Plot and poetics of Zülfü Livaneli’s political novel “Wait for Me” (2025)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the narrative and poetological features of the latest novel by the renowned Turkish fiction writer Ömer Zülfü Livaneli, titled “Wait for Me” (2025). The article argues that this novel is written in the tradition of the Turkish subjective-psychological political “March 12” novel (S. Soysal, E. Öz, Ç. Altan, et al.), which dominated the Turkish literary landscape in the 1970s and subsequently significantly influenced the country’s artistic process. The subjective-psychological “March 12” novel moved away from descriptions of broad social backgrounds and societal collisions, turning instead to the inner world of a socially active individual full of moral contradictions who internalizes social conflicts. It depicted the spiritual maturation of the protagonist in the face of severe trials. The aim of the study is to prove that the artistic strategies in Z. Livaneli’s novel are typologically close to the principles of the “March 12” subjective-psychological novel but develop these principles in a different direction. The article explores these strategies at the narrative-compositional level, focusing on the structure of the protagonist’s image (a shift away from the persona of socially active engagement), whose spiritual evolution is examined by the writer in a “lyrical” key (through inner monologues, free indirect speech, diary entries, and letters). The scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that Livaneli’s novel is being analytically examined for the first time in Russian Turkological literary studies. For the first time, this novelistic structure is analyzed from the perspective of modern Turkish politicized prose, providing insight into the genre diversity of the author’s own works and Turkish fiction in general. As a result, it is proven that the poetics and narrative structure of the work align with the typological features of the subjective-psychological political novel, while incorporating features unique to the writer himself.

Research materials

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Funding

The study was conducted under the state assignment of Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Author information

About this article

Publication history

• Received: December 7, 2025.
• Published: January 21, 2026.

Keywords

• турецкая политизированная проза «12 марта»
• субъективно-психологический роман
• сюжетика и поэтика романа
• Омер Зюльфю Ливанели
• роман «Жди меня»
• Turkish politicized “March 12” prose
• subjective-psychological novel
• narrative and poetics of the novel
• Ömer Zülfü Livaneli
• novel “Wait for Me”

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© 2026 The Author(s)
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