Author · 2 works
Reşat Nuri Güntekin was born in 1889 in Üsküdar, on the Asian shore of Istanbul. His father, İbrahim Nuri Bey, was an army physician; his mother was Lütfiye Hanım. As his father was posted from one town to another, the boy’s childhood moved with him: he began primary school in Üsküdar and finished it in Çanakkale, then continued his secondary studies in Çanakkale and İzmir. In 1912 he graduated from the literature department of the Darülfünun in Istanbul, today’s Istanbul University.
He started out teaching French in Bursa and later taught literature and composition in Istanbul schools. Criticism and short stories published in magazines under pen names drew him into writing. He had first written Çalıkuşu (The Wren) as a play titled İstanbul Kızı (The Girl from Istanbul); when it could not be staged, he turned it into a novel. Serialised in a newspaper in 1922, the book made his name known overnight to a wide readership.
His appointment as an inspector for the Ministry of Education in 1931 set the course of the rest of his life; the Anatolian towns he travelled through for years supplied the material both for Anadolu Notları (Anatolian Notes) and for his novels. In Yaprak Dökümü (The Fall of Leaves), published in 1930, he told of a civil servant’s family coming apart under a changing way of life. He sat as deputy for Çanakkale from 1939 to 1946, returned to inspection work, and in 1950 went to Paris as Turkey’s representative to UNESCO.
He wrote a plain Turkish close to everyday speech. He drew the people of Anatolia from within rather than from a distance and set his social criticism inside an affecting story; he is counted among the writers who opened the Turkish novel to the provinces. He retired in 1954. He died on 7 December 1956 in London, where he had gone for treatment for lung cancer, and was buried in Karacaahmet Cemetery in Istanbul.
Güntekin wrote where the National Literature movement’s search for a plain language met the social upheaval of the Republic’s founding years. In a country coming out of war and passing from empire to nation state, it was disputed whether literature should turn its face from Istanbul towards Anatolia. How far Westernisation should go, a woman’s place in society and schooling in the provinces were the leading questions of the day; his novels grew out of the conviction that these should be treated with a realistic eye and in the language people actually spoke. Literature was then taken to be the way the new country explained itself.
