NÂZIM HİKMET AND SOVIET LITERARY ANTICOLONIALISM

One of Hikmet’s most appealing and enduring characteristics is his consummate internationalism, with his poetic and personal engagements stretching from East Asia to the Horn of Africa. Of course, that internationalism wasn’t divorced from the main national contexts with which he was associated -the Turkish and the Soviet ones- but was rather, based on them. He engaged the literary spaces of Africa and Asia as a specifically Turkish national poet, familiar with underdevelopment and the workings of Western colonialism. What enabled his engagement in the first place was Hikmet’s place in the infrastructures of Soviet literary internationalism. Indeed, by following Hikmet, as he entered the Soviet orbit first in the 1920s and then in the 1950s and 60s, I will draw the contours of a veritable anticolonial republic of letters that sought to forge literary links between Africa and Asia and connect these with Soviet culture.