Intelligentsia Narratives of the 1970s Turkish Novel

The massive, 900-page A History of Russian Literature by Andrew Kahn et al. ends with an entire chapter titled “Intelligentsia Narratives” in which the writers trace, from the twentieth century onwards, the theme of “the intelligentsia self-consciously thinking about its own mission and history.” The very existence of the Turkish novel attests to the relationship between literature and the intellectual and the manifestation of both in literary format. The emergence of the novel genre in Turkish literature was only an outcome of the country’s general drive to modernize but also a key tool in its realization. While the examples of the patterns in the portrayal of the intellectual through the decades can be multiplied, the above brief outline with its representative cases clearly points to the aforementioned self-reflexivity of writers depicting intellectual types. The novel begins with Emine at home, broken by the horrific torture she has endured and everything else that has happened to her and her friends.