Dossier | Sabahattin Ali

One of the people I came across has probably impressed me more than anyone else I’ve ever
met.” That’s the starting sentence of the novel, where the author first tells the story of his
friendship with “Raif Efendi” and then starts to read his diary, a black notebook, which Raif
had entrusted to him on his deathbed. The first page of the diary is dated June 20, 1933.
Raif’s father, a soap manufacturer in Turkey, sends him to Berlin for training.. Having no
interest in soap manufacturing, being artistically inclined, Raif strolls through the town and
in an exhibition hall he sees a self-portrait of a painter, namely Maria Puder, entitled “Madonna
in A Fur Coat.” He is transfixed by the portrait and introduces himself to the painter
when she visits the exhibition. They soon become lovers. Raif is called back to homeland due
to the sudden death of his father.
The Fur Coated
Madonna
Kürk Mantolu Madonna
However, the war starts stranding Raif in Turkey and disrupting the correspondence of the
two lovers. The distance apart and the lack of communication separates them completely. Ten
years pass. Raif is married to a woman whom he does not love and has a job as an insignificant
clerk..
He encounters an old acquaintance in Ankara, a German woman, who was a neighbor of the
boarding house where he had stayed during his Berlin days and a distant relative of Maria
Puder. Raif finds out from her that after his departure, Maria had given birth to a baby- their
daughter- and then had died a week later. He is shocked and left with feelings of a life
wasted, he is full of regrets.
The book has done eight editions in Turkey in the last twelve months. (40,000 copies)
‘The Fur Coated Madonna’ is a love story. Passionate but clear, bounding to life but destined
to death; full of hope yet ultimately a hopeless love story. There lies the secret to Sabahattin
Ali's success: his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward
from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing
the tensions that accompanies such rises and falls.
Attila Özkırımlı
Sabahattin Ali while writing the novel ‘The Fur Coated Madonna’ used Maria Puder as his
model as if she were his ideal woman. The woman in question is defined via her relationship
with men. Maria is unable to tolerate being dominated by men. She’s not used to the traditional
expectancy of women being reliant on men and obeying them. She’s a self-sufficient
and independent woman. As Sabahattin Ali considered that to create such a Turkish female
character would not have been realistic, he depicted Maria as a German.
Nüket Esen
German Russian French Turkish