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Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963) |
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One of the most important
figures
in 20th century Turkish literature and one of the first Turkish poets
to use more or less free verse. Nazim Hikmet's works were widely translated
both in the Communist East and the West during his lifetime.
However, in his home country Hikmet remained a controversial
figure due to his social criticism and commitment to Marxism.
Spending some 17 years in prisons, Hikmet once called poetry
"the bloodiest of the arts." He was the only major writer to
speak out against the Armenian massacres in 1915 and 1922. Hikmet died in the Soviet Union in 1963.
Nazim Hikmet was born Mehmet Hazim in Salonica, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloniki). His father, Nazim Hikmet Bey, was a civil servant, whose father Nazim Pasha, had been a leading figure in the Ottoman civil service. Hikmet's mother, Aisha Dshalila (Cecile), was a painter, partly of Polish, partly of Huguenot descent. In 1905, Hikmet Bey was obliged to resing from his post at the foreign service. For a period the family lived in Aleppo, where Hikmet Bey invested his money in a unsucessful project. After returning to Istanbul started a new business, and went bankrupt. In 1909 he was appointed translator in the press department of the Foreign Ministry. He then worked as managing director of a publishing firm and the manager of a cinema. Hikmet Bey died in 1932. While still at school, Hikmet began writing poems. He studied briefly at the French-language Galatasary Lycée in Istanbul and attended the Naval War School, but dropped out in 1920n because of ill health. Soon after, he wrote a lampoon about the British and became involved with his friends in gun smuggling to Mustafa Kemal. During the war of independence, Hikmet went to Anatolia to join Atatürk and then worked as a teacher at a school in Bolu. He studied sociology and economics at the University of Moscow (1921-28) and joined in the 1920s the Turkish Communist Party. In Turkey he was sentenced in prison in absentia. While in the Soviet Union, Hikmet had a short-lived marriage to Nüzhet Nazim, a student, and then he lived together with Ludmilla Yurchenko in a second-floor flat in Tverskaya Boulevard. Ludmilla was a dentist, Hikmet referred to her as Dr. Lena. After returning to Turkey in 1928 without a visa Hikmet continued to contribute to newspapers and periodicals and write plays. At the Ipek Film Studios he wrote scripts under the name Mümtaz Osman and directed films. Because of his unauthorized re-entry, he was sentenced to a prison term but pardoned in 1935 in a general amnesty. In his cell he he wrote a long poem, 'Giaconda and Si-Ya-U', about Leonardo's famous Mona Lisa, the Giaconda of the title, who fells in love with a young Chinese man visiting the Louvre museum in Paris. Miraculously, she escapes from the wall of the museum, and joins revolutionaries. At the end she dies in flames. "And so it was that in Shanghai, on this day of death / The Florentine Gioconda lost / A smile more famous than Florentine." In 1935 Hikmet married Piraye Altinogly, a woman with striking red hair, whose father was editor of the newspaper Tercuman-i Ahval. With Piraye he had two children; she had also two children from her first husband, Vedat Örfi Bengü, who had moved to Paris. Some of his best poems Hikmet wrote to her. Hikmet was condemned in 1938 to prison for 28 years and
four months for anti-Nazi and anti-Franco activities. According to the
Military Court, he had provoked naval soldiers to rebellion. Hikmet
spent the following 12 years in different prisons, unable to publish
his work. During this period he fell in love
with Münevver Andac, the daughter of his uncle. In the poem
'Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison' (1949),
Hikmet expressed his will to survive: "To think of roses and
gardens inside is bad, / to think of seas and mountains is good. / Read
and write without rest, / and I also advise weaving / and making
mirrors." (tr. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, in Things I Didn't Know I Loved, 1975) While in Bursa Prison, where Hikmet was transferred in 1940, he shared a cell with the future novelist Orhan Kemal. In 1950, to hasten his release after international protests, Hikmet went into a huger strike at the Pasakapisi prison in Üsküdar. Upon his release, Hikmet divorced Piraye, moved together with Münevver, and began to work at the Ipek Film Studios. Being constantly under the surveillance of the police and in fear of an attempt on his life, Hikmet eventually escaped from Turkey in a small boat. His wife and his son, Memet, were not allowed to travel abroad. And he left in Istanbul his in-progress writings. After losing his Turkish citizenship, Hikmet lived in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. In 1950 he shared with Pablo Neruda the Soviet Union's International Peace Prize. Hikmet became a Polish citizen and from 1951 lived his remaining days in Sofia, Warsaw, and finally in Moscow. In spite of his heart disease and the warnings of his doctors he also travelled in Africa, China, Cuba, and spent time in Paris, Rome, and Prague. His reddish-blond hair began to show hints of grey. An administrator of the communist-dominated World Peace Council (WPC), he participated in conferences around the world. From the early 1950s, Hikmet's companion
was Galina Grigoryevna Kolesnikova, a doctor, whom he met in the
Barvikha Sanatorium. After separation, he married a young woman named
Vera Tulyakova; born in 1932, she was thirty years his
junior. Vera was the last great love of his life. With
