popularity of Kürk Mantolu Madonna
in Turkey over the last decade
be explained?
Jirapon Boonpor
S1653032
MA Middle Eastern Studies
Professor Dr Erik-Jan Zürcher
Leiden University
Introduction
1
Chapter One
Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s Past Receptions
15
Chapter Two
Book Readers’ particularities and
Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s characteristics
30
Chapter Three
Contextualising Popular Views and Romantic Realism
47
Conclusion
66
Introduction
“Madonna in a Fur Coat makes a glorious comeback.”1
“Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat – the surprise Turkish bestseller”2
“The mysterious woman who inspired a bestselling novel”3
These are some of the several newspapers and magazines’ headlines appearing in mid 2016 when the English translated version - Madonna in a Fur Coat - of the Turkish novel Kürk Mantolu Madonna was released. These articles introduce the decades-old Turkish novel which has gained an unprecedented degree of popularity, rather surprisingly, in the past decade in Turkey.
Kürk Mantolu Madonna is a story written in Turkish language by Sabahattin Ali, a
Turkish journalist, poet and writer who is remembered for his Leftist political stance and articulated criticism towards the Turkish Republic’s Kemalist one-party state of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in 1907 in the Ottoman sancak (district) of Gümülcine (modern-day Greek city of Komitini) in the eastern part of the Ottoman eyalet (province) of Rumelia, Sabahattin Ali was a citizen of the Ottoman Empire and then the newly established Turkish Republic. Therefore, he witnessed his native empire’s transforming into a nation-state. Apart from that, Ali experienced the development in Europe leading up to World War II while studying in Potsdam, Germany from 1928 to 1930. Unfortunately, his prolific literary output abruptly ended when he was murdered in 1948, an incident believed to be because of his anti-government advocacy. Nonetheless, Ali is considered one of the most prominent Turkish literary figures of the early period 1 Anadolu Agency, ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat makes a glorious comeback’, Hurriyet Daily News, 2016, <http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/madonna-in-a-fur-coat-makes-a-glorious-comeback.aspx? pageID=238&nID=98840&NewsCatID=386> (22 January 2017).
2 Maureen Freely, ‘Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat – the Surprise Turkish Bestseller’, The
Guardian, 2016,
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/sabahattin-ali-madonna-fur-coat-rereadin g> (22 January 2017).
3 Emma Jane Kirby, ‘The Mysterious Woman Who Inspired a Bestselling Novel’, BBC News, 2016, <http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36213246> (22 January 2017).
of the Turkish Republic. Kürk Mantolu Madonna is one of his three novels and arguably the best-known Turkish classic literature in Turkey in the last decade. This bestselling Turkish novel is the primary interest of this thesis.
Essentially a love story without conspicuous political message, Kürk Mantolu
Madonna is set during the interwar periods in Ankara and Berlin. The novel
consists of two related stories of different time periods. In the first part of the story, an unnamed narrator, who lives in 1940s Ankara, struggles with economic problems as a result of a worldwide economic crisis. He loses his job in banking sector and later manages to acquire a bank clerk position through a friend’s connections in another bank. Social and economic developments of the setting are realistically portrayed, exemplifying Sabahattin Ali’s regarded pioneering of social realism in Turkish literature. At his new workplace, the narrator meets Raif, an older co-worker whom other colleagues call by an Ottoman title of Efendi. Initially, the narrator perceives Raif Efendi as a cold, isolated and ignored person, but gradually, having to share an office with him, develops friendship with him. After that the narrator learns about Raif Efendi’s earlier life which is interesting, something inconceivable on the surface of Raif Efendi’s aging, lethargic, unmotivated and downhearted exteriority. Through a black covered notebook which Raif Efendi keeps in his office desk’s drawer, the narrator learns about Raif’s few years living in Berlin. The beginning of the black notebook is dated 1933, but the events written in the notebook have happened before - around 1924. Then the story in the book becomes the second part of the novel, of which Raif, as a young man, is the main protagonist. Raif, a young and naïve Turkish man, is sent by his family to learn soap trade in Berlin. There he meets a debonair yet puzzling German woman, an artist whose Madonna-like self-portrait mesmerises Raif and makes him keep coming back to see the portrait. Raif’s encounter with Maria Puder, the German artist, turns into friendship, and later their friendship develops into an ambiguous romance. Unfortunately, their romance abruptly halts when Raif has to return to Turkey because of his father’s death. Raif plans to settle and establish himself first before calling for Maria Puder to join him in Turkey. However, shortly after his arrival back in Turkey Maria’s correspondence with him ceases and that leaves him miserably puzzled. Raif resolves to get on with life –
marrying a Turkish woman whom he is not entirely in love with and working on the futile inherited land. His scanty fortune eventually dries up and Raif takes up a job as a German to Turkish translator in a bank in Ankara. Years later, Raif accidentally comes across his former co-lodger from his accommodation in Berlin. This lady co-lodger is a distant relative of Maria Puder. Through her, Raif learns that he and Maria have a child together and that Maria has passed away a week after her giving birth to their daughter. As a result of overwhelming grief from the unanticipated news, Raif Efendi becomes closed up, miserable and unenthusiastic to live. Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s contribution to Turkish and world literature is beyond doubt worthwhile and interesting, but a literary analysis of this novel is not within the scope of this thesis. Rather, this paper is interested in its current popularity in Turkey, in other words, the novel’s interactions with today’s Turkish readership.
One of the most interesting aspects of Kürk Mantolu Madonna is that it was written over seven decades ago but over the last decade or so it has become extremely popular in Turkey. Over the last ten years, the novel has been in Turkey’s top-ten bestselling lists. It was number one bestseller from 2014 to 2016, with total sales of 750,000 copies over the three years’ period. In 2015 alone, 350,000 copies of Kürk Mantolu Madonna were sold. These figures are extraordinary for Turkey’s book market. In 2015, Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık
(Strangeness in My Mind), the 2014-released novel of Orhan Pamuk, the winner of
the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the most popular contemporary Turkish writers, sold 231,000 copies, over 100,000 copies less than Kürk Mantolu
Madonna. Turkish Librarians' Association (Türk Kütüphaneciler Derneği) reports
that Kürk Mantolu Madonna was the most borrowed book of 2015. On Instagram, a social media very popular in Turkey, there are over twelve thousands posts with hashtag #kurkmantolumadonna.4 In May 2016, Kürk Mantolu Madonna is
translated into English and published, titled Madonna in a Fur Coat, by Penguin Classics, joining other 11 foreign-language translated versions of the novel. It is undeniable that Kürk Mantolu Madonna is one of the most celebrated Turkish novels in the last decade. This paper is intrigued by the sudden, unexpected and 4 As of 24 October 2016
unprecedented nature of the novel’s becoming very popular in Turkey over the past decade. It aims to understand why this 1940s novel has become popular to such a degree in Turkey in the last decade.
