Nazim Hikmet was born in Salonica, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloniki). His father, Nazim Hikmet Bey, was a civil servant, and his mother, Aisha Dshalila, was a painter. He studied briefly at the French-language Galatasary Lycée in Istanbul and attended the Naval War School, but dropped out because of ill health. He also wrote a lampoon about the British. During the war of independence, he went to Anatolia to join Atatürk and then worked as a teacher at a school in Bolu. He studied sociology and economics at the University of Moscow (1921-28) and joined the Turkish Communist Party in the 1920s.

After his return to Turkey in 1928 without a visa Hikmet wrote articles for newspapers and periodicals, film scripts and plays. From the age of 14 he had written poems. Because of his unauthorized re-entry, he was sentenced to a prison term but pardoned in 1935 in a general amnesty. In 1938 the author was condemned to prison for 28 years and four months for anti-Nazi and anti-Franco activities. Hikmet spent the following 12 years in different prisons. During this period he married Münevver Andac - it was his second marriage. Hikmet was released in 1950 because of international

protests, and escaped in a small boat from his home country in fear of an attempt on his life. His wife and his son, Memet, were not allowed to leave the country.

After losing his Turkish citizenship, he lived in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. In 1950 he shared with Pablo Neruda the Soviet Union's International Peace Prize. Hikmet became a Polish citizen and from 1951 lived his remaining days in Sofia, Warsaw, and finally in Moscow. In spite of his heart disease and the warnings of his doctors he also traveled in Africa, China, Cuba, and spent time in Paris, Rome, and Prague. In Moscow he married for the third time. Many of Hikmet's poems, written during the years of exile, are nostalgic. In Warsaw in 1958 he wrote about platans, "white houses" and "an autumn morning in a wine yard" - there are no wine yards in Warsaw and the city is not white. A poem about Donau from the same year brings his thoughts to Istanbul. Broken in health, he died on June 3, 1963 in Moscow, where he was buried. Just a few months before his death Hikmet had written a poem, in which he bids his farewell to his neighbors in his Moscow apartment building, and ponders over how his coffin is to be transported down from the fourth floor. ´

Hikmet's first poems appeared in the 1920s, but he had started to write earlier. In Moscow he saw a poem by Mayakovsky, and although he did not understand Russian, the free-flowing lines fascinated his imagination. His own passionate poetic voice Hikmet found in his twenties. In 1936 he published one of his most famous works, The Epic of Sheikh Dedreddin, which depicted a 15th century revolutionary religious leader in Anatolia. Among his later books is the five-volume MEMLEKETIMDEN INSAN MANZARALARI (1966-67), a 20,000 line epic. In his early poems Hikmet showed the influence of Mayakovsky, although he never used completely free verse. Hikmet had met the Russian writer in Moscow and worked with him at the satirical Metla theater. Typical of Hikmet's poems was change of metre and irregular use of rhymes. Hikmet combined Turkish traditional poetry with avant-gardist trends, and deeply influenced Turkish literature in the 1920s and 1930s.

As a playwright Hikmet applied the techniques of Brecht's epic theater. His Marxist-inspired dramas enjoyed success in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. Hikmet's first published play, By the Fireside (1932), was a verse drama about a poet's love. In 1932 he made a strong impact with his innovative play KAFATASI and consolidated his reputation with UNUTULAN ADAM (1935), which demonstrated the dubiousness of fame and the frequent discrepancy between one's success in the world and one's unhappiness in private life.

Other of Hikmet's dramatic works in the 1930s and 1940s includes The House of the Deceased (1932), which focuses on the greed and hypocrisy of a middle-class family. Ferhad and Sirin (wr. 1945) was based on a Persian-Turkish love legend. It was adapted into a three-act ballet and the story was filmed as a Turco-Russian co-production. IVAN IVANOVIC VAR MIYDI YOK MUYDU (1956) was written shortly after Stalin's death and attacked the cult of personality and the new hierarchy that replaced the old. The play was performed for the first time in Moscow, and was compared to Mayakovsky's The Bedbug (1928), a social satire. Sword of Damocles (1974) depicted the threat of nuclear holocaust, and SABAHAT (1977) revealed the exploitation of the hardworking people by the civic leaders.

In France and Greece, Hikmet's poetry and plays gained a wide popularity, and in 1970 he received critical praise from some prominent American poets. In Turkey the ban on Hikmet's works was lifted in 1964. A vast numbers of books and articles about the author and his work were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The multi-volume complete works project, started in 1968, had remained incomplete by the early 1980s. The only complete edition of his poems has appeared in Bulgaria in the 1960s.

Hikmet did not consider his theater works to be of major importance, but during the years in Moscow he met such Russian theater geniuses as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Vachtangov and Tairov. The main themes in his plays are loneliness, betrayal and the evils of capitalism. Also many of his poems have been dramatized and staged. In 1972 Paris's Théâtre de la Liberté offered a production called Légendes à Venir, which was a mixture of the author's poems and Aziz Nesin's short stories. Hikmet's novels do not compare in quality to his poetry and plays. His collection of tales, SEWVDALI BULUT (1968), and his anthology of newspaper columns, IT ÜRÜR KERVAN YÜRÜR (1965), represent his better production. Hikmet's three volumes of collected letters, posthumously published, reveal the author as a master letter writer

__________________________________

Nazim Hikmet centenary (2002) was celebrated in every capital city in the world - bar none.
___________________________________________

On Christmas Eve 1962 the publisher of fiba (G P Solomos) had the honour and privilege of meeting and speaking with Nazim Hikmet at his apartment on the outskirts of Moscow.