| During
the years which followed the transition to a multiparty system in 1950,
many authors were mainly inclined to the village realities. This tendency
was spread with various works of the writers who had their education in
Village Institutes or who came from villages. Mahmut Makal's Bizim Koy (Our
Village), 1950, and Fakir Baykurt's Yilanlarin Ocu (The Revenge of the Snakes),
1959, for instance, include penetrating observations into the social and
socio-psychological relations in impoverished rural areas and villages.
Yasar Kemal is another author who reflected his knowledge and experiences
regarding rural life in his work. Yasar Kemal who started his literary career
by collecting folkloric works in Adana, later settled in Istanbul where
he published Ince Memed in 1955. This novel which was later translated into
English (Memed My Hawk) and more than a dozen other languages, carries the
traces of a style and approach which Yasar Kemal developed in his later
works. Kemal Tahir, who attained recognition with his Gol Insanlari (The
Lake People), 1955, also wove threads of observations about village life
into the tapestry of the plots in his novels. However, the 1950s were by
no means dominated by novels and short stories which were based on rural
realities and village life. Far from it; the 1950s was a decade when urbanization
accelerated, bringing in its aftermath a host of social and psychological
problems and the problem of alienation exacerbated by the routine, mechanical
and repetitive work patterns. The writers of the young generation influenced
by existentialism, produced works which developed around the individual
and focused on sense and speech. These were themes which found their expression
in the works of writers such as Demir Ozlu, Ferit Edgu, Yusuf Atilgan and
Nezihe Meric, who began to write between the years 1950-1960. There were
also authors who regarded humor and satire as a suitable means for social
criticism and produced in this genre. Aziz Nesin, who criticized social
problems in a satirical and mocking manner by using daily events, produced
works almost in every branch of literature as of 1955. By the end of his
life, he had witnessed many of them being published abroad. He won numerous
literature awards both in Turkey and abroad, including the Golden-Palm Award
in Italy twice, in 1946 and 1957. |
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In poetry,
the influence of the Garip movement continued in the first years of the
1950s. But the following years witnessed the development of the Second
New Movement, which replaced the use of daily language in the poems of
the Garip movement with a poetic expression derived from use of words
with special references stemming from conceptual associations unique and
peculiar to the poet. The poets of this movement were influenced by surrealism
as well as by existentia- lism. Arif Nihat Asya, Cemal Sureyya, Edip Cansever,
Turgut Uyar, Ilhan Berk, Ozdemir Asaf and Kemal Ozer produced some of
the best examples of this movement. They had different tendencies in the
following years.
After 1960,
in the wake of the 27 May military intervention, social themes gained
priority and the search for new techniques and forms contributed significantly
to the enrichment of the Turkish language. In the mid-1960s, a renewal
occurred in social poetry with the republication of books by Nazim Hikmet,
which had not been published since 1936. Poets of this period mainly dealt
with current themes and tried to give messages on social sensitivity.
Although the influence of the Second New Wave, and the search for new
forms, were apparent in the early works of young poets such as Yavuz Bulent
Bakiler, Osman Atilla, Ayhan Inal, Feyzi Halici, Ataol Behramoglu, Ismet
Ozel and Hilmi Yavuz who had started to write at the beginning of the
1960s, the poetry they produced later on was influenced by the dominant
intellectual currents of the period. The short story and the novel of
the period also focused on social themes, the life experiences of the
urban and rural dispossessed, the human costs of rapid transformations
in social structure and the like. Writers such as Orhan Kemal, Yasar Kemal
and Kemal Tahir continued to produce and develop their own styles in the
1960s. Writers such as Samim Kocagoz, Atilla Ilhan, Tarik Bugra, Hasan
Izzettin Dinamo and Ilhan Selcuk mainly dealt with recent history in their
works.
The politicization
that had started in the late 1960s intensified in the 1970s and the political
polarization of society increased. Literature responded to this atmosphere
and authors, whether they produced poetry or prose, increasingly focused
on subjects such as social change, political issues, economic difficulties,
alienation and the relations of the intellectual with his/her environment.
Cetin Altan, Pinar Kur, Adalet Agaoglu, Selim Ileri, Bekir Yildiz and
Ayla Kutlu revealed various aspects of the social transformation in their
works.
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