Author(s): Macit BALIK
Cevdet Kudret (1907-1993) is mostly known as a researcher, critic, literary historian and essayist in Turkish literature. Making a name for him for the first time among Yedi Mealeciler group, Cevdet Kudret seems to have failed to attract researchers despite his works in poetry, novel, story and theater. Reflecting a realist approach in his novels and stories, he compiled his stories, which were published in different journals and different dates, in Sokak (Street, 1974). These stories, based on life-literature relation, besides with the zeitgeist which shapes social identity, include economic and politic reflections of everyday life. Twelve stories in the Sokak, particularly draws attention with their capacity to reflect Turkey's economic, social, political and moral problems during Second World War. Cevdet Kudret reveals the political and economic structure of his time by making use of stories from folk theater and the social life experience and irony. Rather than using social relations and incoherencies and facts of humanity as a tool, the author handles these aspects with a humane and conscientious standpoint by building his relations with social order. In this respect, he distinguishes from social realist writers, who isolate the individual from its context and make use of social problems in their politic arguments. In his stories which have many similarities with his real life, Cevdet Kudret uses economic, politic and social issues in his fictions as a bourgeoisie writer in a time when village novels are most popular. While exposing different aspects of poverty in cities, he also presents a general view of a particular time of Turkey. In this essay, I will make a comparative and analytic study on reflection of these social and politic issues in the fiction based on the stories in Sokak.
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