Asım Bezirci — The Undying Fire of Criticism and Class Struggle

Comrades, young siblings, our hope who will build the future with labor and consciousness...

Today we live in a period when the sky is clouded by the ideological mists of the ruling classes and the culture market overflows with postmodern uncertainties. That is precisely why it is time to tell the young comrades beside us about a veteran worker who wove the aesthetic and theoretical front of this struggle. The name I speak of is Asım Bezirci, known in the literary world as "the ant of criticism" or "the worker of criticism."

So why should we speak of Bezirci today? Why must we not let him be forgotten, but keep him ever fresh in our memory?

Because remembering Asım Bezirci is not merely commemorating a tragic history left in the past. It is grasping a method that tore literature, art, and philosophy from the abstract luxury of ivory towers and united them with a "class compass." His life is the story of taking the voice of the people exploited in factories, mines, and fields and hurling it in the face of the bourgeoisie through the filter of science and dialectics. Come, with a revolutionary eye, let us together examine the anatomy of this class fighter's arduous and patient life.

A Life Shaped in the Bosom of the Class: Chronological Flow

Asım Bezirci's intellectual clarity and resolve to stand in the ranks of the proletariat are not a random intellectual ambition. What made him was the concrete material conditions and infrastructural reality of Turkey in that period.

Poverty, Earthquake, and First Seeds (1927–1939)

• His population register lists his actual birth date as 1928, corrected to 1927. He opened his eyes to the world in Erzincan's Mollagüzel neighborhood, as a child of a poor working family.
• His father Hamdi Bey was a veteran warrior who fought in both the World War and the War of Independence, was taken prisoner and wounded; upon returning he worked as a carpenter and railway worker.
• The family had eleven children besides Asım; yet due to the period's harsh economic deprivation and poverty, not a single child besides Asım survived.
• When their home was leveled in the great Erzincan earthquake of 1939, Bezirci experienced poverty and disaster in their barest form. This traumatic childhood planted the first infrastructural seeds of the class consciousness that would later take shape on the side of labor.

Free Boarding School and the Second World War (1940s)

• After the earthquake he continued his education as a free boarder at Erzurum High School.
• These years were difficult times when the Second World War condemned the whole world and our country to ration bread, scarcity, and the threat of fascism.
• In the social turmoil the war brought, he took refuge in literature; influenced by romantics in his early youth, but in his final high school year he encountered realist writers such as Maxim Gorky, Stendhal, and Balzac, and above all the poetry of Nazım Hikmet and Orhan Veli. In this period he grasped that art must be learned not from books but from the contradictions within life.

University, Marxism, and the First Rupture (1946–1950)

• In 1946 he entered Istanbul University Faculty of Letters, Department of Turkish Language and Literature. In his second year at university he encountered social thought and historical materialism.
• When he graduated in 1950, he joined the Turkey Socialist Party and began working at the party's publication Gerçek.
• He wrote his political cartoons under the signature "A. Toplumcu" and his other writings as "Bezircioğlu." Yet in the anti-communist repression of the Cold War era, he was arrested on 18 December 1950 in connection with pacifist actions criticizing the sending of troops to the Korean War.

The Period of Repression and the Accounting Desk (1950s)

• In his first imprisonment he served a year and a half; then in 1952 and 1956 he was thrown into prisons for six months each.
• This political persecution upended his life; despite graduating from the faculty successfully, he was allowed neither to remain at the university nor to practice the teaching profession he loved—all doors were closed in his face.
• To sustain his life he turned to an area seemingly unrelated to literature: accounting. He worked as an accounting clerk at Unilever and Baker companies for a total of 28 years.
• In this period, to protect himself from repression, he continued writing secretly under pseudonyms such as "Fikret Arıel" and "Halis Acarı" in journals like Forum, Yeni Ufuklar, and Pazar Postası. While doing accounts at the desk by day, at night at home he patiently continued his literary labor.

Material Conditions: Worker Family & Earthquake → Erzurum High School: Free Boarding & World War Scarcity → Istanbul University: TSP & Gerçek Newspaper / First Imprisonment (1950) → Political Bans → 28 Years as Accounting Clerk & Pseudonyms → Post-1960: Establishment of Objective-Scientific Criticism Under His Own Name

The Birth of Objective Scientific Criticism (1960s–1980s)

• The relatively liberal atmosphere brought by the 27 May 1960 coup finally opened the way for him to write under his own name. Against Nurullah Ataç's absolutist and impressionist understanding of criticism, with the discipline accounting had given him (reliance on documents, fear of error, moderation) he defended the method of objective scientific criticism.
• In 1961 he published Çok Kapılı Oda at his own expense.
• He compiled and prepared for press the collected works of giants such as Nazım Hikmet, Tevfik Fikret, Sabahattin Ali, and Orhan Veli with the patience of digging a well with a needle.
• During the historic MESS Strike of 1977, he sharply criticized revolutionary poets and writers who remained silent before the resistance of forty thousand workers who clenched their teeth to sustain it. In the same period, saying "For years I wrote more for intellectuals than for the masses!" he delivered the boldest self-criticism befitting a social critic.

