Kemal Tahir

Kemal Tahir Demir (born March 13, 1910 in Istanbul ; † April 21, 1973 there ) was a Turkish writer and intellectual. He lived in prison for more than 13 years due to political persecution. Some of his books have been made into films.

Life

Kemal Tahir was born in 1910 as the son of Navy Captain Tahir Bey. The father was an advisor to Sultan Abdulhamid II. He attended Hasan Paşa Rüşdiyesi and then enrolled at Galatasaray High School . After his mother's death, however, he left school in the 10th grade and worked from 1928 as a paralegal and later as a warehouse worker at a coal mine. In 1932 Tahir became a freelance journalist, editor and translator for the Istanbul newspapers Vakit , Haber , Son Posta , Yedigün and Karikatur . He became the main author of the daily Karagöz and later editor-in-chief of Tan . In 1937 he married Fatma İrfan.

In 1938 Kemal Tahir and Nâzım Hikmet were accused of "spreading riot" against the armed forces. The two were found guilty by a naval court martial and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Tahir was held in prisons in Çankırı , Malatya , Çorum , Nevşehir and Kırşehir . After 12 years he was pardoned with the general amnesty of 1950.

After his release, Kemal Tahir went back to Istanbul and worked as a correspondent for the Izmir Ticaret Gazetesi trade newspaper . During this time Tahir married his second wife, Semiha Sıdıka. After the Istanbul pogrom in 1955, he was arrested again and spent six months in Harbiye military prison. He then founded the Düşün publishing house with the writer Aziz Nesin .

In 1968 he visited the Soviet Union. In 1970 Tahir developed lung cancer. After an operation, Tahir began to study Marxism intensively and to translate the Marxist terminology into understandable words; he devised a Marxist ideology that fit the Turkish-Anatolian identity. For this he was criticized by many left-wing intellectuals. During a heated debate, Kemal Tahir suffered a heart attack and died on April 21, 1973.

plant

Kemal Tahir was convinced that an orientation towards the West would not make sense for Turkish society. He believed that Ottoman-Turkish society did not correspond to the historical European social models and that westernization would impose a social structure on the country for which this did not offer any prerequisites. Turkey has gone through its own development processes and is based on its own cultural and social structures. Tahir was certain that therefore Turkish literature must be different from Western literature.

Kemal Tahir tried to describe the society of the Ottoman Empire as humanistic, which was very different from European feudal society and capitalism. Again and again he tried to sketch a specifically Turkish society in his novels. The protagonists he describes are often simple people from the country who feel alienated in the big cities. In many novels he also describes the difficult country life in Anatolia and tells of the problems and conflicts of the population. His works are characterized by a socialist-realistic style with a simple language, with charismatic characters and intense dialogues. He is one of the most productive authors of Turkish literature .

Kemal Tahir began his writing career with poetry. The first poems appeared in Içtihad magazine in 1931 . He has also published poems in the magazines Yeni Kültür , Geçit , Var and Ses .

His first major work was the four-part short story, which was printed in the daily Tan and published in 1955 under the title Göl Insanları . The novel Sağırdere was also published in 1955 .

Esir Şehrin İnsanları , the first of the city novels, examines the transformation of the Turks from the Ottoman Empire to a republic and was published in 1956. Tahir describes Istanbul during the occupation after the First World War. Esir Şehrin Mahpusu appeared in 1961 and Yol Ayrımı in 1971 . In the first volume Kemal Tahir described the problems of the peasants; in the following he dealt with the problems of Turkish society in his time.

In his novel Devlet Ana he described the social and political structures of Ottoman society in the early days. In Kurt Kanunu he tells the story of the assassination attempt on Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Izmir. He analyzed the phenomenon of banditry in Rahmet Yolları Kesti and the Ottoman landlordship in Yedi Çınar Yaylası . In the historical story Yorgun Savaşçı , Tahir tells the story of the national resistance movement in Anatolia, which came together without a leadership and started the Turkish war of liberation .

His work shows influences from the narrative cycle Dede Korkut , Anatolian legends, the Bible and the Koran , but also from Persian literature and Central Asian poetry.

Due to financial difficulties, Tahir wrote stories for Pulp magazines under pseudonyms . He also translated the Mike Hammer thriller stories of Mickey Spillane wrote his own novels for the series. He also translated books from French into Turkish.

Some of his novels, including Karılar Koğuşu , Haremde Dört Kadın , Esir Şehrin İnsanları and Kurt Kanunu , were later made into films.

Awards

• 1967/68: Yunus Nadi Prize for Yorgun Savaşçı

Works

• Göl İnsanları . 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
• Damağası . 1977
• Bir Mülkiyet Kalesi . 1977

literature

• Nurettin Pirim: Kemal Tahir . In: Tanzimat'tan Bugüne Edebiyatçılar Ansiklopedisi , Volume II, 2001, pp. 591-594
• Ayşegül Yaraman-Başbuğu: Kemal Tahir . (= Volume 4 of Biyografya ), Bağlam, Istanbul 2004

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Kemal Tahir , Biyografya, accessed April 12, 2018
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Kemal Tahir , Turkish Culture Foundation, accessed April 12, 2018