Kemal Tahir was a prominent Turkish

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

 novelist and intellectual

Intellectual

An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...

. Tahir spent 13 years of his life imprisoned due to political reasons and wrote some of his most important novels during this time. His most important novels include Esir Şehrin İnsanları (1956), Devlet Ana (1967) and Yorgun Savaşçı (1965), all in which Tahir uses historical background to support his characters and settings. Some of his novels were adapted into popular films. Tahir also wrote pulp fiction

Pulp magazine

Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...

 under pseudonyms for financial reasons.

Biography

Kemal Tahir was born on March 13, 1910. His father Tahir Bey was a navy captain and an adviser to Sultan Abdulhamit II. After graduating from Hasan Paşa Rüşdiyesi (secondary school), Kemal Tahir enrolled to Galatasaray High School. But after his mother's death, he dropped out high school at 10th grade and began working as a lawyer's clerk, and later as a journalist. He worked as a journalist, editor and a translator at Vakit, Haber and Son Posta newspapers in İstanbul. He worked as a page editor at Karikatür and Yeni Gün newspapers. He became lead writer for the newspaper Karagöz and later worked as the editor-in chief at Tan. He married Fatma İrfan in 1937.

In 1938, Kemal Tahir and Nazım Hikmet

Nazim Hikmet

Nâzım Hikmet Ran , commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet , was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the "lyrical flow of his statements"...

 was accused of "spreading sedition" amongst the armed forces by the Navy Command Court Martial, was subsequently found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He served time in Çankırı

Çankırı

-Agriculture:Various produce like wheat, corn, beans, apple etc. are grown in the farms, and fields that are rich of water.-Industry:Most of the industry is located near the city center and Korgun. Other towns that are in the industrial map of the city are Şabanözü, Çerkeş, Ilgaz, Kurşunlu, and...

, Malatya

Malatya

Malatya ) is a city in southeastern Turkey and the capital of its eponymous province.-Overview:The city site has been occupied for thousands of years. The Assyrians called the city Meliddu. Following Roman expansion into the east, the city was renamed in Latin as Melitene...

, Çorum

Çorum

Çorum is a landlocked northern Anatolian city that is the capital of the Çorum Province of Turkey. Çorum is located inland in the central Black Sea Region of Turkey, and is approximately from Ankara and from Istanbul...

, Nevşehir

Nevsehir

Nevşehir, formerly Muşkara, , is a city and the capital district of Nevşehir Province in the Central Anatolia Region of Turkey. According to the 2010 census, population of the district is 117,890 of which 85,634 631 live in the city of Nevşehir...

 and Kırşehir

Kirsehir

Kırşehir, formerly Macissus and Justinianopolis, is a city in Turkey. It is the capital district of the Kırşehir Province. According to 2000 census, population of the district is 121,947 of which 105,826 live in the city of Kırşehir.-History:The history of Kırşehir dates back to the Hittites...

 prisons. Twelve years later, he was released in the general amnesty of 1950.

Following his release, Kemal Tahir returned to Istanbul and started working as THE Istanbul correspondent of The Izmir Commerce newspaper. He married his second wife Semiha Sıdıka. He wrote romance and adventure novels and film scripts, using aliases such as "Körduman", "Bedri Eser", "Samim Aşkın", "f. m. ikinci", "Nurettin Demir", or "Ali Gıcırlı". He also undertook translations from French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

. He was taken into custody again following the 6–7 September incidents

Istanbul Pogrom

The Istanbul riots , were mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The riots were orchestrated by the Turkish government under Adnan Menderes. The events were triggered by the false news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece—the...

 and served six months in the Harbiye military prison. Upon his release he ran Düşün Publishing, which he co-founded with the writerAziz Nesin

Aziz Nesin

Aziz Nesin was a famous Turkish writer and humorist of Crimean Tatar origin and author of more than 100 books.-Pseudonyms:...

.

He worked on film scripts with directors such as Metin Erksan

Metin Erksan

Metin Erksan is a Turkish film director and art historian.- Biography :...

, Halit Refiğ

Halit Refig

Halit Refiğ was a Turkish film director, film producer, screenwriter and writer. He made around sixty films, including feature films, documentaries and TV serials...

 and Atıf Yılmaz

Atif Yilmaz

Atıf Yılmaz Batıbeki was a renowned Turkish Kurdish film director, screenwriter and film producer. He was almost a legend in the film industry of Turkey with 119 movies directed. He also wrote 53 screenplays and produced 28 movies since 1951. He was active in almost every period of the Turkish...

.

He travelled to the USSR in 1968.

After having a lung operation in 1970, Tahir worked on vernacularizing Marxist terminology and creating a national left ideology, which would suit a Turkish-Anatolian socio-cultural identity. In doing so, he was criticized by many left wing intellectuals. During a particularly heated debate, Kemal Tahir suffered a heart attack and died in April 1973.

