by Nazim Hikmet

Nazim Hikmet (1902-63), the foremost poet of modern Turkish literature, had a turbulent life, full of prison sentences and exile because of his uncompromising commitment to freedom and justice. He was born in Salonica (now Thessalonica in Greece) in 1902 to a family of the cosmopolitan Ottoman elite. Hikmet studied French at a prestigious high school in Istanbul, then attended the Naval Academy, where he wrote his first poems. He traveled to Anatolia to join the anti-imperialist resistance against the occupation of Turkey after the First World War, and afterward to Russia. There he studied economics and sociology at the Communist University for the Workers of the East in Moscow and encountered revolutionary currents of thought. Hikmet was influenced by the ideology of Vladimir Ilich Lenin as well as the avantgarde artistic experiments of the poets Sergei Esenin...