Which of us in childhood did not come up with our own imaginary countries, our own Shvambrania – with a specific history, culture, kings and military leaders, and always with a detailed map. This type of state and historical construction ends with childhood. However, some authors reserve this privilege for themselves. These include, for example, Jonathan Swift and Orhan Pamuk. On June 7, Nobel laureate Pamuk turns 70. The last of those that appeared in Russian, the novel “Plague Nights” – and there is such a Shvambrania. It’s an imaginary island nation whose history and of course its geographical map has woven into the greater history of the 20th century, which could well exist.
Pamuk admitted that he likes such a game, in fact, it is called fiction. But the singer of details, a fan of details that should be overly realistic, and therefore his fictional stories resemble real ones, and in his historical novels (or conditionally historical ones), the author often relies on real documents. and proof. And then it is not clear who is imitating whom – the source of the idea is a document or an ancient work by a little-known author, the source of the idea is Pamuk or Pamuk. Sometimes his Nobel laureate novels are reminiscent of those by Umberto Eco, who melted medievalism into prose.
Almost all of Orhan Pamuk’s novels can be classified as historical. Those that traditionally relate to the modern age are imprinted with the past – its details, external circumstances such as the Turkish military coups, the inner life of the teahouses in Kars, or the average family of families sitting down to dinner every evening in Istanbul. in front of the TV. The Museum of Innocence is a romance novel that left its mark on the map of Istanbul in the form of the Museum of Innocence with the same name, in which 4213 cigarette butts smoked by the hero’s lover are the subject of today. But this is not so: the action in it begins in the 1970s. And this story is about that period. The Black Book wouldn’t have been possible in the internet age – it has paper newspapers as the main story, it smells like printing ink and newsprint.
During almost half a century of work on classical multifaceted forms of the novel, Pamuk grew up with memory. Including, of course, the periods when he did not live, where he placed not only his heroes, but also himself and his loved ones – in the novel “My Name is Red”, where the action took place in the 16th century. In the 19th century, Orhan, his older brother Şevket, and his mother Şekure appear: this is actually the name of the author’s brother and mother. But for some reason all these novels seem like prose about our day. Today sprouts from the day before yesterday, and the day before yesterday looks like today. There are always several cultural layers in this prose that simultaneously require endless footnotes. So in “Plague Nights,” a story about a plague in paradise about the 1901 epidemic on the fictional Mediterranean island of Minger, which was part of the Ottoman Empire and declared its independence blocked due to the spread of the disease. – and invents its own history and even some of the language.
It has been talked about how surprising it was that Pamuk, who started to write “Plague Nights” in 2016, predicted the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and explained in detail the psychological details of people’s behavior during quarantine. Including the cascading political consequences of the pandemic and self-isolation. But the truth of the matter is that for Pamuk, there is no border between history and modernity, and therefore he always has a history lesson in front of his eyes. A shifting civilization and its climatic nightmare were long foreseen by the author in his remarkable early novel, The Black Book. Journalist Cemal’s essay novel titled “When the Bosphorus Has Receded” contains a supplementary novel in which he imagines a dried-up throat that has been stored underwater for thousands of years, presenting all its (anti)cultural layers to the world. years. In the open field, hundreds of years of shipwreck stand alongside seven-year-old shoes, a soda bottle cap, seaweed-covered coffee grinders, and black pianos with mussel armor. Crusader knights are found there, sitting “with weapons and armor on the skeletons of horses that still stubbornly stand on their feet.” Right next to it is the “Cadillac” of the famous Beyoğlu bandit, who left the police with his girlfriend and jumped into the dark night waters of the Bosphorus: “… I’ll see how the bandit and his girlfriend are. kiss sitting in the front seat, cling to bracelets with fingers studded with rings. Not only their jaws, but their skulls will unite in an endless kiss.
But here, between the layers of civilization revealed by the phenomenon we now call climate change, among the gaping Celts and Lycians, there is also the embryo of future pandemics: swordfish and flounder; new paradise, epidemics of entirely new diseases will spread; This is the most important thing we need to be ready for.”