Journalists, rather than academics, seem to be more receptive to the phenomenal rise of Kürk Mantolu Madonna to popularity. There are several magazine and newspaper articles about the novel’s recent popularity. These include interviews with translators, publishers and related figures of the novel, and analyses of what could be reasons for Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s unprecedented degree of popularity. Maureen Freely, one of the two of the English translators of the novel who has also translated works of a few internationally known Turkish writers including Orhan Pamuk and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, associates the novel’s current hype with young Turkish people and their political struggles with the current government of Turkey. Freely is quoted to be opining that the young Turkish youths protesting at Gezi park in 2013 were asking for something no different from what Raif and Maria found in Berlin which was freedom to express their true natures and shape their own lives, according to their own principles and ideals.5
In Freely’s opinion, Kürk Mantolu Madonna reminds the youths at a time when the state tries to intrude their daily life that going against the state is possible. She asserts that the Turkish youths at Gezi Park protests were encouraged by Ali’s political activities and the love in his works.6 Freely’s analysis on a basis of
Sabahattin Ali’s political legacy is similar to how most academics emphasise Ali’s Leftist political motivation in addition to his social realist portrayal of the life of Anatolian peasants. Freely’s analysis is valuable to this study that it brings out factors – political legacy attached to the novel’s author and a section of the novel’s fan – which could be investigated further.
Meriç Güleç, the managing director of ONK, the copyright agency which holds the rights to publish Kürk Mantolu Madonna, asserts that the novel’s recent bestsellerdom is because of its historical and political contents, and an idealised 5 Emre Kizilkaya, ‘Why an old-fashioned novel is trending among Turkey's youth’, Al Monitor, 2016,
<http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/05/turkey-sabahattin-ali-novel-trending-am ong-madonna.html#ixzz4N3xl6SXU> (22 January 2017).
love story which may seem unattainable to today’s readers but is able to grasp young readers’ attention. Like Freely, Güleç points out that young people make up a large group of the novels’ readers. His way of presenting the novel is also interesting: he asserts that “the book has been rediscovered by a new generation of Turkish readers almost 70 years after it was first published”. It would have been useful if Güleç provided the scale of the novel’s past popularity. Whether the novel was popular in the past or not would yield different implications to its current popularity. Güleç’s assertion lacks concrete evidence to support that today’s Turkish readers have actually rediscovered the old novel by themselves. It is arguable that people’s reading choices depend on different factors, not solely on the readers themselves. This paper aims to investigate Güleç’s claim: how today’s readers might have encountered the novel in the first place.
Filiz Ali, Sabahattin Ali’s daughter, states that “Raif Efendi reminds readers of forgotten feeling and Maria Puder character could be seen as the ideal woman”.7
Filiz Ali insists on the message of love and rejects any historical or political implications of the novel. Yet, she associates Maria with feminism, a political movement, and thinks that it is a part of the appeal of the novel to today’s audience. Filiz Ali’s rejection of political implication is likely a reference to her father’s political legacy. It seems that Sabahattin Ali’s political history is largely remembered and highly charged. This notion leads this paper to further investigate the association between the novel’s current popularity and its author’s political legacy.
Like Güleç and Filiz Ali, Sevengül Sönmez deems the novel’s love affair being a prominent factor which attracts readers today.8 Sönmez sees the novel on par with
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the 12th century Persian love story Layla and
Majnun. The fact that this is not the only love story available on the market shows
that Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s being a love story could not be the only factor which attracts readers. Nevertheless, one might argue that Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s love story is so unique that it sets the novel apart from other love novels. This paper 7 Anadolu Agency, ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat makes a glorious comeback’.
will examine this further. In addition, Sönmez considers that the language of the novel, Sabahattin Ali’s writing style, is easy-to-read and thus makes it accessible to today’s readers. One might question, however, whether an uncomplicated language of the late 1930s could be considered easy-to-read in the 2010s. Considering the large number of editions of the book (81th edition as of August 2016), it might be fruitful to examine if the easy-to-read language of the book is a direct result of Ali’s own speech or publishers’ edition. Sönmez also mentions an increased interest in Ali’s life, including biographies and exhibitions amid the current popularity of Kürk Mantolu Madonna. Sönmez considers the novel a popular product that, like all popular products, people want to show that they also take part in the consumption of the product. This paper finds viewing the novel as commodity an interesting perspective to understanding its current popularity. Accordingly, this paper will also investigate the novel’s popularity from a Marxist perspective.
Emre Kizilkaya analyses Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s current popularity also in relation to political developments such as the Gezi Park protests.9 First, Kizilkaya
acknowledges that Ali was an anti-establishment although one can hardly see any political messages in Kürk Mantolu Madonna. He juxtaposes political landscapes during Ali’s time with today’s time to illustrate a similar oppressive political atmosphere caused by the government. Kizilkaya thinks that some of the young Gezi park protesters felt their freedom being limited by the government and find ‘romantic refuge’ in the novel which is written by a political dissident of a time when political freedom was also limited. This suggests that Kizilkaya perceive Ali’s political legacy the most determinant factor in attracting current readers. Another factor to which Kizilkaya relates the novel’s popularity is its ‘cool’ name which contains the words Madonna and Fur Coat. All other works of Ali’s have Turkish names. One might deduce that Kizilkaya’s ‘cool’ means having a quality of being globally comprehensible. In other words, Kürk Mantolu Madonna could be perceived as resonating the concept of globality. Furthermore, Kizilkaya asserts that some new Turkish fans of the novel may read or buy, without reading, and post photos of the novel only because it is a trend. This shows that Kürk Mantolu 9 Kizilkaya, ‘Why an old-fashioned novel is trending among Turkey's youth.’
Madonna’s current popularity is not only about its having a large readership and
commercial success, but also its omnipresence in today’s imagined public space of social media.
Similarly to the aforementioned journalists, Lydia Beardmore argues that Kürk
Mantolu Madonna has become very popular because of the way Sabahattin Ali is
perceived today as someone leaving a legacy of political resistance against an oppressive government by today’s readers who are also struggling with an increasingly authoritarian government. She thinks that the story of the novel is seen as a reflection of Ali’s years living in Potsdam, a city on the border of Berlin. She also emphasises that several of the novel’s readers are youths who relate to the characters’ rejection of conservative norms and expectations such as gender roles that the society force upon them. She enumerates the novel’s thematic discourses that are talked about by its current readers: freedom, unrequited love, power, and fascination. In addition, she thinks Ali’s prose plays a role in capturing readers’ attention. What is more, it is interesting to read Beardmore’s confident assertion, with unproven historicity, that the novel was not particularly well received upon its initial publication in 1943.10 However considering the fact that
the story was initially serialized and a couple of years later published as a novel, the story must have gained a substantial positive reception since its early years. Apart from that, Beardmore highlights one interesting aspect of the novel’s current popularity, which is its being an accessory of Turkish youths to cafés (hipster styled coffee houses) and being a popular object for photos on social media. This interesting aspect leads this paper to further investigate the connections between Kürk Mantolu Madonna, Turkey’s youths and their current social trends.
Hakan Arslanbenzer also highlights Sabahattin Ali’s political legacy. According to Arslanbenzer, Ali was among the writers who thought that after Atatürk’s death, İsmet İnönü’s having entered the presidency, and the end of World War II their writing and political activities could be less restricted. Accordingly, Ali adamantly 10 Lydia Beardmore, ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’, Reorient, 2016,
criticised the government and Turkish nationalism, the ideology which he formerly adhered. According to Arslanbenzer, Ali wrote about the lives of the poor with disheartening themes such as death, poverty, illness and departure.11 Sırça
Köşk, one of Ali’s short stories, is a good example of this. He adds that Ali employed ambiguous metaphors to imply the oppression of the poor and lower class by the state and upper class. Arslanbenzer sums up Ali’s style of writing as darkness, negation and despair.
