Nâzım Hikmet

Early life

Nâzım was born on 15 January 1902, in Selânik (Salonica), where his father was serving as an Ottoman government official. He attended the Taşmektep Primary School in the Göztepe district of Istanbul and later enrolled in the junior high school section of the prestigious Galatasaray High School in the Beyoğlu district, where he began to learn French. However, in 1913, he was transferred to the Numune Mektebi, in the Nişantaşı district. In 1918, he graduated from the Ottoman Naval School on Heybeliada, one of the Princes' Islands, in the Sea of Marmara. His school days coincided with a period of political upheaval, during which the Ottoman government entered the First World War and was allied with Germany. For a brief period, he was assigned as a naval officer to the Ottoman Navy cruiser Hamidiye, but in 1919 he became seriously ill and was not able to fully recover. That got him exempted from naval service in 1920.

In 1921, together with his friends Vâlâ Nureddin (Vâ-Nû), Yusuf Ziya Ortaç, Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel, and a Kurdish friend, Las Govand he went to İnebolu in Anatolia to join the Turkish War of Independence. From there he, together with Vâlâ Nûreddin, walked to Ankara, where the Turkish liberation movement was headquartered. In Ankara, they were introduced to Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later called Atatürk, who wanted the two friends to write a poem that would invite and inspire Turkish volunteers in Istanbul and elsewhere to join their struggle. The poem was much appreciated, and Muhittin Bey (Birgen) decided to appoint them as teachers to the Sultani (high college) in Bolu, rather than to send them to the front as soldiers. However, their communist views were not appreciated by the conservative officials in Bolu and so both of them decided to go to Batumi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to witness the results of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and arrived there on 30 September 1921. In July 1922, both friends went to Moscow, where Ran studied Economics and Sociology at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in the early 1920s. There, he was influenced by the artistic experiments of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, as well as the ideological vision of Vladimir Lenin.

Convictions and prison sentences in Turkey

Nâzım Hikmet Ran, being a communist and publishing works that promote socialism, had a proud support for the prosecuted ethnic minorities such as the Kurds, which attracted the attention of the Turkish government. In 1931, a charge was filed against him accusing him of "spreading communist propaganda" because of his poems and writings (Jokond ile Si-ya-u, Varan 3, Sesini Kaybeden Şehir). He was found not guilty on 7 May 1931.

He was arrested and sent to prison on 18 March 1933, for allegedly "promoting communism" with his book Gece Gelen Telgraf. On 29 July 1933, he was found guilty and sentenced to 6 months and 3 days in prison, and in August of that same year he was found guilty of insulting Süreyya İlmen and sentenced to 1 year in prison. He was also ordered to pay a fine of 200 lira and another 500 lira in compensation. On 31 January 1934, Nâzım Hikmet was found guilty on other charges related to promoting communism and sentenced to 5 years of prison, but this decision was not enforced because of the general amnesty of 1935, which set him free.

He received his longest prison sentences in 1938, when he was found guilty of "inciting military mutiny" and sentenced to 13 years and 4 months in prison. Later on that year he received another prison sentence of 15 years for "giving directives on how to spread communism in the army in order to spread the principles of socialism within the armed forces and transform the country into a communist state through a revolutionary movement". His total sentence was announced as 28 years and 4 months by the court, with no reduction in the sentence. He served his prison sentence at different prisons in Ankara, Çankırı, Bursa and Istanbul.

However, he was released in 1950 with an amnesty, which he received due to protests against the Turkish government at that time, demanding Nâzım Hikmet to be released. Many intellectuals around the world such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre joined the protests, and famous Turkish authors Orhan Veli Kanık, Oktay Rıfat and Melih Cevdet Anday went on a 3-day hunger strike.

Nâzım was released after these protests and he escaped from Turkey to USSR on 17 June 1951. On 25 July 1951, the government stripped him of his Turkish citizenship.

Style and achievements

Despite writing his first poems in syllabic meter, Nâzım Hikmet distinguished himself from the "syllabic poets" in concept. With the development of his poetic conception, the narrow forms of syllabic verse became too limiting for his style, and he set out to seek new forms for his poems.

He was influenced by the young Soviet poets who advocated Futurism. On his return to Turkey, he became the charismatic leader of the Turkish avant-garde by producing streams of innovative poems, plays and film scripts.

In Moscow in 1922, he broke the boundaries of syllabic meter, changed his form and began writing in free verse.

He has been compared by Turkish and non-Turkish men of letters to such figures as Federico García Lorca, Louis Aragon, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Yiannis Ritsos, and Pablo Neruda. Although Ran's work bears a resemblance to these poets and owes them occasional debts of form and stylistic device, his literary personality is unique in terms of the synthesis he made of iconoclasm and lyricism, of ideology and poetic diction.

Many of his poems have been set to music by the Turkish composer Zülfü Livaneli and by Cem Karaca. Part of his work has been translated into Greek by Yiannis Ritsos, and some of the translations have been arranged by the Greek composers Manos Loizos and Thanos Mikroutsikos.

Because of his political views, his works were banned in Turkey from 1938 to 1965.

