Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet.

• Author: Dirlik, Arif
• Position: Book Reviews

Gosku, Saline and Edward Timms. Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet. New York; NY: St Martin's Press, 1999. 367 pages. Hardcover $39.95.

Nazim Hikmet has a well-deserved reputation as the leading Turkish poet of the 20th century. His poetry, inseparable from his Marxist politics, drew admiration and applause from some of the foremost intellectuals and artists of the century from Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Picasso to Pablo Neruda. Hikmet was remarkably successful in his poetry in bringing lyricism to politics. His populist patriotism, and passionate but critical commitment to the Communist promise, found expression in a poetry that is striking for its musical qualities as it is for intense visuality. His poems ranged in genre from the poetry of love composed for his many love affairs to epic works such as The Epic of Sheik Bedrettin and Human Landscapes. They drew their power not just from a superb use of Turkish free from pedantic ornamentation, but also the sensibility that he brought to his politics; in which sadness played against defiance, tenderness against toughness, and a deep sense of the vagaries of life against his utopi an hopes for the future. When he died in exile in the Soviet Union in 1963, he was a prominent figure in world literary circles, but known in his country of origin by only a few comrades and friends-and his persecutors. Neruda memorialized him with the lines, "Thanks for what you were and for the fire/which your song left forever burning."

Gosku and Timms tell us that since the 1980s, with the lightening of political oppression and censorship in Turkey, "Nazim has become a kind of Turkish national poet" (p. 350). His work has been published many times over, and numerous studies have appeared on his life and works. The present work is to be welcomed as the first major study of Hikmet to appear in English. It draws on this extensive literature in Turkish as well as the literature on Hikmet in European languages, Hikmet's archives, and interviews with his intimate comrades, to provide a comprehensive account of his life and works. The study is successful in placing Hikmet's work within the context of his personal life, which in turn was entangled with Turkish politics in the crucial period of the establishment of the Republic from the 1920s through the 1950s, as well as the worldwide emergence of the Communist revolutionary movement under the guidance of the Soviet Union during this...