As illustrated, newspaper and magazine articles highlight particular ways in which the Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s popularity is expressed. These include its being associated with Sabahattin Ali’s political legacy, Turkish youths, their current trends of coffee drinking and using social media, and their participation in political activities. Their arguments circle around Ali’s legacy of political resistance against the state, the novel’s being his semi-autobiography and a message of anti-conservative norms. In addition, the novel’s love story and its writing style are accredited as crucial factors.
On the other hand, apart from a few volumes of anthology of Turkish literature which introduce briefly Sabahattin Ali’s biography and works, along with other prominent Turkish authors’, the academic works on Kürk Mantolu Madonna are limited to literary analysis of the novel or its comparisons to other works, especially Western classic novels. Academic investigations of this novel’s popularity in 2010s are non-existent. This thesis could accordingly fill this academic gap.
Elisabeth Siedel, a German academic, is perhaps the first scholar who does academic study of Kürk Mantolu Madonna. According to Siedel, despite the fact that Ali was politically active as a socialist during the time in which he was writing the novel, Kürk Mantolu Madonna is not a political critique. 12 Siedel argues that
social outsider as a concept was common among the Turkish generation living 11 Hakan Arslanbenzer, ‘Sabahattin Ali: Tragic Romance and Dark Realism’, Daily Sabah, 2015, <http://www.dailysabah.com/books/2015/04/04/sabahattin-ali-tragic-romance-and-dark-realis m> (22 January 2017).
12 Elisabeth Siedel, Sabahattin Ali, Mystiker und Sozialist : Beiträge zur Interpretation eines
over the transition period from the Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic. She elaborates that uncertainty about the future was ubiquitous: a few years after the declaration of the Republic and Mustafa Kemal’s death, Kemalists’ modernity ideal no longer appeared vigorous and that caused a sense of identity crisis to several people. Siedel sees Kürk Mantolu Madonna as a love story influenced by Ali’s lived experience in a society permeated with this identity crisis. Considering the fact that until now Ali’s works have attracted significantly less academic attention compared to works of other Turkish writers such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Nazim Hikmet or Orhan Pamuk, Siedel’s study on Sabahattin Ali and his work is pioneering, especially that her study was published in 1983.
Before Kürk Mantolu Madonna was translated into English and published titled ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’ by Penguin Classics in May 2016, a part of the novel was translated into English titled ‘The Madonna in the Fur Coat’13 and featured in a
2013 issue of Transit – A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the
German-speaking World. That this translation can be found in the journal is not
surprising taken into account one of the novel’s settings – Berlin -, one of its main characters – Maria Puder who is a German woman -, and one of its two translators – David Gramling’s research interests which include migration history in contemporary Germany, with a particular concentration on Turkish-German literature, film, and culture.14 Considering the year (2013) in which this
translation was published, the novel’s recent popularity in Turkey might have been a factor which got Gramling and his co-translator – Ilker Hepkaner’s attention.
Gramling and Hepkaner argue that Kürk Mantolu Madonna, at its initial publication and throughout the 1950s and 60s, was welcomed as a romantic
wanderlust but dismissed by literary circle especially Marxist writers such as
Nazim Hikmet because it lacks political message. In addition, Gramling and Hepkaner posit that recently scholars and publishing houses have belatedly turn 13 David Gramling and Ilker Hepkaner, ‘The Madonna in the Fur Coat’, Transit vol. 9(1), 2013, < http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ht6w6zv#page-1> (22 January 2017).
14 German Studies, The University of Arizona, <http://german.arizona.edu/people/dgl> (29 September 2016).
towards Kürk Mantolu Madonna for translational and World Literary purposes.15
According to Gramling and Hepkaner, a rise in interest in Turkish-German migration started around 1990 and the late re-publication date of the novel is concurrent with an “increasing re-conception of World Literature canons around translational aesthetics, rather than around national representativeness, and the corresponding tendency to prospect on Istanbul as a new bi-continental world-literary capital.”16 One of the major reasons for the novel’s being neglected
during the 1950s and 60s is that, they argue, the literary landscape in Turkey was one characterised by a pro-Western classics and a promotion of native Turkish nationalist literature. Gramling and Hepkaner’s view of the novel might be deduced as being transnational. This view is interesting, taking into account the fact that the novel is extremely popular in Turkey in recent years. Their argument about Istanbul’s prospect of becoming a new world literary capital, if this were the case in actuality, could be able to explain why the book is popular in Turkey now. A closer look at Istanbul’s potentials for being a hub of global literature might be fruitful. In addition, Gramling and Hepkaner stress a complex context in which Ali was writing the novel. Ali had to transform chronodiversity, which is a politicisation of everyday language from Ottoman Turkish to Turkified Turkish; and an assimilation of native Ottoman Turkish literary approach into Western literary realm, into a monolingual voice in the novel. This, they illustrate, is evident in Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s language use which could be seen as a cultural critique.
Kristin Dickinson acknowledges Sabahattin Ali’s pioneering of social realist genre but Dickinson argues that his works are not confined exclusively to social realism.17 She asserts that Ali was influenced by and influenced two kinds of
literature of his period: social realist portrayal of life of lower classes and minorities in the city and village novel which is a social realist genre with a focus 15 David Gramling and Ilker Hepkaner, ‘Translating the Translingual Novel in Early Turkish Republican Literature: the Case of Sabahattin Ali’, in Michelle Woods (ed.), Authorizing Translation, New York: Routledge, 2017. 44.
16 Gramling and Hepkaner, ‘Translating the Translingual Novel in Early Turkish Republican Literature: the Case of Sabahattin Ali’, 44.
17 Kristin Dickinson, ‘Translating Surfaces: A Dual Critique of Modernity in Sabahattin Ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna’, Transit vol. 9(1), 2013, 2.
on rural Anatolia. According to Dickinson, despite the fact that Ali was often imprisoned for his criticism of the one-party Turkish state, his literary works hardly contain obvious political contents. She argues that Ali was drawn to social outsiders and people on society’s margins when it comes to his literary texts which include subjects as identity crises and ill-fated love stories. Dickinson argues that Kürk Mantolu Madonna is an example of Ali’s diverse subjects and Ali’s attempt to contribute to world literature. Dickinson links the story to historical reality of the early years of the Turkish Republic concerning the translation movement Dünya Edebiyatı that there were attempts to bring Western humanist values onto Turkish culture. She argues that the story of the characters in the book is a basis for a critique of Turkish and German modernities.18 Dickinson explicates
that Maria was a representation of neue Frau women of 1920s Weimar Republic and was the lens through which Raif saw Germany. Dickinson reads Kürk Mantolu
Madonna also as a critique of Kemalist model of modernisation as Westernisation.
According to Dickinson, the novel highlights a difference between adopting Western values to become a modern country and mere copying of the façade of the West; and concepts of outer image and translatability.