12 September and After

• Under the heavy repressive conditions brought by the 12 September 1980 military coup, he was taken from his home in Cide with his eyes bound, and kept under surveillance at Ballıdağ Sanatorium with guards at his side. Without giving up production until the end of his life, he signed more than 70 original works and 17 translations.

2 July 1993: A March Left Unfinished at Madımak

When calendars showed 2 July 1993, this country faced that merciless reactionary hatred that would seep into its capillaries. Intellectuals, artists, and cultural figures going to Sivas for events commemorating our great rebel folk bard Pir Sultan Abdal were cornered by a frenzied reactionary mob.

Asım Bezirci, who emerged from detentions, prisons, and bans with head held high, was one of the 33 people brutally burned to death before the world's eyes at the Madımak Hotel where they took refuge on that black day. This fire stoked by political powers and reaction hand in hand left an undying pain in Turkey's cultural world. Though they tore this unique worker of criticism from us bodily, they could not burn his dialectical legacy.

Why Does Asım Bezirci Matter? What He Contributed to Literary Life and Universal Culture

The value Asım Bezirci added to literary life goes far beyond ordinary book reviewing. He is a magnificent architect who grounded the institution of criticism in Turkish literature on a rational, scientific, and class basis. We can analyze his literary legacy as broadly as possible under four fundamental headings:

The Construction of Objective Scientific Criticism and "Accounting" Discipline

Bezirci always opposed surrendering literary criticism to the personal pleasures and momentary emotional impressions of bourgeois intellectuals. He placed dialectical materialist objectivity against Nurullah Ataç's impressionist style.

The greatest force behind this method was the accounting clerkship by which he earned his living. Bezirci explained how he integrated accounting discipline into his literary work in these words:

"Accounting taught me to act with moderation, to fear error, to rely on documents, to use my mind, not to fall into sentimentality, and to be realistic, orderly, balanced, and consistent. It helped strengthen the objective, scientific understanding of criticism I defended and tried to practice."

Supporting his claims with concrete evidence and statistical data; listing meticulously prepared bibliographies, anthologies, theses, and interviews at the end of his books—these are signs of his loyalty to the scientific method.

A Magnificent Library of Original Works and Monographs

One of the most productive writers of his period, Asım Bezirci produced more than 70 original works in his lifetime, laying virtually single-handedly the infrastructure of revolutionary culture. His principal reference books in the genres of review, essay, and research include:

• Çok Kapılı Oda (1961) and Günlerin Götürdüğü Getirdiği (1962): The first theoretical positions of objective criticism.
• Bilimden Yana (1963) and Sosyalizme Doğru (1976): Fundamental works merging Marxist aesthetics with the scientific method.
• Okudukça (1967), On Şair On Şiir (1971), İkinci Yeni Olayı (1974): Shaking analyses placing the period's literary currents and poetic orientations in the context of class contradictions.
• 1950 Sonrasında Hikâyecilerimiz (1980), Temele Gül Dikenler (1993), Güle Dil Verenler (1993): Mature late-period writings on short story, novel, and theater.

He also wrote magnificent monographs placing writers in a historical materialist framework: Edip Cansever (1961), Abdülhak Hâmit (1966), Orhan Veli (1967), Ahmet Haşim (1967), Nurullah Ataç (1968), Metin Eloğlu (1971), Sabahattin Ali (1974), Orhan Kemal (1977), Rıfat Ilgaz (1988), and Nezihe Meriç (2008).

Collected Works Compilation and "Text Labor"

Bezirci was not only a theorist but also a literary historian and archivist who dug wells with a needle. In periods when progressive poets' works were censored and pushed toward oblivion in Turkey, he carried out enormous text labor:

• Nazım Hikmet Collected Works: Gathering all of Nazım Hikmet's poems in 8 volumes under Cem Publishing House (1975–1980), he produced a magnificent, original guidebook with historical, biographical, and literary notes beneath each poem.
• Tevfik Fikret Collected Works: With the massive 3-volume, 1270-page Complete Poems of Tevfik Fikret (1984) from Can Publications, he transferred the difficult old language faithfully to today's language with magnificent patience down to every letter and restored the poet to social memory.
• He presented permanent documents to literary history by compiling the complete poems and writings of Ahmet Haşim, Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı, Sabahattin Ali, and Orhan Veli in complete editions.

