CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Tasdemir, Nazli Eylem |
|---|---|
| Title | Suat Dervis (1905-1972): A Friend of the Soviet Union |
| Summary | In this thesis, I examine Suat Derviş’s life story and trace the course of Derviş’s intellectual and political journey, from being an aristocratic Ottoman woman with an unavoidable distance from society to becoming a journalist whose writing was informed by a sense of social justice. Born at the end of the Ottoman Empire, Suat Derviş (1905-1972) was an exceptional woman whose writings reflected her changing perspective and her own experiences as a woman. Her literary career and political ideas witnessed a courageous and rather an unconventional transformation. After being trained by private tutors in Turkey, Suat Derviş continued her education in Germany. She started her career as an author with her first novel at the age of sixteen and she went on to work as a journalist in Turkey and many countries in Europe. Her visits to the Soviet Union in 1937 and 1939, and her work in Turkey as a journalist conducting street interviews enabled her to confront different social realities and had a huge impact on her political ideas and her writing. Derviş’s work, I argue, granted her an important role as a socialist feminist woman in Turkey —a role that has been neglected hitherto. In 1944, Derviş wrote a booklet called Neden Sovyetler Birliğinin Dostuyum? (Why am I a Friend of the Soviet Union?) which constitutes the primary focus of this thesis. Derviş wrote this booklet in response to accusations made in anti-communist writer Oğuz Türkkan’s booklets Kızıllar ve Sollar (Reds and Leftists) and Kızıl Faaliyet (Red Activity), with the aim to explain and justify her admiration of the Soviet Union. Derviş’s booklet has been ignored in Turkish history and there is no comprehensive study of it. In this thesis, I explore the disregard of Suat Derviş’s booklet Neden Sovyetler Birliğinin Dostuyum? in Turkish historiography and socialist realist literature. Expressing support for communism and the Soviet Union and being written by a woman in a period in Turkish history of pronounced anticommunism, this booklet has an important place both in Derviş’s life and in Turkish history. By studying and exploring Suat Derviş’s unconventional life and career, and by focusing on her ignored 1944 booklet, I aim (i) to examine Derviş’s distancing herself from the dominant state ideology and to illustrate how she amalgamated feminist and socialist discourses, (ii) to analyze how and why mainstream/official historiography of the Turkish left and feminism overlooked Suat Derviş’ political ideas and her booklet. In doing so, I aim to give recognition to bring Suat Derviş and her booklet Neden Sovyetler Birliğinin Dostuyum? to review the political and literary journey of an exceptional Turkish woman writer and journalist within the historical context of her time. |
| Supervisor | de Haan, Francisca |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/tasdemir_nazli.pdf |
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