The Disintegration of the Life-world of Kurdish Subject as Narrated by Historical Novel: Lukacsian Reading of Zinwe Batam

Zinwe Betem is a historical novel that narrates the events of a specific historical period of Kurdish society. The purpose of this research is to present a  Lukacsian reading of this work to understand that historical period through the lens of how hegemonic forces intervened in the life-world of the Kurdish subjects. The theoretical foundations are based on Lukacs' themes of dialectics, totality, mediation, and realism. The applied method is Lukacsian reading, and Zinwe Betem was selected with a purposeful sampling criterion, which means that this novel contains rich images and narratives of an epoch in which the three aspects of "master-servant relations", "royalty-centered authoritarian modernism" and "left-wing idealism" play fundamental roles in shaping the life of ordinary people in a dialectic of complicity and opposition. The results show that this novel, relying on some thematic arrangements (such as fatalism, myth-making, romantic naturalism, and symbolism) taken from the life-world of ordinary people in that historical epoch, tries to provide a critical understanding of the role of dominant structures in the construction of the Kurdish subjects’ life-world. However, due to non-adherence to the realist rules governing the historical novel genre, it sometimes falls into the trap of reductionism, and by simplifying social antagonisms in the form of the dualism of good and evil, it becomes a captive of the same myths that it seeks to criticize. The novel helps to reproduce the myths that cover up the contradictory historical situation.