Carrying Universal Culture and Translation Activity

Asım Bezirci signed 17 major translation works to carry universal progressive thought into the consciousness of Turkey's working class and intellectuals. While bringing world literature and aesthetic theories to our country he applied an ideological filter, yet did not compromise aesthetic competence. His principal translations include:

• Existentialism from Jean-Paul Sartre (1960) and The New Novel from Alain Robbe-Grillet (1981): Though not identical with his own aesthetic view, he brought these difficult texts into Turkish as a pedagogical act to illuminate literary ruptures in the West.
• Art and Society Through Socialist Eyes from Jean Fréville and Georgi Plekhanov (1963): He carried the foundational stones of Marxist art criticism to our country.
• The People's Bread from Bertolt Brecht translated with A. Kadir (1972) and Socialism and Literature from Anatoli Lunacharsky: Universal examples of proletarian culture in poetry and theory.
• He also assimilated the accumulation of universal culture with a revolutionary attitude by translating universal names such as Erskine Caldwell (God's Little Acre), Simone de Beauvoir (Pyrrhus and Cineas), Gustave Flaubert (Three Tales), Marcel Cachin (Science and Religion in the Light of Socialism), and Jean Jaurès (Selected Writings).

As our comrade Aydın Çubukçu and veteran cultural figures have always emphasized, Asım Bezirci is a deep-rooted pillar who gathered together all national and universal values on the side of labor, peace, and independence that did not pass through the reactionary filter of the ruling classes.

Final Word to Young Comrades: Walking Bezirci's Path

The Absolute Power of Labor and Respect for Those Who Create Value

The sole dynamic force that creates the world from scratch, shapes history, and ensures social progress is labor. The deepest roots of culture, art, and philosophy live in the common sum of material and spiritual values the working class and laboring masses have created over ages. Asım Bezirci, as the child of a poor Erzincan railway worker, grew up feeling and seeing this plain truth not as a theoretical paper matter but at the very heart of life. At the center of his philosophical, literary, and human compass always lay absolute respect for these people who create value. According to the unshakable belief that summarizes Bezirci's entire aesthetic understanding, "the most justified person in society is the person who produces." That is why standing without hesitation on the side of those who create value—the working class that turns the world with calloused hands—is the noblest honor a revolutionary intellectual can carry.

A Revolutionary Who Took Joy in Struggling in the Ranks of the Class

The great value of commemorating and understanding Asım Bezirci lies in his not seeing class struggle as a long-faced obligation, a task undertaken grudgingly, or a melancholy intellectual corvée. He was a unique man of the cause who drew pure joy, enthusiasm, and revolutionary cheer from struggling in the ranks of his class, from producing, and from enlightening the masses. In his mental world, working and producing a work was the sole real "way of life" of dominating life and making sense of the world against the order of exploitation. Sharing the precious knowledge he accumulated like digging a well with a needle with his people was, for Bezirci, far beyond prizes and applause—a genuine "joy of living."

Writing for laboring masses in his class's union publications and in the newspaper Politika, meeting workers face to face, and addressing the masses directly gave this veteran pen indescribable "enthusiasm and happiness." He never rewarded the troubled, pessimistic, inward-turned melancholy of bourgeois modernism or petty-bourgeois intellectuals. On the contrary, despite political persecution, prisons, sanatorium rooms, and deprivation spanning his life, with that "baby smile" and "affectionate young man's gaze" that friends testify never left his face, he carried his fight with magnificent patience and cheer. He knew fighting for his class as the most enthusiastic way of giving life its most progressive meaning.

The Importance of the Path Opened and a Call to Young Generations

Today for young comrades to know and take Asım Bezirci as guide is to turn respect for labor from a theoretical mold into a living revolutionary practice that produces, resists, and rejoices. The objective-scientific and social-realist path Bezirci opened commands working without weariness, pursuing objective reality meticulously, and finding direction with a "class compass" in every social upheaval.

Young comrades, while fighting against the wheels of exploitation and the darkness of fascism, must make Bezirci's unbowed head and the morality with which he faced the struggle with joy their guide. By taking the side of the proletariat without hesitation on literary, intellectual, and practical fronts and reinforcing the path of scientific realism he opened, they will hold the sole key to building tomorrow's enlightened world. For history is made by human beings, the constructive, creative force that carries the future in its bosom and will change this rotten order from its roots—in that just struggle walked with joy!

Hope lies in humanity; the future in the glorious struggle of the working class!