Young Turks in Literature

...proximity to Russia means that all such movements, however innocent, are lumped together with Communism...

...For the best Turkish writers have managed to achieve a synthesis between constructive Western influences and their own native culture...

...A large man with a bulky figure, a deep-bellied chuckle and a robust humanity, Yashar Kemal is almost a Turkish Balzac...

...and they have been further encouraged by Turkey's growing climate of liberalism since the overthrow of the restrictive Menderes regime...

...Since it appears to be no longer dangerous for them to present their indictment of society in articles and pamphlets, they may turn to other themes in their fiction...

...Yet he has a deep understanding of the West and a voluminous knowledge of Western literature, which he has read in translation...

...Yashar Kemal proves in Mainstay that he is a natural writer of sensitive feeling, with a touch of the poet and philosopher, an observant eye and a wry turn of wit...

...Who's the one Agha of this place?' he insisted, 'What's his name...

...Yet the value of this book, like that of his other work, lies as much in its subjective as in its objective quality...

...His prize-winning novel, for example, tells the story of Memed...

...There may be too many gaps to fill, and the progress of literary activity a trifle too feverish, but the fact remains that some of the results are astonishing...

...and I discovered after some time that the terribly narrow world of his became wider and wider, while with learning of new things his thirst for knowledge increased...

...It gives a picture not merely of economic and social conditions in a primitive Anatolian village, but of the mind and feelings of a young Turkish writer with a Western outlook, perplexed and frustrated by the task of living in both worlds at once...

...Today Turkey can boast of a remarkable group of writers whose freshness, originality and insight into their country's problems deserve attention the world over...

...The aims of the first school are purely literary and experimental...

...Mainstay's most moving passages concern the living conditions of the peasants...

...In spite of its popularity many of the intellectuals ignore or disparage his writing, chiefly because left-wing thought in Turkey is taboo...

...Born in southern Turkey in 1922, he is the son of a rich landowner whose family originated in Anatolia...

...Although nearly every young Turk has been modernized under the Kemalist revolution and subjected to an intensive education in Western ideas and styles of writing, he is the product of a great historic past and is fiercely proud of the cultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire...

...Although this school can claim few outstanding writers, it has won considerable praise for its attacks on the Turkish literary taboos of sex and alcoholism, and for its criticism of publishers who subscribe to these taboos...

...Listen to me, my son, Here it's not the same as you know it...

...These problems, particularly associated with the second school of Turkish writers, are the major themes in all his writing...

...In particular he is convinced that in Turkey, still primarily an agricultural country, the land question and the backwardness of the peasants are the most important problems...

...There can be no doubt that he is thinking, for his own country, in terms of principles of the left...

...Corporal Hasan stroked his beard thoughtfully...

...Many of its writers— Bilge Karasu and Feynaz Kayakan, for instance—are preoccupied with form rather than content and openly admit their debt to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf...

...Its use of fiction to spread a political message has found a large and sympathetic audience among the younger generation and several writers of this school have gained wide prominence in the past 10 years...

...What did you say?' he asked...

...I asked who is the Agha of this town?' repeated Memed...

...There's no Agha here...

...How could this town have an Agha...

...a village boy who becomes a bandit after being driven to the hills by the cruelty of his peasant environment and the local Agha, or big landowner...

...Disease was rife, and the local "doctor" was a boy of eight who merely muttered a prayer over his patients...

...The younger writers are eager to catch up with the West, and are easily intoxicated by the new literary forms and techniques they have discovered in Western literature...

...Prodigiously creative, he has published many short stories and a widely acclaimed travel book, Mainstay, and he is now planning a five-volume novel...

...The second school of writing, far more influential, attempts to expose the social and economic conditions of the peasants and consequently finds most of its themes Gabriel Gersh, a student of European letters, has written before in these pages on both English and Italian writers...

...Who's the owner of all these shops and fields...

...The imams and the hocas ruled the community, teaching nothing but tne Koran to the children, extorting a living from the village elders...

...He believes that one of the essential distinctions between Western and non-Western politics is that political parties in the West are based on the pursuit of principles, not merely on the pursuit of power...

...When he was four, his father was murdered by a peasant while kneeling at prayer in a mosque, a sight which struck young Kemal with a grief which has always haunted his writing...

...Two distinct schools of contemporary writing have now emerged in Turkey...

