From the History of Turkish Popular Literature: The Novel of Peyami Safa “A Young Girl Among The Bektashi”

Abstract

This article centers around the figure of Peyami Safa, a classic of Turkish literary modernism, and particularly around his creative activities that have not yet received enough attention in Turkish studies in Russia, especially his contribution into Turkish mass (popular) literature. Under examination is the story “A Young Girl Among The Bektashi”, which combines erotic, detective, and gothic plot lines. The story was published in 1927 under the name Server Bedi, a widely known pseudonym of Peyami Safa. In this work he manifests as a writer extremely sensitive to the political situation, to government ideology, and to state policy. A decree aimed at secularization of the state was issued in Turkey in 1925, according to which dervishes’ tekkes were to be closed. Even though the struggle against “popular” forms of Islam started much earlier, in the late 19th century, when Sultan Mahmud II took steps to eradicate the Bektashi Order of dervishes, the Republican government was still in need of legitimizing its activities at all levels and in all forms of social influencing, including such media as literature and fiction. To further discredit the Alevi and Bektashi religious minorities, Peyami Safa builds his story around (and actively uses) various misconceptions about dervishes’ customs, rituals, and religious practices, misconceptions that were purported and widely circulated among the Sunni Turks. The novelty of the paper lies in the fact that it gives the fullest biography of the writer available in Russian, which, in turn, reveals major underlying reasons that determined the author’s choice of narrative strategies. Due to Peyami Safa’s personal features that were exacerbated by a serious disease he suffered, he failed to create a literary piece of mass literature of the same high quality which characterizes modernism writings created under his own name.