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Research Article

No. 10 (2026): Open Issue

Literature Against Life: Communication and Evil in the Writings of Ömer Seyfettin (1884–1920)

DOI
https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1934361
Submitted
16.02.2026
Published
22.04.2026

Abstract

Ömer Seyfettin is a pivotal figure in the emergence of Turkish national literature, responsible not only for a vast corpus of short fiction but, through his 1911 “New Language” manifesto, in part the originator of modern literary Turkish. At the same time, the darker themes of his writing—above all, the frequent depiction of explicit sadistic violence—have been ambiguously situated vis-à-vis his aesthetic, literary, and political project. Responding to Veysel Öztürk’s recent claim that sadistic evil is both instrumentalized and, at time, undermines Ömer Seyfettin’s nationalist politics, this article instead maintains we must disaggregate sadism from evil in his thought. This article proposes that Ömer Seyfettin viewed sadism as a vital, natural force associated with the preservation of reproductive futurity, a notion he developed through his engagements with nineteenth-century medical literature; against it, he juxtaposed the sterility and narcissism of an Ottoman literary culture that had developed under Persianate influence. By reading his fiction alongside a notion of “communication” derived from the thought of Georges Bataille, it proposes that for Ömer Seyfettin sadomasochism offered a possible path out of the deadlock of Persianate narcissism. It concludes by arguing for the central role of desire and enjoyment in his oeuvre.

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