...Outstanding among this second literary school is Yashar Kemal G?k?eli, usually known simply as Yashar Kemal, the winner of Turkey's first literary prize in 1956 with his first novel, Ince Memed...

...At first Corporal Hasan couldn't get what he was driving at...

...in the inexhaustible variety of life in the Turkish countryside...

...Really!' asked Memed, almost shouting in his astonishment...

...A profound admirer of Kemal Ataturk, Yashar Kemal interprets Ataturk's revolution in Turkey as a movement to the left, in the sense that Ataturk came nearer to the Turkish people, and did more for them, than any Turkish ruler had done...

...The villagers lived in hovels caked with grime, and the wheat they ate and the dung they burnt were seldom enough to last out an Anatolian winter...

...A clause in the Turkish penal code—oddly enough one borrowed from Fascist Italy—prescribes the death penalty for anybody engaged in "subversive" activities...

...Everyone's his own Agha...

...My child,' replied Corporal Hasan...

...Preaching the gospel of science, enlightenment and land reform in Anatolia, Yashar Kemal found himself despised and rejected by a community verging on destitution and steeped in the superstitions of a degenerate Islam...

...Like most Turkish writers, Yashar Kemal is deeply steeped in the history, poetry and folklore of his people...

...But whatever form their writing may take, Yashar Kemal, with his unique vision, strong Turkish background and deep sense of social justice, will undoubtedly continue to be the most outstanding among them...

...This school may still be influenced by foreign authors—at the moment England's Angry Young Men are in vogue—but on the whole it has found inspiration in its country's background and problems...

...The novel sold 33.000 copies in Turkey alone—an enormous figure for a country with over 60 per cent illiteracy—and was translated into several languages...

...the miracle is that so much genuine and original Turkish work has emerged...

...Yashar Kemal's writing deeply reflects his conviction that a Turkish writer cannot be aloof to politics...

...More important, the writers of this school are setting the style and pattern of contemporary Turkish literature and it is likely that they will continue to exert the major literary influence in Turkey during the next decade or so...

...The book's revelations of ignorance and poverty in a small Anatolian village where Yashar Kemal taught for a brief time have caused a deep stir in Turkey, particularly among the middle-class reading public whose social conscience is now awakening...

...He is a contributor to Commentary and America...

...If the children knew what sort of a world this was," a fellow teacher told Yashar Kemal, "they'd refuse to be born...

...At one point in the story, Memed arrives in a town where he is told there are no big landowners: " 'Who's the Agha of this town?' asked Memed...

...But the Menderes Government's restrictions on those who criticized its policies did not discourage Yashar Kemal from writing about the plight of the Anatolian peasants in his recent travel book, Mainstay, which surpasses Ince Memed in both its writing and insight...

...Memed couldn't swallow this...

...WRITERS and WRITING Young Turks in Literature By Gabriel Gersh METIN And, one of Turkey's most promising literary critics, recently warned that "the Turkish writer today is trying to fill too many gaps and therefore he may fail by dissipating his energies...

...What Agha...

...The author's description of peasant life has been criticized by several sympathetic Turkish critics who feel that it was much too exaggerated...

...The major problem facing the modern Turkish writer is how to reconcile his learned Western techniques and ideals with his inherited Turkish background...

...It is of course possible that the new atmosphere of freedom in Turkey may cause a few changes in their writing...

...In the eyes of some Turks this sort of writing is subversive, and Yashar Kemal was imprisoned several times for brief periods in the last few years by the Menderes Government...

...Undoubtedly, Yashar Kemal protests too much and is impatient with the slow pace of economic and social change...

...Hafizes, like mendicant friars, reciting the Koran from village to village, carried the process of extortion still further, and a neighboring teacher was almost stoned to death by a fanatical Dervish order...

...But the fact that he could make such a statement at all shows how far modern Turkish literature has progressed since the founding of the Republic in 1923...

...But unlike most Turkish intellectuals, who have been educated in the West, he speaks only Turkish and a little English, and has never been outside Turkey except for a brief visit to Israel...

...The fields in this town belong more or less to everyone...

...Most Turkish literary critics agree that Yashar Kemal's work is truly representative of the "tough" school of Turkish writing...

...There is real poignancy in his description of a 19-year-old peasant "intellectual" who derived his knowledge mainly from newspapers and magazines: "It was as though whole worlds of fairy tales were disclosed to him in the pages of every newspaper and magazine I gave him...