In the effervescent cultural milieu of nineteenth-century Istanbul, Sami Paşazade Sezai stands apart as an author of singular importance. The son of the first Ottoman Minister of Education, Sezai was born in 1859, a few short years after Sultan Abdülmecit famously granted legal equality to the Empire’s non-Muslim minorities. By the time he was fourteen, the great Westernising playwright Namık Kemal had penned Homeland or Silistria, his satirical excoriation of the government of the day; before Sezai’s eighteenth birthday, the Sultan would promulgate the first Ottoman constitution.
As the trajectory and logic of the Ottoman state shifted, so too did the worldview of many of its illustrious families. Sezai was trained in Arabic and Persian, and in the literature of the Divan tradition, rhythmic Ottoman verse rich with metaphorical conceits and Islamic referents. Yet his schooling also gave him French and German, and with those languages, access to European authors. Like many of his contemporaries, Sezai experimented with, and refined, prose forms native to Western European literature. In 1888, he published Sergüzeşt, one of the very first Ottoman novels; Küçük Şeyler, a seminal collection of short stories, followed in 1892.