Nazim Hikmet – Biography of Nazim Hikmet

The turkish poet Nazim Hikmet Ran He was born in Thessaloniki (now part of Greece) on November 20, 1902. His father Nazim Hikmet Bey was a state official, his mother, Aisha Dshalia, a painter. He studied French first in Istanbul, Turkey, and then enrolled in the Naval Academy, but was forced to drop out due to health problems.

As he himself confesses in the poem “Autobiography“(1962), when he began to write poetry he was only fourteen years old, introducing free verse for the first time in the poetic language of Turkey. The passion for poetry was transmitted to him by his paternal grandfather, who, in addition to” pasciĆ” “and Governor of several provinces, he was also a writer and poet in the Ottoman language.

In fact, it was impossible for him to remain in his country, where he was the subject of intense hostility due to his public denunciation of the massacres that took place in Armenia in the period 1915-1922. In Russia, his life changed radically: he enrolled in the Eastern Workers University and studied at the faculty of sociology. Thanks to university studies, he got in touch with the great Russian poets and writers and even managed to meet one of their teachers – the poet Mayakovsky.

During his stay in Russia he married, but the marriage did not last long and was annulled after his return to Turkey in 1928. He was able to return to his homeland, due to a general amnesty. The climate of persecution, which surrounded him, however, was increasingly heavy and the Communist Party was declared illegal, the Turkish State did not miss the opportunity to arrest him, using illegal posters as a pretext.

In the period 1928-1936 Nazim Hikmet He spent about five years in prison, during which he wrote five collections of verses and four long poems. During this time his literary interests diversified and, in addition to poetry, he wrote novels and plays, also collaborating with some newspapers as a journalist and proofreader. He took any job, even bookbinder, in order to support his mother (widow), his second wife, and her children.

Hikmet He was arrested in 1938 on charges of inciting the Turkish army to revolt with his poems. It seems, indeed, that the sailors loved to read his poem “The Epic of Sherok Bedrettini“which spoke of a peasant uprising against the Ottoman Empire in 1500. The sentence was very harsh: twenty-eight years in prison. He remained imprisoned for fourteen long years, during which he wrote his most important poems. The books of Nazim Hikmet they were translated all over the world, and his reputation as a poet grew everywhere except in his homeland, where, as he had to regretfully admit, his poems would never see the light of day in their original language.

An international commission called for his release from prison, among whose members were also Jean Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso. The poet continued his fierce battle against the Turkish government and began a hunger strike that lasted 18 days, after which he was the victim of a heart attack. During the period of deprivation of liberty, he divorced his second wife to marry a translator with whom he had a son.

Thanks to the intercession of the International Commission, he was released from prison in 1949, but was the victim of two assassination attempts that forced him to flee to Moscow again. All this cruelty against Hikmet, that the Turkish state was still trying to send him to the front despite his weak health after the heart attack, contrasted with the international prizes that were awarded to him, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.

The last leak of Hikmet abroad was almost an adventure novel: he left with a small ship from Istanbul, but when trying to cross the Bosphorus he found himself caught in a storm. He managed to attract the attention of a Bulgarian ship, calling out his name. But the ship realized it had seen him, without making any rescue attempts. Nazim He was almost desperate to save himself when the ship approached and allowed him to climb aboard. In the captain’s cabin he found a manifesto with his photo and the words “Save Nazim Hikmet.” The captain would have taken some time to save him, only to receive instructions on what to do from the government of Bucharest.

Hikmet moved back to Moscow. Turkey for its part deprived him of citizenship and it was Poland that gave him a new nationality, thanks to the existence of an ancient ancestor of whom, according to Nazim, “derived her red hair.” Back in Moscow in 1960, he divorced his third wife to marry the young Vera Tuljakova.

Nazim Hikmet died of a heart attack on June 3, 1963. In 2002, the centenary of his birth, the Turkish government, thanks to a petition signed by more than half a million citizens, finally restored the citizenship that had been taken away from him in 1951.