Louis Mitler views Kürk Mantolu Madonna, as well as Köstence Güzellik Kraliçesi
(The Beauty Queen of Constance), as Sabahattin Ali’s semi-autobiography.19 This
corresponds with Ahmet Oktay’s analysis that the main character in Kürk Mantolu
Madonna could be identified, though not entirely, with the author himself.20
However, Oktay’s main discussion about Ali is his pioneering of social realist portrayal of Anatolian peasants. Oktay argues that Ali’s works gained attention because for the first time there emerged written works which brought Anatolian peasants’ life into Turkish literature (of the 1930s).21 According to Oktay, Ali
picked up the neglected group of people whose lives were affected by economic and social changes done by the Republican administration, as a subject of his 18 Dickinson, ‘Translating Surfaces: A Dual Critique of Modernity in Sabahattin Ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna’, 4.
19 Louis Mitler, Contemporary Turkish Writers: a Critical Bio-bibliography of Leading Writers in the
Turkish Republican Period up to 1980, Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Institute for
Inner Asian Studies, 1988, 218.
20 Ahmet Oktay, Cumhuriyet dönemi edebiyatı: 1923-1950, Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1993, 1202.
works and portrayed it through social realist eyes without official ideology.22
Oktay also acknowledges that Ali also wrote about an exploitation of labourers. Oktay outlines the three novels which Ali wrote. Kuyucaklı Yusuf (Yusuf of
Kuyacak) (1937) is about provincial life and patriotism and the novel was later
made into a film. İçimizdeki Şeytan (The Devil within Us) (1940) is a highly political novel about the intellectual circle in Istanbul in the 1940s. Kürk Mantolu Madonna (1943) is a love story set in Germany. Interestingly, Oktay talks about the first two novels in details but not much about Kürk Mantolu Madonna. It would be even more peculiar, if the argument that today’s readers prefer to read works which represent Ali’s political legacy held true, that İçimizdeki Şeytan is less well-known compared to Kürk Mantolu Madonna.
Like Oktay, Talat Sait Halman describes Sabahattin Ali as one of the early figures in social realism in Turkish fiction and a pioneer of village fiction.23 Social realist
fiction realistically portrays the lives of real people. Village fiction refers to a specific genre of Turkish fiction which realistically narrates the life of Anatolian peasants. Halman does not, however, exemplify Ali’s works of each category. Kürk
Mantolu Madonna could not be considered a village novel. First of all, the settings
of the story are two big cities and none of the main characters is from rural areas. It is interesting that today the most famous work of a village novel pioneer is not of village novel genre.
Erika Glassen categorises İçimizdeki Şeytan a ‘semi-autobiographical’ Turkish novel, which realistically portrays Istanbul’s sobet society whose members cherished unconcerned Bohemian lifestyle of the early Republican period.24
Glassen, similar to Siedel, describes works of sobet writers as showing their disappointment with a lessened will to create a national identity in the later years after the establishment of the Turkish Republic. Considering Glassen’s argument 22 Oktay, Cumhuriyet dönemi edebiyatı, 1190.
23 Talat Sait Halman, Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Literature, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press; New York, NY: Crescent Hill, 2007, 365.; Talat Sait Halman ed., Contemporary
Turkish Literature: Fiction and Poetry, Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1982, 443.
24 Erika Glassen, ‘The Social Self: The Search for Identity by Conversation (Sohbet): The Turkish Literary Community and the Problem of Autobiographical Writing’, in Olcay Akyıldız, Halim Kara, Börte Sagaster (eds.), Autobiographical Themes in Turkish Literature: Theoretical and Comparative
that İçimizdeki Şeytan is Ali’s semi-autobiography and journalists’ argument that people read Ali’s works today because of his personal legacy, it is interesting as to how İçimizdeki Şeytan is not as popular as Kürk Mantolu Madonna. Despite that, one could argue that Kürk Mantolu Madonna reflects Ali’s years in Germany, personality cult of Sabahattin Ali does not seem to be the only reason for the current popularity of Kürk Mantolu Madonna.
Hercules Millas puts Sabahattin Ali in a category of Turkish Marxist novel writers. Millas describes these authors as internationalist,25 meaning surpassing
nationalist discourses. According to Millas, themes in Marxist novels include social classes (instead of national or religious groups), minorities, anti-nationalist sentiment, and anti-state authority sentiment. Unfortunately examples of these Marxist novels, either by Ali or other writers in the category, are not given. Kürk
Mantolu Madonna could well fit into this category. The narrator is a job seeker
who lost his job in a bank. Raif Efendi, the main character, is a translator in a bank. The story narrates images of factories, lives of the working class who look for work in factories, domestic workers, people whose lives are strictly socially stratified. While young Raif is living in Berlin, his co-lodgers are from different countries. Millas’s reading of Ali’s works offers a different perspective to understand Kürk Mantolu Madonna as a novel with internationalist outlook, a perspective similar to Gramling and Hepkaner’s transnational and global perspective of Kürk Mantolu Madonna.
Reviews of academic studies illustrate that Sabahattin Ali is highly regarded as an important figure in Turkish literature. Most scholars underscore his writings as social realism which portray both marginalised lower class in city and poor Anatolian peasantry. In addition, Ali’s lived experience and legacy of articulated Leftist political stance are well remembered and often juxtaposed with his written works. Several scholars focus on Ali’s works which reflect his legacy more than others. Kürk Mantolu Madonna is often viewed simply as a love story with the themes of social marginalisation and identity crisis. There is virtually no academic 25 Hercules Millas, ‘Constructing Memories of Multiculturalism and Identities in Turkish Novels’, in Catharina Dufft (ed.), Turkish Literature and Cultural Memory: Multiculturalism as a Literary
studies on Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s phenomenal rise to popularity over the last decade. This paper deems the popularity of Kürk Mantolu Madonna in Turkey in the last decade is peculiarly interesting and that a detailed study might further an understanding of recent political as well as social developments in Turkey.
This paper sets out to explain the increasing popularity of Kürk Mantolu Madonna in Turkey over last decade or so. This study looks at different elements related to the novel including its themes, publishers, readers and author. Chapter one investigates a history of Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s reception(s) over time since its first publication in the early 1940s. The chapter examines the novel’s publishing history, takes into account social and political contexts, and consults academic literatures. It aims to lay out the novel’s popularity or unpopularity over time as a point of departure in order to be able to analyse what the current popularity means. Chapter two focuses on contemporary contexts. The chapter aims to bring out and analyse interactions between the novel’s characteristics which set it apart from other books on the market and its current readership’s credentials which include young people and hipsterism. The Marxist approach of culture industry is employed as an analytical framework. Chapter two aims to illustrate how the novel’s unique characteristics could fulfil preferences of its today’s readers. Chapter three investigates the novel’s popular reception over the last decade. This chapter employs critical discourse analysis to analyse reviews of the novel taken from two major online book retail stores’ websites where customers can leave their opinions about the novel. Chapter three aims to lay out and make sense of the discourses which readers express about the novel.