The same cross-section of civilization – not only with the Greek, Ottoman and fictional Minger cultures, but also over a long period of time, is presented in “Plague Nights”. And in addition to the mechanics of the pandemic, there is another mechanic here – a demonstration of technology for the emergence of myths that were born before our eyes and formed the basis of the state history of a non-existent country. subjectivity and even language as a result of the mythological interpretation of tragic events and a series of coincidences. In fact, Benedict Anderson’s concept of nations as imaginary communities is well known. However, Pamuk is perhaps the second author, after Thomas Mann, to create such an imaginary country in his 1909 novel Royal Highness, which artistically illustrates how such communities were born.
As befits a writer who “made the whole world cry for the beauty of his land,” the Nobel laureate was persecuted on his own land. In 2005, a year before the Nobel Prize, Pamuk nearly went to jail for “despising Turkishness” – we don’t know how such bizarre archaic accusations came to be.
He always allowed himself to defend the Kurds and speak freely about the Armenian genocide. However, he also tried to explain to Europe exactly how Turkey, trapped between the West and the East, would be deciphered: “I come from a country knocking on the doors of Europe, and therefore I know how easily the anger caused by an emotion can flare up. despicable and how dangerous it has reached.
The appeal and rejection of Europe is obvious not only to the Turks, but also to the Russians. And these love-hate, closeness-rejection, admiration-humiliation relationships are very similar as Pamuk explained in his journalism and in his speeches at the award ceremony. In the article “Politics and Family Feasts”, the author turns into an observer-sociologist who listens to the conversations of ordinary people and tries to understand their disappointment with the image of Europe that has been desired and unattainable for decades, and therefore hated: while speaking with hope, they now speak only of the evil that comes from him, and of such phrases that can only be heard on the outskirts of the city. In The Fury of the Humiliated, Pamuk talks about the 9/11 terrorist attack being approved by the most ordinary, polite Turks: “Mr. Orhan, have you seen how America was bombed? – he said, and added angrily: – You did the right thing. “This old man,” the writer continued, “was not an Islamist at all; he worked as a gardener… Although he later regretted his words… This was far from the only person I’ve heard of. Yet, after cursing those who killed so many innocent lives A “but” followed, and then an implicit or explicit criticism of America as a political leader began.
Pamuk tries to understand all these just as he tries to understand the structure of archaic thought in the example of political Islamism in the novel Snow.
This is how an outstanding writer should be – both local and global, loving his country, trying to understand its flaws, presenting it to the world, and at the same time a citizen of this world. In each of her novels, she shows the beauty of Turkey in an essay book about Istanbul and even in an album of photos she took from her balcony overlooking the Bosphorus – 8,500 photos that capture the shifting immutability of the landscape.
Orhan Pamuk is a writer located in the middle of the world, between the West and the East. Born into a Europeanized family where her father adores French culture, translated Valerie, and often went to Paris to see Sartre and Beauvoir at the Café de Flore, Pamuk’s plot is always the duality and interweaving of West and East. He created many novels based on it. In an interview with the Nouvel Observater in 2001, Pamuk said that a reporter found Orhan Bey on the island of Heybeliada, the summer home of Istanbulites who wrote the novel Snow, and admitted that he always wrote a typical Western novel, “Traditions mixed with Islamic tales.”
Isn’t Istanbul like this – scattered across Europe and Asia, and its history and geography not doomed to this duality? Isn’t it the same in Turkey itself, which has been tempted by Europeanization and modernization and has always been disgusted with them?
Here is Minger Island, which was invented and described in detail in Pamuk’s last novel, Plague Nights. A novel in which the author deals with human frailties with tolerance and understanding and ends with a somewhat funny scene: The old Pakize Sultan, who was the Minger Queen for a few weeks in her youth and was then expelled from there, goes like this: she goes out on the balcony of her home in Geneva with her granddaughter Mingerka and reads something in the history textbook. Promoting the myth of the false state in which he occupies the first paragraph, he shouts with him: “Long live Minger! Long live the Mingers! Long live freedom!”
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.