Perhaps the most important feature that makes Ankara interesting is the period in which it was written. During this period, a new regime was established together with the Republics in Turkey and accordingly, new conditions full of uncertainties emerged. In addition, a Kadroist movement, including Yakup Kadri, started to operate in order to spread the principles of the new era to the public. It is clear that the effects of Kadroist views on Ankara are quite intense. On the other hand, considering that this novel was written in a period when Yakup Kadri’s realistic, socialist, objective and hard style, which we know from his previous works, had matured, it can be said that it is quite suitable for different readings. In this respect, it has been seen that the social realist theory of Georg Lukacs, a contemporary of Yakup Kadri, sheds a strong light on the analysis of this novel. While Lukacs, on the one hand, highlights principles such as objectivity, typicality, social view, historical perspective and concrete data under the name of “critical realism”; on the other hand, he criticized the transformation of social realism into ideological attitude for the sake of distant and abstract dreams, describing it as “revolutionary romanticism”. Although Yakup Kadri has presented an ideal fictional structure according to the Lukacsian theory in the first chapters of the novel, he approaches the attitude criticized by Lukacs in the last chapter. In the article, Yakup Kadri’s drift between these two extremes according to the Lukacsian theory is explained with a comparative method and with examples.

Georg Lukacs, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Ankara novel, critical realism.