Nazim Hikmet (whose rarely used surname was Ran), widely recognized as the best poet of the Turkish language in the 20th century, was born to a well-to-do family in then-Ottoman Salonica on January 15, 1902. After attending a French-language secondary school in Istanbul, he enrolled in the Naval Cadet School but was discharged at the age of 17 on account of ill health (or, according to another source, because he was a member of a group that opposed military training). Not long thereafter, he began writing poetry.
At that time, the Ottoman state had been defeated in World War I, its lands were partly occupied by Armenians in the East and Greeks in the West, and a struggle for liberation had been under way led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later to be called Atatürk [d. 1938]). Having strong nationalistic leanings, Nazim, together with a friend, traveled to Anatolia as a primary school teacher in early 1921 in order to join the liberation efforts. There he learned about the new Bolshevik revolution, which had spread to the Caucasus. He subsequently traveled to Baku, then to Moscow, where he attended the KUTV (the Communist University of the Toilers of the East) and became a Communist. Returning home in late 1924, he joined a Marxist circle in Istanbul and worked there semilegally until April 1925. The few articles he wrote for the journal Aydınlik (Clarté) consisted of stereotypical declarations of historical materialism.
As one of the leaders of the Turkish Communist Party (TKP), Nazim was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison, but he fled to Moscow in August 1925, where he gained fame as a poet and playwright. He participated in the Vienna Conference of May 1926, where he exhibited a stern secularist stand against a comrade who had a more lenient attitude toward people’s traditions. He returned to Istanbul in late 1928. In the following year, the clandestine TKP suffered extensive arrests and was forced to reorganize. Nazim headed the opposition and was sentenced to four years in prison in March 1933. Pardoned in August 1934, he was purged from his party at the end of 1935 but continued his political activities; he also wrote more poems and plays and participated in filmmaking as a scenario writer. He was arrested in early 1938 and charged with inciting the cadets of the army to mutiny; another lawsuit was brought against him for disseminating communist propaganda in the navy. In total, he was sentenced to 28 years and 4 months in prison. He served the last of these sentences until mid-1950 and was readmitted to the party while he was still in prison. Fearing that he would be assassinated, he fled to the Soviet Union, where he spent the rest of his life. He became active in the World Council of Peace and also served as a member of the TKP External Bureau (Central Committee).
The pretext given for Nazim’s dismissal from the TKP in the mid-1930s was his “Trotskite-police opposition,” which is a usual cliché for refusal to obey party discipline. In fact, he was an ardent believer in equality and social justice and achieved, through his poetry and plays, much more than the center of the party did in disseminating these values to the public at large. His rebellious nature made him also oppose the personality cult dominant in the Soviet Union. It might be speculated that, had he lived in Russia rather than in Turkey in the 1930s, he would have ended up in the Gulag.
Further Reading
Erden Akbulut, N.H. in Comintern Documents (Komintern Belgelerinde Nâzım Hikmet), 2002; Memet Fuat, Nazim Hikmet, Life, Psychological Frame, Lawsuits, Discussions, Doctrine, Poetical Development, 2000.
METE TUNCAY