Chapter One
Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s Past Receptions
“When it was first published in Istanbul in 1943, it made no impression whatsoever. Decades later, when Madonna in a Fur Coat became the sort of book
that passed from friend to friend, the literary establishment continued to ignore it. Even those who greatly admired the other works of Sabahattin Ali viewed this one
as a puzzling aberration. It was just a love story, they said – the sort that schoolgirls fawned over.”26
Maureen Freely’s statement above shows how she views Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s popularity over the past decade a remarkable phenomenon because, in Freely’s view, it is a seventy year old novel, which was not well-received when first published and overlooked, but has become a recent fad in Turkey in the past ten years. This notion of an old novel’s comeback after several decades of little attention certainly makes Kürk Mantolu Madonna appear mysteriously appealing to current and future readers of the novel, which Freely translated from Turkish into English in 2016. Unfortunately, Freely’s statement is not accompanied by sufficient well-grounded evidence in an academic sense, which is understandable since the quote is taken from Freely’s newspaper article, which was not subjected to thorough academic investigation. Hence, an academic investigation of Freely’s statement is necessary.
This chapter aims to examine, the history of the reception of Kürk Mantolu
Madonna, in addition to its success in the last ten years among Turkish readers.
Knowing whether the novel was popular before or not, at different periods over the seven-decades of its life, is fundamental to investigating and analysing the novel’s current popularity. By using the novel’s publishing history, literature reviews and exploring the social and political contexts which the novel has lived through, it should be possible to map how the novel’s reception has changed over time. A deeper understanding of the novel’s history should also help to shed some light on its recent popularity.
The story which was to become known as Kürk Mantolu Madonna was first serialised, though uncompleted27, in the Turkish newspaper Hakikat from 18
26 Freely, ‘Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat – the Surprise Turkish Bestseller.’
27 Yasemin Yener from Bilgi Publishing, through email correspondence, offers this information that the story was published by the newspaper Hakikat but “due to some unknown reason it was never completed”.
December 1940 until 8 February 1941. Initially, it was called Lüzumsuz Adam
(Unnecessary Man) and later changed to Kürk Mantolu Madonna because Ali was
not happy with the sound clash of the Z and S in the word Lüzumsuz.28 The story
was then completed and published as a novel in 1943. Publishing history of the novel could well be evidence of how successful or unsuccessful the novel has been through times since its first publication. However, by and large publishing records in Turkey, until very recent years, were not systematically kept. Hence, tracing the reception(s) of Kürk Mantolu Madonna through publishing history proves to be difficult. The first (1943) edition of the book was published by the publishing house Remzi Kitabevi who did not keep records of the number of copies it printed.29 Naturally this insufficient figure alone could not hint the reception of
the novel at its first publication. The novel was published again in February 1966 by Varlık Yayınevi as a part of the 3,000 copies of Ali’s complete oeuvre.30 It is
known that authors whose works are published by Varlık, a publisher which owns a literature and art magazine of the same name, are or later become famous writers or poets. The fact that Ali’s oeuvre was published by Valık suggests that Ali was already a significant literary figure by 1966; or after 1966 Ali became a known author. Indeed, Sabahattin Ali must have been an established author in Turkey since his lifetime, long before this 1966 posthumous oeuvre. Between 1934 to 1936, several of Ali’s writings were published by Varlık, including Kağnı (short story, 1936), Esiler (Prisoners, play, 1936), Kanal, Kırlangıçlar, Arap Hayri, and Pazarcı.31 The presence of his works in Varlık suggests that Ali must have
gained a certain recognition at least by the second half of 1930s. Yet, a problem with a complete oeuvre is that it is not possible to gauge a reception of each individual work within the oeuvre. Hence, it is not possible to know the reception of Kürk Mantolu Madonna at the 1966 publication. Notwithstanding, Kürk Mantolu
Madonna must have reached a number of readers.
28 Asım Bezirci, Sabahattin Ali Hayatı Hikâyelleri Romanları, Istanbul: Oluş yayınları, 197.
29 An email requesting for Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s publishing records was sent (24 Nov 16) to Remzi Kitabevi but the publisher did not have any other information apart from the novels’ publication year – 1943.
30 This information is provided by Varlık Yayınevi through email correspondence.
31 Behçet Necatigil, Edebiyatımızda İsimler Sözlüğü, Istanbul: Varlık, 1960; 1968; 1972; 1975; 1978; 1980; 1989,304.
After Varlık, Bilgi Yayınevi became the publisher of Kürk Mantolu Madonna. According to Yasemin Yener, Bilgi Publishing’s Translation Coordinator, around 1966 to 1970 the publisher published more than 5,000 copies, but, “sadly, I cannot be more precise than that,” remarked Yener. Yener’s figures might actually not be accurate due to few facts. Valık published the novel in 1966. It is not a common practice for a novel to be published by two different publishers at the same time. According to Behçet Necatigil’s Edebiyatımızda İsimler Sözlüğü (1960), Bilgi was the publisher which published Sabahattin Ali’s works from 1972 to 1976.32 The
information provided by Necatigil is more convincing considering that fact that a copy of the 1976 edition by Bilgi has survived and is one of the sources for this paper.33 Hence, it is more convincing that Kürk Mantolu Madonna was published
again in 1976. Supposedly, the novel was published again in 1976 for 5,000 copies, this still cannot precisely illustrate whether the novel was popular or not around mid 1970s.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Cem Yayınevi was the novel’s publisher and held the rights to publish until 1998 when Yapı Kredi Yayınları took over the right to publish the novel. A request for publishing records of the novel has been sent to Cem Yayınevi, but there came no response. Hence, there is no publishing records of Kürk Mantolu Madonna during the 1980s and 1990s. Yapı Kredi Yayınları (YKY) is the current publisher of Kürk Mantolu Madonna and has published over one million copies of Kürk Mantolu Madonna in eighty-one editions (as of August 2016) since 1998. The numbers of copies published by YKY have continuously increased over the years starting with around 1,500 copies per year from 1998 to 2000; to 3,500 copies on average each year from 2001 to 2003. The numbers continually increased from 2004 to 2011: 6,200 copies; 8,700 copies; 10,400 copies; 14,200 copies; 20,000 copies; 22,000 copies; 40,000 copies; 60,000 copies consecutively. From 2012, the figures jump to 6 digits: 120,000 copies in 2012, 180,000 (2013), 240,000 (2014), 350,000 (2015) and 250,500 copies (2016).34
What can be said about these well-recorded figures by the current publisher of the 32 Necatigil, Edebiyatımızda İsimler Sözlüğü, 304.
33 This information is received through email correspondence with Yasemin Yener, Bilgi Publishing’s Translation Coordinator.
book is that there have continually been increasing supplies of the novel over the last decade and the supplies are extremely high in the last half decade.
Publishing history does not directly speak about the degrees of Kürk Mantolu
Madonna’s popularity over time. Yet, useful information could be retrieved from
the publishing records above. When Kürk Mantolu Madonna first came out, it must have been widely read as the latest novel of an established Turkish writer whose former writings were well received, though some of Ali’s works, such as İçimizdeki Şeytan, a controversial novel with political contents, received negative reception from certain groups. Kürk Mantolu Madonna was available again in 1966 as a story in Ali’s complete oeuvre, which must have been read by a number of people. The novel was then published as an individual novel in 1976. Publishing records for 1980s and 1990s are not available unfortunately but the book was also published in this period. From 1998 to 2005, the numbers of the book published remained moderate yet increasing. From 2006, there were continually remarkable increases of the book’s published copies each year until 2011. From 2012 to 2016, the figures of published copies reached one of the highest in Turkish books’ publishing history. If supplies of a book can be an indication of the book’s popularity, from 2012 to 2016, Kürk Mantolu Madonna is an extremely popular book, to an unprecedented level of popularity in Turkey.
