Summary
Narine A. Hovhannisyan (Stepanakert)
Hakob Oshakan’s novel, besides being culturology, chronology, psychoanalysis and ideology, is, in our deep conviction, the novel of the Armenian Question. The historical process that started the tragedies of the Armenian people to counter the Armenian Question was largely conditioned by the presence of the Turks. Consequently, Turkishness and the Turk, as a collective whole of national characteristics, became the main concentration of thoughts of Oshakan’s novel.
Exceptional depths are the psycho-observations and psycho-instinctive discoveries of the Turk’s character created by Oshakan, the penetration of racial inner, dark folds, the uncoverings and decipherments of the instincts of the sexual psychological impulses, the subconscious flow, the discoveries of internally stored realities.
In Oshakan’s novel, the most typical manifestations of sexual psychology of the Turk’s character are vulgarity, rape, ethnic profanation, homosexuality, forced feminization, at that they are not private cases of racial psychology, but a public phenomenon and morality. Turkish sexual harassment and racial sadism were fully exposed during the Armenian massacres. According to Oshakan, the Armenian massacres, especially the 1915 Genocide, were the historical platform for Turkish self-manifestation.
One of the striking features of Turkish ethnic psychology described in Oshakan’s novel is religious fanaticism with a focus on anti-Armenian sentiment. Hatred on an unbelievable level is a sacred feeling in Turkish national psychology, also a public phenomenon, a state-encouraged policy. The false ideology of the Turkish state-nation has for centuries instilled in Turkey the mentality that Armenians live on their lands, sowing hatred towards Armenians to the point of national fanaticism.
According to Oshakan, the psychology of extermination and expansionism reaches the level of doctrine in Turkey. The ideology of the Great Turan is the cornerstone of the Turkish national-political strategy and Oshakan shows that Pan-Turkism and Turanism, as complementary concepts, are the national basis for the education of Turkish generations. The dream of the Great Turan, complemented by the racial biological instincts of the Turks, became the precondition for the Armenian Genocide and the occupation of the Armenian Highland.
Oshakan’s revelations of Turkish ethnic psychology are falsification, denial, cunning and unsurpassed diplomacy. On the symmetry of the subconscious and conscious levels of Turkishness Oshakan directs sharp emphases especially against the conscious։ crime and villainy are born from the inner drive of the Turkish biological instincts, from the unconscious level of meditations, from the sound of blood, while denial and treachery are manifestations of the conscious level.
Oshakan’s revelations of the Turkish ethnic image lead to the philosophical notion of an anti-human. The philosophy of the anti-man rises on the internal psychological basis of the history of sadistically committing genocides towards unarmed nations and cold-heartedly denying them. Conscience and self-esteem as psychological elements are completely absent in the Turkish national consciousness and psychological structure.
Thus, in Oshakan’s novel, blood and gender are the poles of the ethnic Turkish type of psychoanalysis, the tensions of internal density. Turkey, as a collective psychology, is at the level of the blood of the Turkish heroes of Oshakan, that is, of innate essence. In other words, Turkishness is a biological psychology, an instinctive mental system.