Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic by Sibel Bozdoğan (review)

Book Reviews 253 admonition of politics in Bulgaria, where cynicism, electoral fraud, police brutality, and partisanship rule the day. While the reader laughs wholeheartedly at the protagonist’s comic adventures in the first part, the stories in the second elicit bitter chuckles. The feuilleton series were written in the aftermath of the fall of the government of Stefan Stambolov (1887–94) that was characterized by various limitations on civil and political liberties. The stories demonstrate the author’s resentment towards the Stambolov regime but also reflect the widespread disappointment that its fall did not bring the long-awaited freedom and rule of law. People’s hopes for fair elections are dashed as Bai Ganyo, who quickly switches sides to support the new government, employs the same methods he has previously used to secure the election of his candidate. Confident in his abilities, he boasts that he can help even a donkey get elected, “[just] give me the police chief and his men, and give me one or two thousand levs” (p. 109). This atmosphere is also well reflected in parliamentary proceedings and archival documents. But reading Aleko’s work makes these events livelier, adding words and dialogues that otherwise remain unspoken in the conventional sources. The translation is excellent. The translators have managed to convey with considerable skill and elegance the style and language of the book along with the vivid idiomatic expressions of Bai Ganyo’s speech. The text contains a glossary, as well as helpful footnotes to clarify specific events and the author’s ironic allusions. However, readers with no prior knowledge of Bulgarian history might have benefited from a more detailed introduction discussing the historical and political context in which the work was written. Likewise the reader might have appreciated a more detailed biography of Aleko Konstantinov along with a discussion of his ideas in order to help understanding the position of his criticism. The translation allows a wider audience to be acquainted with one of the masterpieces of Bulgarian literature. The book can be used in university courses as a medium or starting point for exploring Balkan history, literature, culture, and society. The entertaining nature of Bai Ganyo’s adventures in Europe will undoubtedly make the book enjoyable for undergraduate students and the broader public. Hopefully it will also lead to comparative studies discussing the significance of the work in the context of other contemporary works of Balkan and European literature. Milena B. Methodieva University of Toronto Bozdoğan, Sibel. Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. ix + 367 pp., 240 illus. Paperback, $30.00: ISBN 978-0-29598-152-9. In Modernism and Nation Building, Sibel Bozdoğan describes Turkish architectural culture in the 1930s as both a case study demonstrating the modernist JOTSA 1:1-2 (2014) 254 movement’s international influence and an example of this movement destabilized, re-situated, and re-interpreted for national or ideological purposes. The book addresses both grand theories that evaluate architectural work based on its conformity to a given norm (i.e., “modernism”), as well as specific historical evidence that complicates these theories. Bozdoğan’s goal is to tell the story of a particularly Turkish engagement with modernist architecture. As she argues in the introduction to the book, high modernism is a style very much “pertinent” to Kemalist political ideology (p. 5). At the same time, however, the “complexities and contradictions” inherent in adapting grand theories to local ideas “make it problematic to explain the Turkish case exclusively from the general high modernist blueprint” (p. 6). There are two themes that reappear in Bozdoğan’s study. The first, and most prominent, is that there was an ongoing tension between modernism’s theoretical claims to transcendence—both national and ideological transcendence—and the Turkish architectural community’s denial of this transcendence. Modernism, Bozdoğan argues, was taken up by “many new regimes and diverse political systems” in the early twentieth century—making it a movement self-consciously (if not actually) devoid of an ideology (p. 5). The movement was likewise explicitly described as “international”—at least in Europe and the United States—and thus beyond or...