Abstract
Cenghis Daĝci, with his nine best-sellers published by Varlik Yainevi, a leading Turkish publishing house, takes his place at the top of the list of successful Turkish novelists over the last twenty years. Two of his bulky works (1,019 pages) - Onlar da Insandi (‘They Too Were Human Beings’) and O Topraklar Bizimdi (‘Those Lands Belonged to Us’) - can be counted among the world's modern classics. Another two of his novels - Badem Dalina Asili Bebekler (‘Dolls Hanged on the Almond Tree’) and tlsiiyen Sokak (‘Cold Street’) - are said to be masterpieces of contemporary colloquial Turkish.
Daĝci is a Crimean Turk who writes in Turkish and publishes his books in Istanbul. He seems to have set himself the task of recording the tragedies of the Crimean Tartars under the Communist regime in the early years of the Soviet state (1920-36) from a critical realist's point of view. The genuine love of a writer towards his people enabled Daĝci to bring about his remarkable achievement. His own life is a sequence of contradictions and tragedies. When the war broke out he was a young university graduate. During the German invasion of the USSR he fought against the Nazis as a Red Army officer, and later against the Russians as a member of the Free Turkestan Army after he had been taken prisoner by the Germans. When the Russians advanced deep into Poland Daĝci, who had in the meantime been wounded, fled with the help of a Polish nurse to Italy by way of Czechoslovakia. By then the war was over and Cenghis Dagci decided to make his home in England.