Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation, by James H. Meyer

When Nâzım Hikmet, Turkey’s Pablo Neruda, decided his country was too small for him, he had been in jail for nearly eight years. Imprisoned for his communist beliefs throughout the Second World War, Nâzım worked on the novel in verse that would become Human Landscapes from my Country. Although he had initially imagined the work as a Turkish epic, in September 1945 he confessed to a friend that his story was ‘sprawling beyond the Homeland’. He explained that he could not ignore the war, that his epic would need to address ‘the century’s traits’: ‘revolutions, liberation movements, and wars’ (S. Göksu and E. Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet [1999], p. 228). In Human Landscapes, in poetry crafted with extraordinary talent, Nâzım embraced the international politics of the twentieth century.

Primarily a biography, James Meyer’s revisionist study pays particular attention to the poet’s physical movement across borders. The thirteen chapters track Nâzım’s life from his birth in Salonica in 1902 through confrontation with the Turkish establishment in the 1930s to his death in Moscow in 1963. For the early chapters, Meyer relies on familiar memoirs and previous biographers, though he departs from the latter in his insistence that Nâzım was a ‘child of the imperial borderlands’. Meyer draws here on his first book on late nineteenth-century mobility between the Russian and Ottoman empires, and he introduces his central argument: ‘border-crossing’ was a defining element of Nâzım’s life and poetry. He really begins to break new ground in Chapter Five, with Nâzım’s first arrival in Moscow in 1922. Meyer has done extensive research in Russian archives, and he effectively uses it to situate Nâzım among a cohort of border-crossers (he also draws on archives in the Netherlands, Turkey and the US). Meyer offers revealing snapshots of Turkish communists and Turkish students at Moscow’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East, many of whom, he demonstrates, had connections to Russia that pre-dated their interest in communist ideology.

Meyer seeks to deflate myths associated with Nâzım’s life, in particular the claim that the poet was a ‘romantic communist’. Employing previously unused Russian sources for the poet’s second sojourn in the Soviet Union as well, Meyer suggests Nâzım was more often deceitful with women than romantic and more committed to self-promotion than to any ideal. In this vein, Meyer argues that Nâzım’s mission to Bulgaria in 1951–2 was driven by personal interests rather than any concern for the ethnic Turkish communities he visited (p. 205). Meyer challenges those who cast Nâzım in later life as a democratic socialist and argues the poet was decidedly Stalinist (p. 303). Some of these assertions, like the suggestion that Nâzım died by suicide, are made without new evidence and will be disputed by those who adhere to older readings.

Each chapter ends with a few brief pages on the poems themselves, as Meyer vindicates his central argument by showing that major changes in Nâzım’s style coincided with relocations. But if we are to take seriously the contention that border-crossing was formative, then we must also take seriously the meaning that Nâzım and his contemporaries invested in their travels. After all, not all borders or border-crossers were the same. Erik-Jan Zürcher has argued that we should understand the Young Turks as ‘children of the borderlands’, and many of Zürcher’s border-crossers became part of the government that imprisoned Nâzım.

The narrowness of Meyer’s approach to border-crossings is evident in one of his preferred metaphors: ‘closing doors’. His own understanding of mobility itself feels almost romantic, as it privileges the relatively unmonitored Russo-Ottoman borders of the late nineteenth century. It encourages him to describe the twentieth century as a period of hardening borders and decreasing mobility (esp. pp. 187–9). And it leads him to overlook the way the twentieth century generated new kinds of mobility, including ones driven by ideological choices.

Nâzım addressed numerous themes in his poetry, and, even if we limit ourselves to Meyer’s subject, we find creativity that defies any simple relationship to geographic circumstance. Meyer cites, but does not substantively engage with, scholars who understand Nâzım’s border-crossing in terms of transnational communism, socialist internationalism or postcolonialism (see, for example, the works of Katerina Clark, Rossen Djagalov and Nergis Ertürk). The geography of Red Star over the Black Sea is in fact narrow, and we hear little about Nâzım’s trips to Beijing, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, Havana or Tashkent. But these later border-crossings were no mere Cold War junkets. Locked in his prison cell in Bursa years earlier, Nâzım travelled in his mind as he expanded the borders of his national epic. Meyer treats ideology largely as class-based Marxism, and he misses the way that anti-imperialism allowed Nâzım to imagine, to visit, places he had never been. After describing the other Turkish students in 1920s Moscow at length, Meyer admits that Nâzım ‘usually preferred the company of fellow literary-minded intellectual types’ (p. 124), including the Chinese poet Emi Siao (we might also add the Palestinian poet Najati Sidqi). It was more than poetry that connected, for anti-imperialism runs through inter-war poems in which Nâzım crosses borders to China, India and Ethiopia.

Meyer has found wonderful material that enriches our understanding of Nâzım and the individuals around him. Readers will enjoy Nâzım’s sarcastic responses to Soviet questionnaires and welcome the connections that Meyer draws to other Turkish leftists. But those seeking to understand the beauty of Nâzım’s verse and appreciate the intellectual project that engaged him will need to read this book alongside those listed in Meyer’s bibliography.