Like Maureen Freely’s, most newspaper articles present Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s popularity in the last decade as unprecedented that the novel was not at all popular in the past, bordering unheard-of. Often, these articles highlight the uninvestigated story of Ali’s murder, which results in a sense of mysterious appeal to the novel. This representation of the novel would certainly help commercially promote the novel to its future readers and add a sense of mystifying entertainment to its current readers. However, it would not be fair to judge that all newspaper or magazine articles about certain books are only for the purpose of increasing sales of the books. But one crucial problem with this kind of reportage is that often there is no sufficient evidence, which is required by academic scholarship, to support their claims. Hence further study needs to be done to
confirm or refute the assertions that Kürk Mantolu Madonna was not at all popular in the past.
Kürk Mantolu Madonna has attracted little scholarly attention despite its
phenomenal popularity in the last decade. To survey academic studies of Kürk
Mantolu Madonna, it is inevitable to go through its author because most academic
works focus on Sabahattin Ali, instead of specific works of his. When certain works of Ali are discussed in details, often than not these do not include Kürk
Mantolu Madonna. Only a few studies have Kürk Mantolu Madonna as their
subject. Most of them are literary criticism or comparative literary - between Kürk
Mantolu Madonna and other, often Western, novel. There is virtually no academic
studies on Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s recent popularity in Turkey, or information about the reception of the novel in the past. In order to trace the novel’s past popularity, fragments of information need to be pieced together and interpreted. An issue which one might encounter when tracing Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s reception is the absence of its author from Turkish literature reference books from a certain period. Few academics of certain periods left Ali aside from their books. However, the fact that Ali is not mentioned in reference books of a certain time does not necessarily mean that Ali or his works were unknown during that time.
A survey on academic publications might confirm Freely’s statement above that
Kürk Mantolu Madonna did not attract attention in the past. Since the subject of
this paper is the novel’s popularity in Turkey, it is possibly best to start with reference books on Turkish literature. Kürk Mantolu Madonna does not extensively appear in academic publications. One of the earliest and rare mentioning of Sabahattin Ali in academic books is in Behçet Necatigil’
Edebiyatımızda İsimler Sözlüğü (1960) (Dictionary of Names in Contemporary Literature). The book briefly introduces Ali and his works. The half-page
paragraph gives a very brief biography of Ali and lists Ali’s works, without discussion. There is no relevant information to be gauged for Kürk Mantolu
Madonna’s receptivity. Two other reference books– Seyit Kemal Karaalioğlu’s Resimli-Motifli Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (1973) (History of Turkish Literature) and
Vasfi Mahir Kocatürk’s Büyük Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi: Başlangıçtan Bugüne Türk
Edebiyatı Tarihi (1970) (History of Turkish Literature from the Beginning to the Present) – mention neither Kürk Mantolu Madonna, nor Sabahattin Ali in their
entire volumes. The absence of Kürk Mantolu Madonna and Ali from these two important reference books could be an indication that, at least in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kürk Mantolu Madonna was not a well-known novel as Freely claims.
However, the absence of Sabahattin Ali from the two reference books is peculiar. It was unlikely that Karaalioğlu and Kocatürk, both a prolific Turkish literature scholar, never heard of Ali and his works. Certainly works of Ali were present in Turkey during the two scholars’ time. At least, in 1966 Varlık published 3,000 copies of complete oeuvre of Ali’s works. In addition, there were books about Sabahattin Ali published in the late 1960s and throughout 1970s, including
Sabahattin Ali’nin Dosyası (Sabahattin Ali’s Files) (1968); Ön Türk Roman (Ten Turkish Novel) (1971) containing Ali’s novel Kuyucaklı Yusuf; and Sabahattin Ali, Hayati, Hikâyeleri, Romanları (1974). Karaalioğlu and Kocatürk must have read or
at last heard about Ali and his works. The omission of Ali and his works from Karaalioğlu and Kocatürk’s reference books then seem intentional for certain reasons. The fact that neither reference works talk about Sabahattin Ali and Kürk
Mantolu Madonna does not compulsorily mean that Kürk Mantolu Madonna was
unheard of during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
With incomplete sources, whether the novel was widely or limitedly read could not be confidently determined. Available publishing records are that 3,000 copies of Kürk Mantolu Madonna were published in 1966 and 5,000 in 1976. There might have, or have not, been more publications and copies during this period. As Sevengül Sönmez points out, the current fad of Kürk Mantolu Madonna has led people to be interested in Ali’s biography as well as his other works.35 If an
interest in a novel can lead to an interest in the novel’s author, then an interest in an authorial personality could also lead to an interest in this writings. It is then 35 Handan Kazanci, ‘The Book that Turks cannot put down’, Anatolian Agency, 2016,
<http://aa.com.tr/en/culture-and-art/the-book-that-turks-cannot-put-down/567492> (22 January 2017).
likely that Kürk Mantolu Madonna was read during the later years of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a period which saw a noticeable interest in Sabahattin Ali’s life and works. The period of 1960s and 1970s saw a proliferation of books, though not necessarily academic, about Ali. In 1968 Kamal Sülker’s book
Sabahattin Ali’nin Dosyası (Sabahattin Ali’s Files) was published by Ant Yayınları, a
socialist leaning publisher. The book’s focus is an investigation Ali’s murder. In 1971, one of Ali’s novel – Kuyucaklı Yusuf – was included in Fethi Naci’s book Ön
Türk Roman (Ten Turkish Novels). In 1974, another book about Ali was published – Sabahattin Ali, Hayati, Hikâyeleri, Romanları. In this book, Asım Bebirci talks about
Sabahattin Ali’s life, his short stories and novels. In 1978, Kemal Bayram’s book
Sabahattin Ali Olayı (Sabahattin Ali Incident) was published. And in 1979, a book
called Sabahattin Ali authored by Filiz Ali Laslo (Sabahattin Ali’s daughter) and Atilla Özkırımlı’s was published. The interest in Ali - especially his mysterious death and his works –during the late 1960s and 1970s can be conceived by the orchestration of these books in this period. Kürk Mantolu Madonna, as one of Ali’s works, must have been known and/or read during this period as well.
The current phenomenal rise to popularity of Kürk Mantolu Madonna sees these 1960s/1970s books about Ali reprinted or on sale as second-handed books.
