Nazım Hikmet

Nazım Hikmet (1902–1963) was born in Selânik, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now Thessaloniki in Greece, into a family with Ottoman, Polish, and Circassian roots. His father served as a government official, and his mother, Celile Hanım, came from a cosmopolitan family with ties to Polish nobility, an inheritance reflected in a poet whose imagination moved easily between Anatolia and the wider world. He attended Galatasaray High School in Istanbul before transferring schools, and graduated from the Ottoman Naval School on Heybeliada in 1918. Poor health ended his brief naval career soon after.

When Istanbul came under Allied occupation, Hikmet crossed into Anatolia in 1921 to join the National Struggle led by Mustafa Kemal. What he saw there, famine, poverty, and the wreckage of war, shaped the concerns that would define his poetry. He soon left for Moscow, where he studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East and encountered the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky. That encounter changed his poetry permanently. He abandoned the fixed syllabic meter that dominated Turkish poetry at the time for free verse, a form that could carry the rhythm of factories, streets, and working lives rather than the inherited rhythms of Ottoman court poetry.

Prison, exile, and the years in between

Hikmet's communist convictions brought him into repeated conflict with the Turkish state. In 1938, he was convicted on separate charges of inciting mutiny in the army and navy, receiving two sentences that were combined into a total of 28 years and 4 months, the longest prison sentence he ever received and the one that defined the next decade of his life.

He served much of this sentence in Bursa Prison, where he wrote Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (Human Landscapes from My Country), the long verse work generally considered his central achievement. He also formed a close friendship with fellow inmate Orhan Kemal during these years, encouraging the younger writer toward the literary career that would make him one of Türkiye's major novelists.

By 1950, Hikmet's health had deteriorated and he began a hunger strike to press for his release. His mother joined the strike in solidarity, followed shortly after by poets Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Oktay Rıfat. International figures including Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean-Paul Sartre campaigned on his behalf. He was released under a general amnesty in 1950.

Freedom did not last. In 1951, at 49, he was recalled for military service despite serious heart disease. Sensing the recall as a pretext for renewed persecution, he escaped by boat across the Black Sea to Romania and from there to the Soviet Union. In July 1951, the Turkish Council of Ministers stripped him of his citizenship. He lived the rest of his life in Moscow, active in the World Peace Council and traveling internationally, but never returned to Türkiye. He died of a heart attack on 3 June 1963 and is buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery. Türkiye restored his citizenship in 2009, forty-six years after his death.

Poetry

835 Satır (1929)
His first major collection, published after his return from Moscow, marking his full break from syllabic verse into free form.

Jokond ile Si-Ya-U (1929)
A long poem structured as a dialogue pairing the Mona Lisa with a fictional Chinese revolutionary, reflecting Hikmet's habit of placing Turkish poetry inside a wider world of political struggle.

Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı (1936)
An epic poem based on the fifteenth century Ottoman rebel Sheikh Bedreddin, who led a peasant uprising against the sultan. Hikmet used the historical rebellion to speak indirectly about class struggle in his own century.

Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (Human Landscapes from My Country)
Begun in Bursa Prison in 1939 and written across the following decade, this epic in verse follows passengers on two trains crossing wartime Anatolia across roughly 17,000 lines. A ban on Hikmet's work kept it out of print in Türkiye during his lifetime. Following the ban's lift in 1965, his son Memet Fuat published the complete work in five volumes through De Yayınevi in 1966–1967, three years after Hikmet's death. It is widely regarded as the work carrying the fullest range of his voice.

Yaşamaya Dair (On Living)
A three-part poem written between 1947 and 1948, arguing that living demands complete seriousness and engagement, whether in ordinary life, facing death directly, or confronting the eventual end of the world itself. Read the full analysis on its dedicated Literature entry.

Rubailer
A collection written in the quatrain form associated with classical Persian and Ottoman poetry, though Hikmet used the form with plain, direct language rather than ornamental style.

Hearing his work

Readers who want to experience Hikmet's poetry beyond the page can hear Fazıl Say's Nâzım Oratoryosu, a large scale orchestral setting of his poems performed live in Istanbul in 2016, with actor Genco Erkal narrating, Say at the piano, and İbrahim Yazıcı conducting the orchestra. Watch the full performance here.

Why he still matters to learners of Turkish

Hikmet's free verse strips away the ornamentation that makes Ottoman classical poetry hard for beginners, and his vocabulary stays close to spoken Turkish even when his subjects are large. Reading him alongside Orhan Veli Kanık, whose own break from inherited form happened around the same period and who stood beside Hikmet during the 1950 hunger strike, gives a learner a clear sense of how modern Turkish poetry found its voice in the mid twentieth century.