 This brief account does not attempt to summarise this material.Atay was of a generation deeply committed to the westernising, scientific, secular culture encouraged by the revolution of the 1920s; he had no nostalgia for the corruption of the late Ottoman Empire, though he knew its literature, and was in particular well versed in Divan poetry.Yet the Western culture he saw around him was largely a form of colonialism, tending to crush what he saw was best about Turkish life.