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Nâz¿m Hikmet is Turkey's best-known poet and one of their most recognizable historical figures. Meyer situates Nâzim's fascinating international life story within the context of his border-crossing generation of Turkish communist contemporaries, addressing changing attitudes in the 20th century toward borders and the people who cross them.
List 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, holding the rank of professor since 2024. Meyer's first book,
Turks Across Empires, was published by OUP in 2014.
Summary
Nâzim Hikmet is Turkey's best-known poet and one of their most recognizable historical figures. Meyer situates Nâzim's fascinating international life story within the context of his border-crossing generation of Turkish communist contemporaries, addressing changing attitudes in the 20th century toward borders and the people who cross them.
Additional text
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
