Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzim Hikmet and his Generation

Nâz)im 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, Nâz)im 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 Nâz)im 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 Nâz)im 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 Nâz)im 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.

Table of Contents:
Prologue: Tears of Joy Introduction: The Border-Crosser 1: Child of the Imperial Borderlands 2: On the Road to Ankara 3: Up for Grabs in Anatolia 4: First Soviet Steps 5: In Revolutionary Russia 6: Moscow-Istanbul-Moscow-Istanbul 7: At Large in Istanbul 8: Closing Doors 9: Descending into Darkness 10: Desperate Measures 11: In Stalin's USSR 12: A Kind of Freedom 13: Final Frontiers Epilogue: Afterlives

About the Author :
A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, James H. Meyer has spent more than three decades studying and living in the Turkish-Russian borderlands. After graduating with a BA in English from McGill University, he worked for seven years as a teacher in Istanbul. In 1999 Meyer returned to the US, completing an MA in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University (2001) and a PhD in Middle Eastern and Russian history at Brown University (2007). Since 2009, he has taught history at Montana State University. Meyer's first book, Turks Across Empires, was published by OUP in 2014.

Review :
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... The book is a new biography of the great 20th century poet Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963). It draws deeply on previously untapped archival sources from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam and Washington, situating him within a broader generation of border-crossing Turkish communists. Red Star over the Black Sea is an intelligent and expertly crafted transnational history. Beautifully written... 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.