Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet

This is the first full-length biography in English of Nazim Hikmet, the Turkish poet and political activist who is one of the greatest literary figures ever to emerge from Turkey. Not only a communist committed to revolution, but a romantic who was passionately in love with his country and his people, Hikmet was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and sentenced in 1938 to twenty-eight years imprisonment. Although an international campaign helped to secure his release under an amnesty in 1950, he fled to the Soviet Union in 1951 where he died in 1963 stripped of his Turkish citizenship. This book presents much new material, most of it Turkish and not available to most readers, and the authors have also used interviews with people who were close to Hikmet to illuminate his life. Hikmet’s poetry has been skillfully integrated with his personal and political life, and photographs richly illustrate the career and life of a poet whose career forms a microcosm of twentieth-century politics.