Wasted Youth and Reunion in Death: Imperial Decline and Decadent Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Ottoman Culture

Abstract

The decadence question in the Ottoman Empire became a common ground for intellectual debates about language, translation, and authenticity at the turn of the century. It was part of the manifold translational processes among French, high Ottoman, and the rising Ottoman vernacular, as well as the unexpected circulations of literary movements and genres in the Ottoman literary field. The decadents and the conservative modernizers – who were all cosmopolitan author-translators – negotiated and transformed Eurocentric norms of literariness and, by using local forms, introduced new genres and styles into the emergent field of modern Ottoman-Turkish literature. This study discusses decadent aesthetics in relation to the burgeoning performance scene in Istanbul at the turn of the century. It analyses two domestic family dramas written by prominent authors of the time, Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem’s Vuslat (1874) and Muallim Naci’s Heder (1909), by recontextualizing them within the literary history of fin-de-siècle pessimism and decadent aesthetics. It revisits Ottoman literary historiography, which typically follows conservative views on decadence as degeneration and over-westernization, by discussing aesthetic decadence in Ottoman Turkish literature. It reorients Naci’s work within innovative currents and offers a uniquely nuanced reading of both Ekrem's and Naci’s plays. Finally, this study introduces decadent performance of the late Ottoman Empire to global decadence studies, underlying its inner social, political and aesthetic dynamics.