Later life and legacy

Nâzım's imprisonment in the 1940s became a cause célèbre among intellectuals worldwide. A 1949 committee that included Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean-Paul Sartre campaigned for his release.

On 8 April 1950, Nâzım began a hunger strike to protest the Turkish Parliament's failure to include an amnesty law in its agenda before it closed for the upcoming general election. He was then transferred from the prison in Bursa, first to the infirmary of Sultanahmet Jail, in Istanbul, and later to Paşakapısı Prison. Seriously ill, Ran suspended his strike on 23 April, National Sovereignty and Children's Day. His doctor's request to treat him in hospital for three months was refused by officials. As his imprisonment status had not changed, he resumed his hunger strike on the morning of 2 May.

Nâzım's hunger strike caused a stir throughout the country. Petitions were signed and a magazine named after him was published. His mother, Celile, began a hunger strike on 9 May, followed by the renowned Turkish poets Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet and Oktay Rıfat the next day. In light of the new political situation after the 1950 Turkish general election, held on 14 May, the strike ended five days later, on 19 May, Turkey's Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day, when he was finally released by a general amnesty law enacted by the new government.

On 22 November 1950, the World Council of Peace announced that Nâzım was among the recipients of the International Peace Prize, along with Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Wanda Jakubowska and Pablo Neruda.

Later on, Nâzım escaped from Turkey to Romania on a ship via the Black Sea and from there moved to the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet bloc recognized the Turkish minority only in communist Bulgaria, the poet's books were immediately brought out in this country, both in Turkish originals and in Bulgarian translations. The communist authorities in Bulgaria celebrated him in Turkish and Bulgarian publications as 'a poet of liberty and peace.' The goal was to discredit Turkey presented as a "lackey of the imperialist" United States in the eyes of Bulgaria's Turkish minority, many of whom desired to leave for or were expelled to Turkey in 1950–1953.

When the EOKA struggle broke out in Cyprus, Ran believed that its population could live together peacefully, and he called on the Cypriot Turks to support the Greek Cypriots' demand for an end to British rule and union with Greece (enosis). Hikmet drew negative reaction from Turkish Cypriots for his opinions.

Persecuted for decades by Turkey during the Cold War for his communist views, Nâzım died of a heart attack in Moscow on 3 June 1963 at 6.30 a.m. while he was picking up a morning newspaper at the door of his summer house in Peredelkino. He is buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, where his tomb is still a place of pilgrimage for Turks and others from around the world. His final wish, which was never carried out, was to be buried under a plane tree (platanus) in any village cemetery in Anatolia.

His poems depicting the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland (Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları, "Human Landscapes from my Country"), as well as the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş Savaşı Destanı, i.e. The Epic of the War of Independence"), and the Turkish revolutionaries (Kuvâyi Milliye, "Force of the Nation) are considered among the greatest literary works of Turkey.

After his death, the Kremlin ordered the publication of the poet's first-ever Turkish-language collected works in communist Bulgaria, where a large and recognized Turkish national minority still existed. The eight volumes of these collected works, Bütün eserleri, appeared at Sofia between 1967 and 1972, in the very last years of the existence of the Turkish minority educational and publishing system in Bulgaria.

Nâzım had Polish and Turkish citizenship. The latter was revoked in 1959 and restored in 2009. His family has been asked if it wanted his remains repatriated from Russia.

Patronage

During the 1940s, as he was serving his sentence at Bursa Prison, painted. There, he met a young inmate, İbrahim Balaban. Ran discovered Balaban's talent in drawing, gave all his paint and brushes to him, and encouraged him to continue with painting. Ran influenced the peasant and educated him, who had finished only a three-grade village school, in forming his own ideas in the fields of philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics. Ran greatly admired Balaban and referred to him in a letter to the novelist Kemal Tahir as the “peasant painter" (Turkish: Köylü ressam). Their contact remained after they were released from the prison.

In popular culture

• Nâzım's poem "We'll Give the Globe to the Children" was set to music in 1979 by Russian composer David Tukhmanov.
• The 1979 Russian animated film Tale of Tales is partially inspired by Hikmet's poem of the same name.
• Finnish band Ultra Bra recorded a song "Lähettäkää minulle kirjoja" ("Send me books") based on a translated excerpt of Hikmet's poem "Rubai".
• The Ignorant Fairies is a 2001 Italian film, in which a book by Hikmet plays a central plot role. This is reprised in the 2022 TV serialization of the film.
• The Blue-Eyed Giant is a 2007 Turkish biographical film about Nâzım Hikmet. The title is a reference to the poem Minnacık Kadın ve Hanımelleri. The film chronicles Nâzim Hikmet's imprisonment at Bursa Prison and his relationships with his wife Piraye and his translator and lover Münevver Andaç. He is played by Yetkin Dikinciler.
• Nâzım Hikmet's children's tale, "A Cloud in Love," was adapted into an animated short film in the Soviet Union in 1959 and into a children's opera by the Greek National Opera in 2022. The tale was translated into English by Evrim Emir-Sayers for dePICTions, the open-access annual critical review of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT), in 2023.
• Nâzım's poem 'You' appears in the prologue of the main campaign of the 2020 videogame Suzerain, developed by Torpor Games.