A Mind at Peace

A Mind at Peace (Archipelago Books, 2008 and 2011; English translation by Erdağ Göknar of Huzur, 1949) is an iconic Turkish novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62), one of the pioneers of literary modernism in Turkey.

Tanpınar was a poet, novelist, and critic who worked as a professor of Ottoman and Turkish literature at Istanbul University. Though he was known in his lifetime as a major poet, renowned scholar, and prolific essayist, he was not recognized as a major fiction writer until a decade after his death. It was in the context of the growing interest in the 19th- and early 20th-century Ottoman past that Tanpinar’s fiction was rediscovered and given new meaning. His subject matter has become relevant to contemporary interests and his aesthetic complexity (including a dense Perso-Arabic vocabulary) is no longer objectionable. Today, he is considered to be an icon of Turkish literature and is an influence on many contemporary Turkish novelists, foremost among them Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk.

A Mind at Peace first appeared in serial in the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet. The novel is part of a multi-volume roman fleuve that includes the untranslated novels, Song in Mahur and Waiting in the Wings. It is set in Istanbul on the eve of World War II (1939) and captures the anxieties of a cosmopolitan family challenged by the difficulties of the early Republic, which was founded after the partition of the Ottoman Empire in 1920-23. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the Republic of Turkey experienced a fifteen-year “westernizing” cultural revolution that attempted to distance it as much as possible from its Ottoman-Islamic past by transforming everything from the alphabet to the legal system, from education to the clothes people wore. Access to the past was restricted for the sake of developing a future-oriented “new” society. Writers like Tanpınar lived through this transition and knew how to read and write in both the “old” Ottoman script and the “new” Latin Turkish; in short, they were familiar with two mentalities and the Ottoman legacies from Mevlevi Sufism to art and architecture weighed heavily upon them.

In Tanpınar’s ironic vision, however, the promise of “modernization” gives way to anxiety. What is certain about this new world is not progress, but fragmentation and destabilization. In A Mind at Peace, rapid social change is masterfully gauged through the way it registers in the psyches of Tanpınar’s Istanbulite characters. He seems to be asking, “How does a Muslim society on the periphery of Europe balance tradition and modernity?”