourished, such as Fazl Hsn Dalarca (19142008), who wrote poems dealing with
fundamental concepts like life, death, God, time, and the cosmos; Behet Necatigil (19161979),
whose somewhat allegorical poems explore the significance of middle-class daily life; Can Ycel
(19261999), whoin addition to his own highly colloquial and varied poetrywas also a
translator into Turkish of a variety of world literature; smet zel (1944 ), whose early poetry
was highly leftist but whose poetry since the 1970s has shown a strong mystical and even
Islamist influence; and Hasan Hseyin Korkmazgil (1927-1984) who wrote collectivist-realist
poetry.