Nazım Hikmet

Nazım Hikmet — Biography

Born Mehmet Nâzım in Thessaloniki on 15 January 1902, he had a father who was the son of an Ottoman provincial governor and a mother of Circassian, Polish, German and French descent. After graduating from the Ottoman Naval School on Heybeliada he was exempted from service on health grounds, joined the Turkish War of Independence in Anatolia in 1921, and the next year went to Moscow to study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, where Mayakovsky's influence led him to abandon syllabic metre and pioneer free verse in Turkish. Known as a "romantic communist" and "romantic revolutionary," he was repeatedly prosecuted from 1931 for belonging to the outlawed Turkish Communist Party, and in 1938 was convicted of inciting mutiny in the army and given a combined term of 28 years and 4 months, part of eleven separate trials that kept him jailed for more than twelve years in total. A campaign that drew support from Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, plus a hunger strike by Turkish poets, won him release under a 1950 amnesty; he left for the Soviet Union the following year, lost his Turkish citizenship, and took Polish nationality instead, a decision reversed 46 years after his death, in 2009. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages and brought him a peace prize in 1950; he also scripted and sometimes directed films through the 1930s and 1940s. He died of a heart attack in Moscow on 3 June 1963 and remains buried there.