Mzisa Buskivadze
PhD in Philology
Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University
Assistant Professor
Tbilisi, Georgia
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9094-6291
Mzisa Buskivadze
PhD in Philology
Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University
Assistant Professor
Tbilisi, Georgia
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9094-6291
New People” of the “New Time” in the Novels by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and Oguz Atay
(“A Mind at Peace” and “The Disconnected”)
Abstract
The historical environment and sociocultural situation greatly influence the formation and development of the literature. The development of Turkish literature is directly related to the historical and political choices of the country. Internal literary processes on one hand and external literary factors – on the other result ambivalent nature of Turkish literature. Norms accumulated in society, in turn, determine the rules of behavior of the same society. Cultural norms, customs and habits, religious beliefs, and traditions, are primary determinants of the society’s thinking system. The literature considers and analyses the mentioned issues at the level of fictional text, in different respects and with different intensities. 20th century has brought to mankind progress, as well as two wars that, in turn, made mankind to think about being an absurdity of being. For Turkish society, 20 th century was distinguished by the uninterrupted process of modernization and Europeanization. The mentioned process originated from the second half of the 19th century.
Pro-European orientation conditioned by political and historical necessity was the main basis of the dualist attitude of Turkish society. In the 20th century, a class of intellectuals emerged in Turkish literature, they attempted to use the best experience of the past as the measure of the society's moral development. Superficial adoption of European values mostly delays the healthy development of society. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, in his novel “A Mind at Peace”, describes the Turkish intellectuals whose internal harmony was disturbed. The process of the mentioned disturbance results from eternal conflict between the new and old, past and present, east and west. The society’s position at the“threshold” greatly complicates the choice. Characters of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar see the solution in harmonic relation with time. New epoch, new challenges require keeping pace. The writer regards that a“new individual” should dominate over time, and successfully integrate the national and European values.
And Ogyz Atay was against the pseudo-values of the bourgeois class. Society fostered on the primate of money degrades in moral respect. The character of Oguz Atay’s novel “The Disconnected”, Selim Isik is a representative of the bourgeois class and he cannot accept the system of values of that class, ending up with suicide. Suicide is some kind of method that became the cause of self-determination for his friends, especially for Turgut Ozben. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and Oguz Atay demonstrate, through self-reflection of the protagonists of the conflict between the internal and external worlds of the “new individuals” of the new time. The writers concentrate on the individuals and present their mental crisis as the general crisis of the epoch.
Keywords: New People, New individual, Turkish literature, novels “A Mind at Peace” and “The Disconnected”, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Oguz Atay