Disappearing in the Ecstasy of History: Armenians and the Monocultural Sublime in Modern Turkish Literature

This essay examines the work—fiction and nonfiction—of Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar (one of Turkey's greatest modern writers) in the context of Armenians and the violence inflicted on Armenians by the Ottoman/Turkish state in 1893, 1915, and 1923. It examines the striking absence of Armenians in Tanpınar's work, given his own Armenian friends and experience of teaching for years in Armenian high schools. It also considers the extent to which Tanpınar's own indebtedness to a nationalistic monocultural sublime can be factored into this selective amnesia and explores the possible sources of his nationalism—either the influence of the French writers Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès or equally (and more locally) Tanpınar's own Sufi sensibilities.