1867 - 1915
Ottoman Turkish poet and editor.
Tevfik Fikret, the son of a bureaucrat in the foreign service, was born Mehmet Tevfik in Istanbul. He studied literature at the prestigious Galatasaray lycée, where his teachers included Muallim Naci and Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem. At the age of fifteen, he published his first poetry in the newspaper Tercüman-i Hakikat under the name Nazmi. He entered the civil service but later resigned, drawing public attention when he donated his salary to the refugee commission, saying that it was "a disgrace to accept so much money for so little work." In 1896, he became the editor of Servet-i Fünun, the main journal of the new literary movement. At this time, he became known as Tevfik Fikret. Under the influence of the French Parnassian school, his pre-1901 poetry emphasizes art for its own sake, preferring form and technique over content, and poetry over prose. Generally written in the aruz meter, Fikret's poetry draws from scenes of everyday life, as in the poems "Hasta çocuk" (The sick child), "Balikçilar" (The fishermen), and "Bir içim su" (A drink of water). In 1899, Fikret became professor of literature at Robert College. Following the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, he joined with Hüseyin Cahit Yalçin in establishing the newspaper Tanin (The echo).
Bibliography
Mitler, Louis. Ottoman Turkish Writers: A Bibliographical Dictionary of Significant Figures in Pre-Republican Turkish Literature. New York: P. Lang, 1988.
Shaw, Stanford, and Shaw, Ezel Kural. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 2: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808 - 1975. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
— DAVID WALDNER
