Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

A
and 
B
)

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CHAPTER 8 – YABAN, KADRO, ANKARA 
239 
Köylüler, sanki, başımızdan geçen âfet hafif bir sağanakmışcasına her 
şeyi unuttular. 
(
C
)


The most important change made by C is not in the novel itself but in the preface to 
the second edition
7
. This ended with the following words, set in a separate 
paragraph:
“Yaban”, çölde bir feryattır. 
 
 Yaban
is a cry in the wilderness.
For some reason this climax to the extremely emotional conclusion of the preface 
was removed in C.
The general impression of these changes to the text of the novel is that in contrast to 
the Greek case of Venezis, which will be discussed in the next chapter, the substance 
of the storyline remains unchanged between the first version in the manuscript of 
circa 1930 and the printing of 2006. Against this, it must be said that the care taken 
over the precise choice of words, as revealed by minor verbal reworking on almost 
every page of the manuscript, and the praise which Yakup Kadri has received as a 
prose poet, should make the reader uneasy about extensive and quite unauthorized, 
however minor, changes to his text in editions circulated after his death. It is to be 
hoped that a proper critical edition of 
Yaban 
will be undertaken. 
7
Karaosmanoğlu 1945, 12

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CHAPTER 8 – YABAN, KADRO, ANKARA 
240 
The plot of the novel is in a certain sense very simple. The narrative purports to be 
the content of a half-charred notebook found by the commission investigating war 
crimes after the battle of Sakarya. The notebook belonged to an educated native of 
Istanbul, Ahmet Celal, who had moved to a village near a tributary of the Sakarya 
before the 1921 campaigning season and contains his observations of life in the 
village, encounters with the Greek invaders and nationalist army as well as 
expressions of his personal feelings. The last sentences in the notebook reveal that 
the heavily injured Ahmet Celal has left it behind and moves off into an 
indeterminate yonder.
The novel gained an immediate celebrity. Most critics have taken it to be a realistic 
account of the interaction of an intellectual from Istanbul with the actuality of 
Anatolia and have differed only in what they thought the lesson was meant to be. 
One of the earliest reviews first appeared in a provincial newspaper and was then 
reproduced in 
Kadro
,
 
of which Yakup Kadri himself was the responsible editor. 
Because the reviewer responded so quickly using an approach that was to be 
followed by much more sophisticated critics, it is worth setting out his review at 
some length.
The review was purportedly written by a local reader whose identity was disguised 
by the abbreviation of his name which appeared as Ta. Hay. The review first 
appeared in 
Taşpınar,
a periodical published in Afyon
8
. It was republished in 
Kadro 
by Vedat Nedim who announces that his own article on the novel would appear in 
8
Kadro
, March 1933, vol. 2, no. 15, pp. 47-49: ‘Türk edebiyatının ilk orijinal eseri: ‘YABAN’’. 

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