Ideology

The foundation of Kemal Tahir's ideology can be broadly described as Marxist. As a writer and a political activist, he saw a contradiction between the socio-cultural and political structure of Turkey and solutions that Marxism offers. Due to his belief that Westernization was something that did not quite fit Turkish society, he found Marxism somewhat lacking. Marxist historical theory is based on the existence of a bourgeois class, something that did not develop in the Ottoman Empire (as in many other 'peripheral countries'). Perhapd the greatest intellectual struggle was in reshaping Marxist historical theory to the reality of Turkish history.

After studying Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

 and Engels

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...

' opinions about eastern societies, Kemal Tahir worked on historical theories of historians and sociologists like Ömer Lütfi Barkan, Mustafa Akdağ, Halil İnalcık

Halil Inalcik

-Biography:He was born in Istanbul to a Crimean Tatar family, which left Crimea for Constantinople in 1905. His birthday is unknown but İnalcık chose 26 May 1916 for his birthday. He attended Balıkesir Teacher Training School and then Ankara University, Faculty of Language, History and Geography,...

, Niyazi Berkes

Niyazi Berkes

- Biography :Berkes was born in Nicosia on 21 October 1908. He started his secondary education in Cyprus, Nicosia. During his education, he later, went to Istanbul and graduated from Istanbul Erkek Lisesi in 1928. In 1931, Berkes graduated from the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Literature...

 and Şerif Mardin. His conclusion was that Ottoman-Turkish society does not follow euro-centric primitive/slavery/feodality/capitalism socio-historical model. İt has its own special evolution process, structural differences, dynamics and conditions based on its cultural and social structure. So Westernization, whether in form of capitalism or communism, is trying to bring an abstract and formal superstructure to a society which does not have the necessary substructure. Without a fundamental economic and social revolution this kind of exercises would be nothing but an absurd mimicry.

In frame of this ideology, Kemal Tahir aimed to describe the Ottoman society in his works which was based on a humanist foundation which was very different from European feudal and later capitalist society. He tried to emphasize a "Turkish reality" in his novels.

In his writing career, which was in socio-realist line, he used a simple language that was enriched with dialogues and charismatic characters. He was one of the most productive novelists of Turkish literature

Turkish literature

Turkish literature comprises both oral compositions and written texts in the Turkish language, either in its Ottoman form or in less exclusively literary forms, such as that spoken in the Republic of Turkey today...

.

Works

Kemal Tahir started to literature with poetry. His first poems were published in İçtihad magazine in 1931. He got published poems in Yeni Kültür, Geçit, Var and Ses magazines.

His first major work was a four-part novella that was published at Tan newspaper and later published as a book in 1955, titled Göl İnsanları (People of The Lake). Again in 1955, he became well-known with his novel Sağırdere (Deaf River).

Esir Şehrin İnsanları (People of the Captive City), first of his city novels that he took İstanbul as a frame to observe Turks' transition from Ottoman Empire to the Republic, was published in 1956. İn this novel, Tahir described İstanbul under occupation after the World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. Sequels to this novel, Esir Şehrin Mahpusu (Prisoner of the Captive City) was published in 1961 and (People of the Independent City) in 1976.

At first, Kemal Tahir focused on problems of peasants. Then, he dealt with Turkish history, especially events of recent history. In his novel Devlet Ana (Mother State) he described governmental and social structure of Ottoman society at its beginnings; in Kurt Kanunu (Law of Wolf), he narrates the Izmir assassination incident, which was a failed attempt to kill Ataturk; he analysed banditry phenomenon in Rahmet Yolları Kesti (Rain Closed the Roads) and "ağa" system in Yedi Çınar Yaylası (Seven Plane Tree Plateau). İn his historical novel Yorgun Savaşçı (Tired Warrior), Tahir narrates the period that the national resistance forces in Anatolia without a leader came together and started the Turkish Independence War.

Because of financial difficulties, Kemal Tahir wrote pulp fiction novels under pseudonyms. He also translated Mike Hammer

Mike Hammer

Michael "Mike" Hammer is a fictional detective created by the American author Mickey Spillane in the 1947 book I, the Jury .-Description:...

novels and even wrote original new novels for that series.

Some of his novels (like Karılar Koğuşu, Haremde Dört Kadın, Esir Şehrin İnsanları and Kurt Kanunu) later adapted into movies.

Complete List of Fiction

• Göl İnsanları (stories) (1955)
• Sağırdere (1955)
• Esir Şehrin İnsanları (1956)
• Körduman (1957)
• Rahmet Yolları Kesti (1957)
• Yedi Çınar Yaylası (1958)
• Köyün Kamburu (1959)
• Esir Şehrin Mahpusu (1961)
• Bozkırdaki Çekirdek (1962)
• Kelleci Memet (1962)
• Yorgun Savaşçı (1965)
• Devlet Ana (1967)
• Kurt Kanunu (1969)
• Büyük Mal (1970)
• Yol Ayrımı (1971)
• Namusçular (1974)
• Karılar Koğuşu (1974)
• Hür Şehrin İnsanları (1976)
• Damağacı (1977)
• Bir Mülkiyet Kalesi (1977)