Between Empire and the Nation-State, between Humanism and Communism: Nazim Hikmet’s Noble Struggle with Modernity

Nazim Hikmet became an iconic figure in his homeland Turkey only decades after his death in 1965. As a son of an Ottoman civil servant father and a painter mother, Hikmet is reflective of a generation of young Ottoman subjects who learned about and struggled with modernity, nationalism, and communism. His socialist phase is significant for this volume because Hikmet is one of the first and the most well known intellectuals and political agitators of late Ottoman, early Republican Turkey.

Hikmet became a member of the Turkish Communist Party in 1920 and made his way to Moscow, ostensibly to study between 1921 and 1928 but mainly to observe the Bolshevik cultural landscape. He quickly became a wanted man in Turkey for his communist activities. He wrote poems, essays, novels and plays and directed films, all of which challenged the modern Turkish nation-state project. Consequently, he spent seventeen years in prison in Turkey and lived in exile once free.

 Hikmet’s writings present historians with a wealth of information about how an Ottoman subject matured into a socialist while remaining a humanist and how his generation challenged both the nationalist and communist states, which were works in progress. This essay examines his works and the writings about him from a historian’s point of view in an attempt to place his life and works against the historical backdrop of the post-imperial era in Turkey and Russia/Soviet Union. It situates him in the context of the struggle between nationalists and communists competing to establish themselves as true representatives of progress and modernity. It argues that Hikmet’s life and works provide a template for understanding the intellectual history of the era as the arts and politics intersected during oft romanticized early revolutionary era in Turkey and the Soviet Union.