Red Star over the Black Sea
Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Publishing:2nd Mar '25
£30.00
This title is due to be published on 2nd March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers", individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close. Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.
James H. Meyer has written a beautiful book...Thoroughly grounded in multi-country archival research, this book reevaluates the impact of Hikmet and his comrades and offers a fresh approach to writing a transnational history... intelligent and expertly crafted. * Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Russian Review *
Meyer's meticulously researched book offers the most comprehensive biography of Nâzım Hikmet to date and fills an important gap in the existing literature. It is a solid work of scholarship and gives great inspiration to those intending to contribute to the aforementioned biographical boom in Turkish studies. * Erdem Sönmez, Middle Eastern Studies *
A deeply researched biography of Turkey's great 20th century poet, using previously untapped archival sources in Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam and Washington. Meyer does not shy away from Nâzım Hikmet's complexities and contradictions, while still recognizing his extraordinary literary talent and boundless reserves of energy. His book does justice to Nâzım's remarkable life story. * William Armstrong, Turkey Book Talk *
Meyer's meticulous archival work and delicately historicist reading of Nâzım's literary works in the political contexts of their composition brings us beyond the familiar heroic mythography, providing instead a moving sense of the poet in his own world. As a work of social history dealing with a larger cast of characters, the book is truly capacious, whether it is showing how late Ottoman pan-Turkists contributed to the making of the Soviet East, or documenting how celebrity functioned in the communist nations. * Samuel Hodgkin, Yale University *
Placing Nâzım's Hikmet's life and work in its transnational context, Meyer gives readers a sense of the complex ways in which Nâzım's work was a product of both his own genius and a larger revolutionary moment. By drawing connections between the personal, political, and artistic, Red Star over the Black Sea captures the romantic elements of his life without reducing him to an abstract icon, incapable of error or removed from the daily political struggles of his era * Reuben Silverman, New Books Network *
ISBN: 9780198951667
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
384 pages