Besir Fuad

Besir Fuad, who lived from around 1852 until his death on February 5, 1887, was an Ottoman intellectual and military officer remembered as the first Turkish positivist and naturalist, championing realism, naturalism and positivism against the Romanticism favored by his contemporaries. He published more than two hundred articles on science, philosophy and military affairs along with sixteen books, introducing Ottoman readers to Western thinkers including Auguste Comte, Voltaire, Emile Zola and Charles Dickens, and his 1885 monograph on Victor Hugo is regarded as the first critical literary monograph written in Turkish. A graduate of the Ottoman Military Academy in 1873 who served as aide-de-camp to Sultan Abdulaziz and fought in the Serbian-Ottoman and Russo-Turkish wars before leaving the army in 1884 to write full time, he died by his own hand on February 5, 1887, an act he documented as a scientific experiment, a death that provoked wide public discussion of suicide in Ottoman society.