A Social Novel
I wrote this short novel five years ago. My purpose was not to create a literary work. I simply wanted to compare the strange thoughts of our intellectuals with social reality. After the Constitution, I met with most of our great men. Everyone’s idea, more or less, converged on this conclusion: “Ottomanism is a common nationality. Ottomanism means neither only Turkishness nor only Islam. Every individual living under the administration of the Ottoman state, ‘regardless of race and religion,’ belongs to the Ottoman nation!” However, this idea was nothing but an illusion, a crude fantasy born in minds raised by the non-national Tanzimat education. There was no possibility of forming a “common nationality” from a collection of individuals whose religion, language, upbringing, history, culture, and glories were different. Was “Ottomanism” in reality anything other than the name of our state? The Germans living in Austria couldn’t be called “Habsburg nation, Austrian nation”—A German, wherever he was from, was German everywhere. We who speak Turkish were also a nation possessing a five-thousand-year history, even a very ancient mythology. Whether we lived in the Ottoman State’s country, in the Caucasus, in Azerbaijan, in Turkestan, in Bukhara, in Kashgar, in short, wherever we lived, we were still pure, genuine Turks… However, the political ideas and social aims of the intellectuals who gave imaginary meanings to the word “Ottomanism” were ridiculous enough to bring tears to one’s eyes from laughter.
These honorable gentlemen couldn’t see the truth even after the Balkan War. It was at that time that I wrote this address. Since the ideas in it were purely Tanzimat inspirations, I didn’t try to draw personal “caricatures” by attributing them to any particular person. While the Turkish peasant understood the boundaries of nationality very well, saying “One whose tongue is like my tongue, whose religion is like my religion…” the intellectual gentlemen didn’t give importance to either language or religion during the last revolution. Finally, time taught them a severe lesson. In ten years, events that couldn’t fit into a century befell us. Now the value of nationality is generally understood. Importance has begun to be given to the natural spoken language, to national literature, to national art, to the national ideal. Today, the political claims and foolish actions of the heroes in this book will probably appear as excessive “exaggerations,” but what are the aims—which they cannot confess too openly—of those who still pretend to be opposed to nationalism, to Turkism, in language, in literature, in art, in politics? If they exist, aren’t they all these empty fantasies?
Ömer Seyfettin
