Turkish Modernism’s Soviet Courses

There has been a longstanding tendency within the domain of Turkish and Comparative Literary Studies to associate the history of Turkish modernism with Nâzım Hikmet’s early career in the Soviet Union by focusing on his mediation of the international avant-garde. While his early futurist poems calling for the abolition of traditional verse are frequently cited as illustrating the emergence of Turkish modernism, his prose poems “The Gioconda and Si-Ya-U” and “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” signify the conclusion of a Soviet-inflected Turkish avant-garde. Acknowledging the importance of Nâzım’s early poetics, this chapter provides a more comprehensive and multifaceted account of Turkish modernism’s “Easterly” trajectory. Scholars of Middle Eastern and Comparative Literary Studies refuse to ascribe any literary value to socialist realist aesthetics, immediately dismissing it as Soviet-sponsored dogma. Challenging this critical “prejudice” against leftist literatures (excepting the avant-garde), this chapter demonstrates that the history of Turkish modernism cannot be understood without exploring its entanglements with the histories of socialist realism and Marxian aesthetics.