HALİDE EDİP ADIVAR’S IRONICAL CRITIQUE OF THE ERA THROUGH NASRETTIN HOCA or MASKE VE RUH

Halide Edip Adıvar tries to look at the world and the problems that threaten the world through the lenses of Nasrettin Hoca in the play Maske ve Ruh (1945), which she describes as a “fantasy play”. In this piece embodying ironical and outstanding features when compared to the mainstream understandings of literature and theatre of the time, Adıvar delicately makes use of various visual and auditory elements such as text, fiction, setting, costume and effect by mounting the 14th and 21st centuries together. Exhausted by the pre-World War II period and its conditions that threaten the world, and after breathing the air of Akşehir that is filled with peace and beauty, Adıvar wants to see the world through the eyes of Nasrettin Hoca and understand it the way he did. The world system to be projected upon the future, the values and their oppositional appearance all seem to her as “an intellectual misguidedness that lack direction”, which was what led her to write this ‘fantasy’ with Nasrettin Hoca narration. While drawing together various names such as Nasrettin Hoca, Shakespeare, İbn-I Haldun, Timurlenk, Sokrates and more, Halide Edip discusses particularly Nasrettin Hoca and Shakespeare together, as the representatives of the common values of humanity through their evaluation of world issues and of the course of the century. By such a comparative analysis of the West and the East, she indeed makes a critical inquiry of different time periods and of man’s current place in history.