Sabahattin Ali’nin Dosyası is available as an electronic book on Worldcat.org since
2002. Sabahattin Ali, Hayati, Hikâyeleri, Romanları is published again in 2007 by Evrensel. Sabahattin Ali Olayı is printed again in 2012 by Tanyeri Kitap. Filiz Ali and Atilla Özkırmlı’s Sabahattin Ali is republished in 2014 by YKY, with additional inputs by Sevengül Sönmez who is the author of the book A’dan Z’ye Sabahattin Ali (2009). Apart from these biographical books, Ali’s other works such as İçimizdeki Şeytan (The Devil Within), begin to catch attention, being purchased, by Turkish readers as well. In the past few years, Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s popularity has brought about an interest in Ali’s biography and his other works. By the same token, the interest in Ali in the late 1960s and 1970s suggests that Kürk Mantolu
Madonna, among Ali’s other works, might have caught attention of the Turkish
public to a certain degree. At last, one might assume that Kürk Mantolu Madonna was known and read by a number of Turkish readers during the late 1960s and throughout 1970s.
Viewing Karaalioğlu and Kocatürk’s omission of Sabahattin Ali from a political perspective might yield some clues on why the two Turkish literature scholars did not mention Ali as one of notable Turkish literature personnel. Ali’s political legacy and the political landscape in which Karaalioğlu and Kocatürk lived might help one understand this. Ali’s legacy includes his Leftist political stance; his articulated criticism towards the one-party Kemalist state governed by the Republican People’s party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi: CHP) of the 1930s and 1940s; and his murder which is widely suspected to have been conspired by the CHP government. Sabahattin Ali was recalcitrant in his writings against the CHP government of the 1930s and 1940s. His murder in 1948 was not thoroughly investigated and the news of the discovery of his mutilated body emerged on a national newspaper in 1949. The legacy of his Leftist political idea, his articulation of the idea, his harsh criticism towards the government, and his death because of what he stood for must have still been fresh in the memory of the Turkish people of the 1950s. This memory was carried through the 1960s and 1970s, exemplified by the proliferation of books about Ali’s life and works published during the 1960s and 1970s as laid out above. Turkey’s political landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s were marked with popular uprisings of the Leftist workers and students and the military’s intervention in politics. Tumultuous political situation together with economic recession gave rise to social unrest including street demonstrations, labour strikes and political assassinations throughout the 1960s. The Leftist workers and students’ movements were antagonistic towards successive governments, most of which were motivated by Kemalist ideology, and the military. The Turkish coup of May 1960 got rid of the democratically elected government of the Democratic Party (Demokrat Parti; DP) and brought general İsmet İnönü, the head of the CHP, to prime ministerial office form 1961 to 1965. The military continued to dominate the political scene until October 1965. Election was held in 1965 brining democratically elected government but another coup struck in 1971, known as 1971 Turkish military memorandum, removing the democratically elected government and installing Ferit Melen, another CHP leader, as Prime Minister. Although the DP was formed to oppose the CHP, the party was also ideologically Kemalist. After the dissolution of the DP in 1961, Justice Party
(Adalet Partisi, AP) succeeded and carried on the basic principles of Kemalism throughout its lifetime and prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. What is more, there were clashes between the Leftist movements and the nationalist Rights, most prominently the Grey Wolves. The Grey Wolves (Bozkurtlar), though officially named Ülkü Ocakları Eğitim ve Kültür Vakfı (Idealist Clubs Educational and Cultural Foundation), is a Turkish ultra-nationalist organization born in the late 1960s. During its vigorously active years of the 1970s, the organisation was paramilitary and staunchly anti-Communists.36 It is widely believed that the then
Turkish state was complicit to the Grey Wolves’ attacks on Left-wing groups.37
Members of the Grey Wolves allegedly assassinated Left-wing and liberal intellectuals, labour organisers, activists, officials, journalists and Kurdish people during the political violence between 1976 and 1980.38 In actuality, being (seen
as) politically Left in Turkey during the late 1970s could be life threating. The political landscape in which Karaalioğlu and Kocatürk produced their reference works was one intensely dominated by Kemalist ideology and violent ultra-nationalist Rightist activities of which Leftist political attitude was enmity. Sabahattin Ali’s legacy, which was still fresh in the memory of the Turkish people, would not have positively impressed the CHP, DP, AP and the military, and would certainly have infuriated the Nationalist Movement Party (Turkish: Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP), a Turkish far-right political party and its ally Grey Wolves. This might explain why Karaalioğlu and Kocatürk did not register Ali as one of noteworthy Turkish authors. In the case of Kocatürk, reading from this perspective is hugely convincing that the exclusion of Ali was political. Kocatürk was a DP politician in the Turkish parliament. As a DP member, the principles to which he, at least officially, subscribed were Kemalist nationalism and secularism; and political and economic liberalisation. The Rightist nationalism; religiously Kemalist secularism and economic liberalism were clearly antithetical to the 36 Stephen E. Atkins, ‘Grey Wolves (Turkey)’, in Encyclopaedia of Modern Worldwide Extremists
and Extremist Groups, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004, 110–111.; Gus Martin, The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Terrorism, Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2011, 236.
37 Ganser Daniele, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe, London: Routledge, 2005, 238-239.; Martin A. Lee, ‘On the Trail of Turkey’s Terrorist Grey Wolves’,
Consortium News, 2015,
<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/12/16/on-the-trail-of-turkeys-terrorist-grey-wolves-2/> (22 January 2017).
38 Martin A. Lee, ‘Turkish Dirty War Revealed, but Papal Shooting Still Obscured’, LA Time, 1998, <http://articles.latimes.com/1998/apr/12/opinion/op-38664> (22 January 2017).
Leftist political and economic standpoint that the legacy of Ali represented. Thus it is less surprising that Kocatürk’s Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi left Sabahattin Ali aside. Providing this scenario and viewing from a political lens, one might understand why Ali was excluded from Karaalioğlu and Kocatürk’s reference books. If this were the case, the absence of Ali from the two reference books would not mean that Sabahattin Ali or his works received no interests from academia or the public. This might actually suggest otherwise: that Ali and his political legacy were well remembered, better yet highly charged, throughout the 1950s until the 1970s. The exclusion of Ali and his works from the two reference books makes it difficult to trace Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s reception during the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, the above mentioned situations could suggest that Kürk Mantolu
Madonna, as one of Sabahattin Ali’s works, at least as a side-effect of the interest
in the author, was known among the Turkish public.
There seems to be only one Turkish Literature reference book – Behçet Necatigil’s
Edebiyatımızda Eserler Sözlüğü (1971)39 – that registers and gives details of Kürk Mantolu Madonna. This book is a glossary of stories written in Turkish. It gives a
brief summary and literary criticism of Kürk Mantolu Madonna. The receptivity of the novel is not discussed however. What could be said about Kürk Mantolu
Madonna’s presence in this 1978 glossary book is that Kürk Mantolu Madonna was
a known, at least within the circle of Turkish literature literati. This would refute Freely’s claim that Kürk Mantolu Madonna “made no impression whatsoever… the literary establishment continued to ignore it.”40
Comparing Necatigil with Kocatürk, it is revealing that the exclusion of Sabahattin Ali from Kocatürk’s volumes was political. As discussed earlier, Kocatürk was a politician who adhered to Kamalist nationalism, hence Right-leaning. Ali’s Leftist credentials must have distasted Kocatürk. On the other hand, Ali and his works are discussed by Necatigil who was not political. Necatigil was one of the poets whose idea was that poetry should be ‘uncontaminated’ art devoid of political 39 Behçet Necatigil, Edebiyatımızda Eserler Sözlüğü, Istanbul: Varlık Yayınevi, 1971; 1979; 1989; 2003, 210-211(1971), 258(2003).
contents and the apolitical viewpoint was reflected in their works.41 Necatigil’s
stance against political motivation in his literary works might explain why he does not exclude Sabahattin Ali, who was most likely a controversial figure amid the then intense political struggles between the Left and the Right, from his works -Edebiyatımızda İsimler (1960) and Eserler (1971) Sözlüğü.
