ABSTRACT

This essay concerns the contributions likely to be made by Nâzım Hikmet’s book, Human Landscapes from My Country, to further studies on the Turkish bourgeoisie. Human Landscapes from My Country depicts seven distinct bourgeois characters who played a role during the historical period from the Turkish War of Independence to the Second World War. In his work, Nâzım Hikmet views Turkey and the world at that time through the eyes of those characters he created as the representatives of the Turkish bourgeoisie. He exposes their relations with political ideologies, with state authorities, with each other, with the intellectuals, with the world, and with the oppressed classes. In this exposition, Nâzım Hikmet relies on his observations of real-life experiences, on the one hand, and reconfigures those observations on the basis of the inspirations aroused by his socialist world view, on the other. In the Landscapes, we are given the opportunity for reading about the world views, concerns, motivations, political tendencies, mental patterns, and business habits of the bourgeois at the time as told by Nâzım Hikmet and for translating them into mental images in our own minds. This opportunity enables us to look at the Turkish bourgeoisie by means of such rich materials as unlikely to be found in memoirs, interviews, corporate records, economic journals, reports or financial documents. The Landscapes is one of the extremely rare examples of the fact that literary works are unique resources for studies to be conducted on social classes.