Nazim Hikmet

Nazim Hikmet Ran was born into a cultivated Ottoman family in Salonika, then an Ottoman city and now Thessaloniki in Greece. His official birth date was registered as 15 January 1902, though family accounts place his actual birth some weeks earlier, in late 1901 ^[1]. His father, Hikmet Bey, served in the Ottoman foreign ministry, and his grandfather Nazim Pasha was a provincial governor with a taste for Sufi poetry. His mother, Celile Hanim, painted and spoke French, and the household exposed the boy early to both European culture and Ottoman literary tradition ^[2].

The family moved in the circles of the late Ottoman elite in Istanbul, where Nazim grew up. He wrote his first poems as a schoolboy, and a recitation of one of them reportedly impressed the naval minister enough to secure his admission to the Ottoman naval academy on Heybeliada island in 1917 ^[2]. Illness cut his naval training short: after a severe bout of pleurisy he was discharged from the service on medical grounds around 1920, ending any prospect of a military career ^[1].

The Allied occupation of Istanbul after the First World War pushed the young poet toward the nationalist resistance. In 1921 he crossed into Anatolia to join the movement led by Mustafa Kemal, and he briefly taught school in Bolu. What he saw of Anatolian poverty during those months unsettled him, and it shaped the direction his politics and his poetry would take ^[2].

In 1922 Nazim Hikmet traveled to Moscow, drawn by news of the Russian Revolution and by the promise of an education. He enrolled at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, where he studied economics and sociology and absorbed the artistic ferment of the early Soviet years ^[1]. The constructivist theatre, the agitprop poster, and above all the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky showed him what verse freed from fixed meters could do. He committed himself to Marxism during this period, a conviction he never abandoned ^[3].

He returned to Turkey in 1924, after the founding of the republic, and began writing for leftist journals. His politics soon brought trouble: facing arrest for his work on a communist magazine, he slipped back to the Soviet Union in 1926 and did not return home until a general amnesty in 1928 ^[2]. Because the Turkish Communist Party had been outlawed, the authorities watched him closely from the moment he re-entered the country.

His first major collection, 835 Lines, appeared in Istanbul in 1929 and announced a revolution in Turkish poetry ^[1]. Nazim discarded the syllabic and quantitative meters that had governed Turkish verse for centuries and wrote instead in irregular, cascading free lines, using the plain vocabulary of the street rather than the ornate Ottoman literary idiom. The book made him famous and controversial at once. Through the early 1930s he supported himself as a journalist, screenwriter and playwright while publishing further collections, and he faced repeated prosecutions for the political content of his work ^[3].

Nazim Hikmet spent roughly seventeen years of his life in Turkish prisons, the result of a series of convictions between 1928 and 1938 ^[2]. The decisive blow came in 1938, when military courts convicted him of inciting cadets and sailors to revolt, largely on the evidence that young officers had been reading his 1936 poem The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin, an account of a fifteenth-century egalitarian uprising in Anatolia. Two trials that year produced a combined sentence of more than twenty-eight years ^[1].

He served most of that sentence in the prison at Bursa. Confinement did not silence him. In his cell he translated, painted, taught fellow inmates to read, and wove textiles to earn money, and he wrote the poems that many critics consider his greatest work ^[3]. Chief among them was Human Landscapes from My Country, a verse epic of some seventeen thousand lines that follows hundreds of ordinary Turks, peasants, prisoners, soldiers and profiteers, through the first half of the twentieth century. Begun around 1941, it circulated in manuscript for decades because it could not be published in Turkey during his lifetime ^[4].

By the late 1940s his case had become an international cause. A campaign for his release drew support from writers and artists abroad, with figures such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson and Jean-Paul Sartre associated with the effort, and in 1949 an international committee formed in Paris to press for his freedom ^[3]. In 1950, seriously ill after a hunger strike he had undertaken in protest, Nazim was released under a general amnesty passed by the new Turkish government. That same year the World Peace Council named him a recipient of the International Peace Prize ^[1].

Freedom in Turkey proved short. Though he was nearly fifty and in poor health after a heart attack in prison, the authorities moved to conscript him for military service, a step he understood as a threat to his life ^[2]. In June 1951 he fled across the Black Sea in a small boat, was picked up by a Romanian vessel, and made his way to Moscow. Weeks later the Turkish government stripped him of his citizenship. He later took the citizenship of Poland, where his great-grandfather Konstanty Borzecki, an emigre of 1848 who became the Ottoman general Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha, had been born ^[1].

From Moscow, Nazim spent his final twelve years as one of the most visible literary figures of the international peace movement. He served on the World Peace Council, traveled widely through Europe, Asia, Africa and Cuba, and continued to write poems, plays and a novel ^[3]. Exile sharpened the elegiac strain in his verse. Poems from these years return again and again to Istanbul, to the Anatolian landscape, and to the ache of separation from his wife and the son he was never able to see grow up.

His late work also registered disquiet with what he found in the Soviet Union. After 1956 some of his poems and his satirical play Ivan Ivanovich, Did He Exist? questioned bureaucratic rigidity and the cult of personality, even as he remained loyal to the socialist ideal itself ^[4].

Nazim Hikmet's emotional life was as unsettled as his political one. He married several times. His long marriage to Piraye, whom he wed in 1935, sustained him through the prison years, and the poems he addressed to her from his cell, published in translation as Poems to Piraye, are among the most read love poems in modern Turkish ^[4]. During his imprisonment he fell in love with his cousin Munevver Andac, a translator, and after his release he left Piraye for her. Munevver bore his son Mehmet in 1951, shortly before Nazim's flight abroad; the Turkish authorities refused for years to let mother and child leave the country ^[3].

In Moscow he eventually married Vera Tulyakova, a young Russian editor and screenwriter, who remained with him until his death and later published a memoir of their life together ^[3]. The distance from Mehmet, the only child he acknowledged, weighed on him, and several of his best-known late poems are addressed to the boy he knew mostly through photographs.

Those who met him described a tall, blue-eyed, red-haired man of unusual charm and energy, a gifted talker who wrote at speed and reworked obsessively. Despite chronic heart disease, worsened by prison and the 1950 hunger strike, he kept a demanding schedule of travel and composition to the end ^[2].

Nazim Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow on 3 June 1963, collapsing at the door of his apartment as he reached for the morning newspaper, according to accounts from his household ^[1]. He was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, far from the Anatolian village grave beneath a plane tree that he had imagined for himself in a late poem. His funeral drew a large gathering of writers and diplomats from across the socialist world ^[3].

In Turkey his books, banned or restricted for decades, circulated underground until the late 1960s, when publication resumed and his collected works began to appear. His reputation at home has since grown into something close to national possession: his poems are set to music, quoted by politicians of rival camps, and taught in schools. In 2002 UNESCO marked the centenary of his birth, and in January 2009 the Turkish government formally restored his citizenship, forty-six years after his death ^[5].

Abroad, Nazim Hikmet is by a wide margin the most translated of all Turkish poets, with his work available in dozens of languages ^[4]. English readers know him chiefly through the versions of Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, whose translation of Human Landscapes from My Country appeared in full in 2002 ^[4]. Among Nazim Hikmet achievements, two matter most to literary historians: he brought free verse and the spoken language into the center of Turkish poetry, and he demonstrated that political conviction and lyric tenderness could inhabit the same line. Poets from the Middle East to Latin America have cited him as an influence, and lines of his about living single and free like a tree, and in brotherhood like a forest, remain among the most quoted in the Turkish language ^[2].