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Research Article

No. 10 (2026): Open Issue

Tragic Vision and Secular Reconciliation with the Divine in Safiye Erol’s Ülker Fırtınası (Storm of the Pleiades)

DOI
https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1934959
Submitted
20.12.2025
Published
22.04.2026

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the experience of modernity and the tragic vision in Safiye Erol’s novel Ülker Fırtınası (Storm of the Pleiades), published in 1944, with particular attention to the protagonist Nuran’s existential crisis. It argues that the novel articulates a distinctly 1930s Istanbul-based experience of modernity through a tragic vision. By tragic vision, the article conceptualizes the tragic as an analytical category within the context of the Turkish novel, drawing on both Western and non-Western theoretical frameworks. It explores how Nuran’s narrative is structured as an inevitable tragic condition of life through the Christian myth of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. It further analyzes how Nuran’s existential crisis culminates in a form of spiritual integration with Republican cultural modernization, presenting the novel’s tragic vision as both a worldview and an inescapable outcome of Turkish modernity.

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