her Hikmet wrote for the Soyuz Multifilm Institute a scenario
for a puppet film, entitled A Cloud in Love. Many of Hikmet's
poems, composed during the years of exile, are nostalgic. 'Paris
Without You' (1958), which he wrote during his visit to France,
reflected his longing for Vera. While in Warsaw he imagined about
platans, "white houses" and "an autumn morning in a wine yard" –
there are no wine yards in Warsaw and the city is not white. A poem
about Donau brings his thoughts to Istanbul. Broken in
health, Hikmet died on June 3, 1963 in Moscow, where he was
buried. Just a few months before his death Hikmet had written a poem,
in which he bids his farewell to his neighbors in his Moscow apartment
building, and ponders over how his coffin is to be transported down
from the fourth floor. Hikmet's first poems appeared in the 1920s, but he had started to write earlier. In Moscow he saw a poem by Mayakovsky, and although he did not understand Russian, the free-flowing lines fascinated his imagination. Hikmet also worked with Mayakovsky at the satirical Metla theater. Hikmet combined Turkish traditional poetry with avant-gardist trends, and deeply influenced Turkish literature in the 1920s and 1930s. His own passionate poetic voice Hikmet found in his twenties. He proclaimed that "the artist is the engineer of the human soul." In 1936 he published one of his most famous works, Simavne Kadısı Oğlu Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı (The Epic of Sheikh Dedreddin), which depicted a 15th century revolutionary religious leader in Anatolia. Among his later major works is the five-volume Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (1966-67), a 20,000 line epic. In his early poems Hikmet never used completely free verse. Typical for his poems is change of metre and irregular use of rhymes. As a playwright Hikmet applied the techniques of Brecht's epic theater. His Marxist-inspired dramas enjoyed success in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. Hikmet's first published play Ocakbasi (1932, By the Fireside), was a verse drama about a poet's love. In 1932 he made a strong impact with his innovative play Kafatası and consolidated his reputation with Unutulan Adam (1934), which demonstrated the dubiousness of fame and the frequent discrepancy between one's success in the world and one's unhappiness in private life. Other dramatic works in the 1930s and 1940s include Bir Ölü Evi (1932, The House of the Deceased), which focuses on the greed and hypocrisy of a middle-class family. Ferhad ile Şirin (1945, Ferhad and Sirin), written in a prison and based on a Persian-Turkish love legend, has been adapted into a three-act ballet and filmed twice. İvan İvanoviç Var mıydı, Yok muydu? (1956), published shortly after Stalin's death, attacked the cult of personality and the new hierarchy that replaced the old. This play, which was performed for the first time in Moscow, was compared to Mayakovsky's The Bedbug (1928), a social satire. Demokles'in Kılıcı (1974, Sword of Damocles) depicted the threat of nuclear holocaust, and Sabahat (1977) revealed the exploitation of the hardworking people by the civic leaders. Hikmet's critics have often pointed to his uncritical embrace of the Soviet Union. His poetry and plays gained a wide popularity in France and Greece, and in 1970 he received critical praise from some prominent American poets. In Turkey the ban on Hikmet's works was not lifted until 1964. A vast numbers of books and articles about the author and his work were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, the multi-volume complete works project, started in 1968, remained still incomplete by the early 1980s. The first complete edition of Hikmet's poems appeared in Bulgaria in the 1960s. Hikmet did not consider his theater works to be of major importance, but during the years in Moscow he met such Russian theater geniuses as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Vachtangov and Tairov. The main themes in his dramas are loneliness, betrayal and the evils of capitalism. Also many of his poems have been dramatized and staged. In 1972 Paris's Théâtre de la Liberté offered a production called Légendes à Venir, which was a mixture of the author's poems and Aziz Nesin's short stories. Hikmet's novels do not compare in quality to his poetry and plays. His collection of tales, Sevdalı Bulut (1968), and his anthology of newspaper columns, It Ürür Kervan Yürür (1965), represent his better production. Hikmet's three volumes of correspondence, posthumously published, reveal the author as a master letter writer. For further reading: Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation by James H. Meyer (2023); Eurasia Without Borders: the Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919-1943 by Katerina Clark (2021); Nâzım Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet by Mutlu Konuk Blasing (2013); In Jail with Nazim Hikmet by Orhan Kemal (2010); The Image of Nazim Hikmet and His Poetry: In Anglo-American Literary Systems by Basak Ergil (2008); Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet, by Saime Goksu, Edward Timms (1999); Modern Turkish Poetry, edited by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar (1992); Contemporary Turkish Writers by Louis Mitler (1988); Contemporary Turkish Literature, edited by Talat S. Halman (1982); 'The Poetry of Nazim Hikmet' by M. Dohan, in Lotus: Afro-Asian Writing, 26 (1975) - Other famous Turkish writers: Yashar Kemal, Melih Cevdet Anday, Haldun Taner, Aziz Nesin, Oktay Akbal, Fakir Baykurt, Orhan Pamuk - Suom.: Hikmetiltä on myös suomenettu runovalikoima Punainen omena (1972) ja Puut kasvavat vielä (1978) Selected works:
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