‘Romantic Communist’: What made Nazim Hikmet the man he was?

The newly updated second edition contains some revisions and extra information as a result of further personal testimony and newly discovered archives. It traces Hikmet's development from the charismatic leader of the Turkish avant garde to the supporter of the politics of the Soviet Union (Stalin's daughter gave him the name “the Romantic Communist”) through to challenging the full microcosm of 20th century politics.

Hikmet was a poet of aristocratic background committed to the working classes. His writings retain their vitality, according to many, precisely because they challenge, and it is this quality that makes them universal. Wherever the underdog is engaged in a struggle against the prevailing status quo, whether it be the working classes against the ruling elite, the poor against injustice and exploitation or even conservationists against big business, they find an echo to their emotions in the poetry of Nazım Hikmet.

Much of the commentary on the life and work of Turkey's most famous poet of the 20th century falls into either the error of weaving a legend around him so he becomes almost a mythological figure such as Odysseus, or the opposite error of portraying him as a demon. Göksu and Timms aim “to avoid idealization, and to do justice to his life.”

Hikmet lived during the most ideological years of the 20th century, a time that has been described as the Epoch of the Great Betrayal of Hopes.

Like Atatürk, he was born in Thessaloniki. His grandfather was a pasha and was at the same time an Ottoman administrator and a Mevlevi. He introduced his grandson to the Sufi ideals of freedom, spirituality and love.

During World War I, at an amazingly young age, Hikmet was a published poet. He wrote “The Cry of My Country” at the tender age of 11, and it is resonant with the patriotic fervor and innocence that marked early World War I poets in England such as Rupert Brooke. Unlike Brooke, Hikmet lived long enough to see the results of war, and so his development more resembles that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, whose later poetry becomes realistic and full of anti-war sentiments.

Serving in a defeated navy, Hikmet wrote patriotic verses protesting the Allied occupation. Leaving the navy, he was to join the struggle of resistance and moved to Ankara, where he discovered the power of poetry with a purpose. It was at this time that he was first exposed to communist ideas, and in 1921, when the Soviet Union had been one of the first countries to recognize Atatürk's government, he first visited Russia.

He developed a new poetic style to express the convulsions of these modern politics. But in the young republic, beset by early rebellions and internal resistance, there was only room for ideologies that supported the republican ideal.

From his first experience of living on the run in İzmir in the 1920s, hiding from the crackdown against any political opposition, through the 1930s when he was “in and out of prison so often it is difficult to keep track of the changes,” to the 1940s when he served the whole decade as a prisoner, Hikmet was continually in trouble with the authorities.

What made him such a threat?

One part of the answer is the content of his poetry. He railed against all of the injustices and hypocrisies of his day. His poetry denounced the bourgeoisie. It denounced war. When he eventually defected to the Soviet Union, he realized the country of his dreams did not exist. His later work was to denounce the apparatus used by the Soviet Union to “perfectionize the people” -- organizations such as TASS and the KGB. He even denounced the cult of Stalin.

Hikmet was dangerous because he was a born leader -- an influencer of men. His first wife, Nüzhet, said of meeting him, “In this circle, which included many male and female friends, Nazım was the most popular person; he was in a position of leadership with his good looks, striking behavior and animated gestures, and through his poems and plays, which conveyed the strength of his convictions and ideals.”

He had been warned by a friend of his in the mid-1920s: “It is possible to survive as a rebellious dissident writer, but you are different. … Nazım, you must avoid challenging the system.” His response was to write, “Don't you burn with desire to write works full of hope and light for your people, for the nations, for mankind, works appealing for progress, justice, truth, beauty, freedom and brotherhood?”

The second part of the answer is in the way he specifically made enemies of important people. He was even expelled from the Turkish Communist Party after internal wrangling in 1932. Not content just to comment on the ruling classes in general he singled one or two important figures out and portrayed them unmistakably in his poems. He also made enemies in his newspaper articles, attacking the old school of poets in general and certain high-profile figures in particular. The war of words even degenerated into threats of physical assault.

But prison seemed to fuel his artistic talents. It is to his long spell in jails in Bursa, İstanbul and Çankırı that we owe so many of his greatest works. A typical poet, Hikmet had a series of romantic relationships. But the one most linked with him is Piraye, the woman to whom he wrote over 150 tender and passionate poems while incarcerated. She would say of her visits, “He could not even hug me because he was handcuffed… but he wanted me to read his new poems.”

Hikmet was stripped of his Turkish citizenship in 1951, but in recent years, he has been rehabilitated to a fair extent. His grave is still in Moscow, in the artists' cemetery.

A Russian who knew him, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, once remarked, “great actor -- pity about the play.”