Despite the likeliness that Kürk Mantolu Madonna was read during the hype of interest in Sabahattin Ali’s legacy in the late 1960s to 1970s, the novel might have not impressed Turkish readers as much compared to Ali’s other two novels. It is evident that Kürk Mantolu Madonna did not attract a lot of academic interest among native Turkish Turkish literature scholars. Apart from Necatigil’s
Edebiyatımızda Eserler Sözlüğü, Kürk Mantolu Madonna is rarely discussed or
mentioned in other academic books. Most of them, when they do acknowledge Ali, talk about Ali’s biography, especially the legacy of his Leftist political stance and an overview of his works, with a focus on his pioneering of social realism in Turkish literature, and an overview of his works, of which the ones with social realist characters are discussed in details. Kürk Mantolu Madonna is mentioned simply as one of his three novels, without any specific credentials to be discussed. An example of this practice can be found in Ahmet Oktay’s Cumhuriyet Dönemi
Edebiyatı 1923-1950.42 In addition to Ali’s contribution to Turkish literature by
bringing the Anatolian peasants’ life, never before were they subjects in literature, into light; Ali’s detailed biography; and mentioning of Ali’s less known writings, Oktay lays out Ali’s three novels. More details are provided for Kuyucaklı Yusuf (Yusuf of Kuyucak; 1937) and İçimizdeki Şeytan (The Devil Within; 1940); and less for Kürk Mantolu Madonna (1943). Oktay explicates that Kuyucaklı Yusuf is about rural life and nationalism; Icimizdeki Seytan a politically controversial novel about university and intellectual circles in Istanbul in the 1940s. As for Kürk Mantolu
Madonna, Oktay simply says that it is a love story set in Germany.43 The fact that
Oktay goes into details and explains what he perceives of the first two novels suggests that he sees the two novels as significant and worth discussing. On the 41 Cangül Örnek and Çağdaş Üngör, ed., Turkey in the Cold War: Ideology and Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 116.
42 Oktay, Cumhuriyet Dönemi Edebiyatı.
other hand, Kürk Mantolu Madonna is referred to as simply a love story without further comments. This might suggests that there was nothing special about the novel which would urge Oktay to discuss. Asım Bezirci talks about Kuyucaklı Yusuf as a very popular and successful novel of Ali that it was published four times and
İçimizdeki Şeytan as a politically controversial novel. When it comes to Kürk Mantolu Madonna, similarly to Oktay, Bezirci refers to it simply as a love story.44
The mere mentioning without detailed discussion of Kürk Mantolu Madonna in these books could be employed to substantiate Freely’s claim that “it (Kürk
Mantolu Madonna) was just a love story, they said – the sort that schoolgirls
fawned over.” Indeed, Oktay refers to the Kuyucaklı Yusuf and İçimizdeki Şeytan as “Sabahattin Ali’nin başyapıtı sayılan” (“master pieces of Ali’s”)45. This might
suggests that Oktay does not consider Kürk Mantolu Madonna as a significant writing of Ali’s; or that Oktay sees Kuyucaklı Yusuf and İçimizdeki Şeytan fit Ali’s political legacy, whilst Kürk Mantolu Madonna does not, and hence discusses the two novels in length. Referring to Oktay’s Cumhuriyet Dönemi Edebiyatı 1923-1950 (1993), one might speculate that, at least, around the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Kürk Mantolu Madonna was only a known novel in Turkey but not of a remarkable
acclaim, at least from a literary criticism point of view. Had it been popular, to a degree close to its current popularity, during the period, Kürk Mantolu Madonna would have been elaborated more by Oktay.
Despite a view that Kürk Mantolu Madonna is simply an ordinary love story, there is another view which reads the novel as more than just a romance. Louis Mitler sees Kürk Mantolu Madonna as Sabahattin Ali’s semi-autobiography.46 It is
conceivable why Mitler thinks so considering the fact that the novel’s setting is Berlin of the inter-wars period and that Ali was living and studying in Potsdam, a city on the border of Berlin, between 1928 to 1930. Even Oktay, who sees a significance of Kürk Mantolu Madonna no further than a love story, opines that the character Raif can be identified with Ali himself.47 Asım Bezirci also thinks that
44 Bezirci, Sabahattin Ali Hayatı Hikâyelleri Romanları, 203.
45 Oktay, Cumhuriyet Dönemi Edebiyatı, 1197.
46 Louis Mitler, Contemporary Turkish Writers, 218.
Raif has Ali’s personality.48 The notion of Kürk Mantolu Madonna partly being Ali’s
autobiography, though mostly devoid of political contents, could have also been a reason for its suppression by the Rightist groups; or for its popularity during the hype of interest in Sabahattin Ali during the 1960s and 1970s. The association between the novel and Ali’s life is indeed a discourse within the current popularity of the novel. ‘The mysterious woman who inspired a bestselling novel’ is a headline of Emma Jane Kirby’s article on the BBC. ‘The mysterious woman’ refers to Maria Puder, the main female character in the novel. The article suggests that there existed a German woman whom Ali might have acquainted and then created a novel character out of. The biographical aspect of Ali in Kürk Mantolu
Madonna might suggest that the novel is popular partly because of a part of Ali’s
legacy lives in the novel; or that the interest in Sabahattin Ali comes from a curiosity originated from reading the character Raif. Nonetheless, what might be said with certainly is that the current fad of Kürk Mantolu Madonna also involves the legacy of Sabahattin Ali.
It seems that Kürk Mantolu Madonna has always been a recognised novel, neither one largely neglected as some newspaper and magazine articles suggest nor one with stratospherical receptivity. Its receptions over time are not possible to be straightforwardly estimated. Talat Halman’s Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (2006) (History
of Turkish Literature) details Sabahattin Ali most extensively.49 Haman’s focus is to
illustrate that Ali was the first to bring the life of Anatolian peasants into Turkish literature, through the lens of social realism which thence brought a new genre – Anatolian social realism - into Turkish literature in the early years of the Turkish Republic. To exemplify this, Halman discusses a short story and a novel of Ali which represent this genre. Despite the fact that in 2006 Kürk Mantolu Madonna must have gained an increasingly notable popularity in Turkey, Türk Edebiyatı
Tarihi, a work authored by Talat Halman, a politically liberal scholar, does not
discuss the novel at all. If Sabahattin Ali’s pioneering of social realism were the only significant aspect of Ali in Halman’s view, the absence of a discussion of Kürk
Mantolu Madonna could be understood. Yet, one could wonder how a prominent
48 Bezirci, Sabahattin Ali Hayatı Hikâyelleri Romanları, 199.
49 Talat Halman’s other books on Turkish Literature also talk about Sabahattin Ali and his works similarly that Sabahattin Ali is the pioneer of Anatolian social realism.
