Throughout history, governments have feared words more than armed uprisings.
Because weapons target a moment; literature targets time.
A novel, a poem or an essay; not just the day it was written,
It also affects the memory of future generations.
That is why courtrooms are not only for politicians,
He also put writers and poets on trial.
The history of literature is also the history of writers who were put on trial, poets who were silenced and pens that paid the price.
One of the most striking examples of this fact is Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In 1849, he was sentenced to death in Tsarist Russia for merely participating in debates on ideas.
Dostoevsky was brought before a firing squad, and after facing death, his sentence was commuted to exile.
This mock execution is one of the deepest wounds that can be inflicted on a person's soul.
Dostoevsky's years in Siberia shaped his literature.
works such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov;
the conflict of law with justice, punishment with conscience, the state with the human spirit.
That is why Dostoevsky wrote not only about Russia but about humanity.
In world literature, writers who share this fate are not limited to Dostoevsky.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled and his books were banned for describing the Gulag system in the Soviet Union. George Orwell was exiled for exposing the language of totalitarian regimes.
still disturbs those in power with their works.
Pablo Neruda became a sought-after poet because his poetry gave people hope.
What these writers have in common is that they write the truth that the government does not want to see.
Regimes have collapsed, bans have been lifted, but artifacts remain.
In Turkey, the tension between literature and power is much more familiar.
Nazım Hikmet spent years in prison for his poetry,
He was stripped of his citizenship and died in exile.
Nazım's crime was not carrying a gun; it was writing about inequality, poverty and injustice.
Sabahattin Ali is one of the most painful literary stories of this country.
He was repeatedly arrested, suspended from his post and finally silenced by an unsolved murder.
Kuyucaklı Yusuf, The Devil Inside Us and The Madonna with the Fur Coat;
are literary records of the individual's loneliness in the face of the state and society.
This list would be incomplete without İlhan Selçuk.
He was repeatedly detained for his writings and thoughts,
İlhan Selçuk is a living witness to the criminalization of thought in Turkey.
His pen is not only journalism; it is also a form of resistance.
Names like Ahmed Arif, Yaşar Kemal, Aziz Nesin
faced similar pressures in different periods,
he paid the price for writing the social truth.
Today, writers are no longer put in front of firing squads.
But forms of repression have not disappeared.
Long detentions, vague crime definitions, digital censorship and defamation campaigns,
are the silencing tools of the modern age.
Literature continues to exist despite all these pressures.
Because literature cannot acclimatize, normalize or make you forget.
On the contrary, it disturbs, reminds and confronts.
History shows that courts decide, governments change, regimes fall.
But the texts remain.
There is no Tsarism to judge Dostoevsky;
The governments that imprisoned Nazım and the periods that silenced Sabahattin Ali are a thing of the past.
In contrast, their words are still alive.
Because literature is the conscience of a society.
And conscience speaks sooner or later.