Our Professor Yalçın: The kind-hearted, wild young man of the Turkish left

Yalçın Küçük has departed for eternity.

Our Professor Yalçın is no longer in this world. He left us his books and his stubbornness.

When I visited the unforgettable Mahmut Dikerdem in his study on Moda Cem Street in the summer of 1980, he asked me about him. “Yalçın Küçük is an intellectual of European stature,” he had said, adding that, like Doğan Avcıoğlu, Küçük was one of those exemplary intellectuals who possessed a vast archive of knowledge, and that we, the younger generation, should follow that path.

May they rest in light.

Our professor’s contribution is immense. It is possible to relive his contribution through the great literary, artistic, and political echoes that emerge in the most unexpected places. He is a socialist idea factory who considered being called a democrat an insult. Younger generations will carry his contributions in their minds for many years to come. And, of course, they will carry them by transcending them...

I can say that I am not exaggerating at all by recalling the lines I wrote in 1993. The person who has left us is a creator of ideas who gave far more to Turkish thought than it deserved.

In the introduction to my first book, “On the Verge of Intellectual Violence,” which I published in a limited run, I must underline today—after 33 years of reading, researching, examining, and writing—what I wrote during my own exile:

“The history of the Turkish intellectual, I underline this without hesitation, begins with Yalçın Küçük. (...) To those poor souls who are in love with the time before the history that began with Yalçın Küçük and his intellectual intervention, I say this: Anything before Yalçın Küçük is, at best, a prologue to the history of the Turkish intellectual. Those who wish may call it preparation. In other words, with this emphasis on intellectual violence that emerged from the very center of the Turkish cultural revolution, from the very heart of the intellectual decay that became widespread in the 1970s, I believe that the prehistory of the Turkish intellectual has come to an end. Küçük, whether one likes it or not, is the man who forced thought, creative thought, into the Turkish language. We are facing a 'thinker' who brought more seriousness to Turkish thought than it deserved.”

HE BROKE THE TECHNOCRATS, HE LOVED THE INTELLECTUAL

I believe it was 13 years ago that two of our professor’s good students, Merdan Yanardağ and B. Sadık Albayrak, prepared a special page in the daily newspaper Yurt, which Merdan was managing at the time. I wrote a small piece for it. I never saw the newspaper; it was impossible.

But I found that piece, which I think also describes the fire of love within me well, in its raw form in my archive, and I would like to repeat it for the younger generation and so that it remains in our digital history:

“Yalçın Küçük is one of the most beautiful, pure, and responsible children of the Turkish left, and perhaps he is now the first among them. If asked, he has surpassed all his teachers with his creativity and self-sacrifice. Jean-Paul Sartre remains truly bland when compared to him. Our professor has surpassed his own teachers in these lands—Namık Kemal, Nâzım Hikmet, Dr. Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, Mehmet Ali Aybar, Doğan Avcıoğlu, İlhan Selçuk, Aziz Nesin, Behice Boran, and even the unforgettable Mahir Çayan, yes, Mahir Çayan—he has surpassed them all. I will try to explain what I mean by this at another time and place. But for me, as I wrote a few years ago, Professor Yalçın is a kind-hearted, beautiful rascal, and this is a much greater challenge for future generations than is thought.

Let me repeat: Those who started school in the second half of the 1960s might remember. It was there, probably in a reader. It is a text I have never been able to forget. It tells of a dream. I think the scene was something like this: The furniture of a messy classroom, students, and so on... They are all sitting together, blaming one and the same child. They are all angry. They are complaining about a child. They are explaining, with examples, how much he has worn them out, what kind of mischief and even injustices he has committed, and how he has made everyone lose their patience. And then they judge him: Unjust and guilty!...

Then, again I think, his teacher comes and says, “Yes, he did all of these things, he treated you very, very badly at times, he broke and smashed things, he made you all despair. You are right. But he also did these things: He took the hands of a small child who had escaped from his mother’s hand and gotten lost, and delivered him to his mother. He carried the heavy bag of an old woman who was being crushed under its weight while returning from the market to her home, he helped a blind person cross a crowded street, he climbed up and brought down a helpless kitten crying on the top branches of a tree... He did these things too.”

I suppose this story was not exactly like this. It was probably different. But that is how it is etched in my mind. This naughty child is Yalçın Küçük. And that teacher is, perhaps pained, but always heroic, the Turkish left.

Our Professor Yalçın is at the head of the naughtiest but kindest-hearted children of the Turkish left. He is a part of us, and we are a part of him. Therefore, the political distances that have formed between us do not show that we do not have, and cannot have, a common ground. They only show that there are things we need to talk about.

He is the youngest of us all. He is our revolutionary young man.”

A very beautiful revolutionary intellectual has left us. It will be truly difficult to get used to his absence.

One thing is certain: As long as his books, his revolutionary excitement, the language he constructed, and his method—which we could call “orthodox creativity” or “creative orthodoxy”—remain on the agenda of the younger generations, this difficulty will trigger new creative quests.