Corruption of intellectuals in the novel yaban by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu

Each individual is a collection of values that emerge from the culture of their time. Therefore, each society blesses the people it creates by "shedding divine light" onto them. This divine light, which is the source of people, constitutes the essence of all behaviors and endeavors of the person. The person, who declares their "omnipresence" by the extent to which they are connected to this essence, also discovers their "nowhereness" as they deny it. Their "nowhereness" appears as their alienation towards everywhere and everything -especially themselves- as a result of the cultural corruption they experienced. This corruption and this alienation that can also be observed in intellectuals, usually occur in the Turkish intellectual as a result of abandoning one's own cultural values while getting closer to the West. This topic, which emerged in Turkish literature by the Tanzimat reformation period, was also discussed by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu in his novel "Yaban" [Strange]. This study which investigated the "corruption of intellectuals in the novel Yaban" consisted of two main parts. The first part entitled "the Intellectual" sought answers to questions such as "who is an intellectual, when were they born and what are their duties" in order to set a basis for the study. Then the emergence of intellectuals in Turkey was discussed. The second and primary part that was set on this basis was discussed under the "corruption of intellectuals in the novel Yaban". In this part, after Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu was introduced as an intellectual, the conflict between the intellectual type in the novel Yaban and the village was examined. In order to better understand the villager who is claimed to be a party to this conflict, a brief discussion was made on the social life of the Anatolian village in the period of War of Independence. Therefore, the main reasons were outlined for the situation of the villager who was occasionally portrayed to be dirty, ignorant and irresponsible in the novel. The most noticeable one among these reasons was that the Turkish intellectual left the soil, villager and culture of Anatolia to their fate by getting away from these. The study focused on the internal conflict of the intellectual who notices this corruption at the time he meets a villager for the first time.