In our joint conservation today, we, the participants from Turkey, gathered with friends from Russia and talked about literature. As thinking about literature sometimes requires going back in history, our conversation touched upon the problems and phenomena that have their roots in the historical contexts and through history, we found the opportunity to discuss the interaction of Turkish and Russian writers with the pieces produced by their counterparts.

Our dear mentor Aslı Perker put forth a concise analysis of what we could and can observe when we take a look at Istanbul and how the landscape of particular cosmopolitan districts of Istanbul  (such as Beyoğlu) changs according to the cultural influence that the Turkish intellectuals were exposed to time to time. It is true that the Arabic and Persian influence was succeeded by a French influence near to the end of the Ottoman Empire, a period where graduates who returned  from Paris and the individuals who interacted with Western and/or revolutionary culture via journals and books, carried the values they acquired to Istanbul and tried to apply them to the governance understanding of the state. At the time, one of the most popular books in Istanbul was Les Miserables and the slowly establishing middle class of the Empire was fond of the novel. Additionally, the poets of Turkey really liked the French poets, for instance, Baudelaire and Valery, and those imitated many things that they saw in these poets. French was so popular that the intellectuals even communicated partly in French and there are novels from that era in which even the dialogues are sometimes in French. Russian literature was not known.

When the Republic of Turkey was founded, the government started a campaign of translation thanks to which many examples of modern literature were introduced to Turkey. Russian literature had become very popular. It was a situation which got support from the government due to some mutual understandings of governance that brought the Soviet Union and Turkey closer to each other. Throughout the years the Turkish writers got so involved in the Russian literature that as Aslı Perker noted, a person’s choice about whether to prefer Dostoyevski or Tolstoy has been a primary question when writers meet.

A somewhat similar case is valid when it comes to the Turkish literature’s entry into the Soviet Union. When Nazım Hikmet, one of the most prominent and successful poets of Turkish literature, had to go to Soviets because of the pressure he experienced in Turkey, his works were already published in some parts of Soviet Union and he continued writing there. He penned plays in Russian as well, several of which were staged in Moscow and acclaimed. (In fact, his influence surged and flowed outside the Eastern sphere so much that it is recorded that in one of the international conferences of writers, Pablo Neruda turned to another delegate from Turkey and while pointing at Nazım Hikmet, said that: Take a careful look at this man, this man has done a lot more than what we have achieved so far.*) We can talk about different writers of Turkey in a similar sense, as Oktay Akbal in his famous travel memoir Hiroşimalar Olmasın (No More Hiroshimas) notes that in many places he went in the Soviet Union, he saw the translations of the book of Turkish writers selling more than they did back in Turkey.

But these were not the only subjects that we conversed about.

We have also discussed issues with regards to the situation of the current publishing industry and about the reasons why contemporary Russian writers are not known in Turkey and vice versa. But I will leave these points to a further post that I will share in the following days. Enough for today!

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*Asım Bezirci, Nazım Hikmet Şiiri