One of the most important figures in 20th century Turkish literature and one of the first Turkish poets to use more or less free verse. Hikmet's works were widely translated both in the Communist East and the West during his lifetime. However, in his home country Hikmet remained a controversial figure due to his social criticism and commitment to Marxism. Spending some 17 years in prisons, Hikmet once called poetry "the bloodiest of the arts." He was the only major writer to speak out against the Armenian massacres in 1915 and 1922."I mean you must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you will plant olives –and not so they'll be left for your children either, but because even though you fear death you don't believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier." (in 'On Living', 1948)Nazim Hikmet was born Mehmet Hazim in Salonica, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloniki). His father, Nazim Hikmet Bey, was a civil servant, whose father Nazim Pasha, had been a leading figure in the Ottoman civil service. Hikmet's mother, Aisha Dshalila (Cecile), was a painter, partly of Polish, partly of Huguenot descent. In 1905, Hikmet Bey was obliged to resing from his post at the foreign service. For a period the family lived in Aleppo, where Hikmet Bey invested his money in a unsucessful project. After returning to Istanbul started a new business, and went bankrupt. In 1909 he was appointed translator in the press department of the Foreign Ministry. He then worked as managing director of a publishing firm and the manager of a cinema. Hikmet Bey died in 1932.While still at school, Hikmet began writing poems. He studied briefly at the French-language Galatasary Lycée in Istanbul and attended the Naval War School, but dropped out in 1920n because of ill health. Soon after, he wrote a lampoon about the British and became involved with his friends in gun smuggling to Mustafa Kemal. During the war of independence, Hikmet went to Anatolia to join Atatürk and then worked as a teacher at a school in Bolu. He studied sociology and economics at the University of Moscow (1921-28) and joined in the 1920s the Turkish Communist Party. In Turkey he was sentenced in prison in absentia. While in the Soviet Union, Hikmet had a short-lived marriage to Nüzhet Nazim, a student, and then he lived together with Ludmilla Yurchenko in a second-floor flat in Tverskaya Boulevard. Ludmilla was a dentist, Hikmet referred to her as Dr. Lena.After returning to Turkey in 1928 without a visa Hikmet continued to contribute to newspapers and periodicals and write plays. At the Ipek Film Studios he wrote scripts under the name Mümtaz Osman and directed films. Because of his unauthorized re-entry, he was sentenced to a prison term but pardoned in 1935 in a general amnesty. In his cell he he wrote a long poem, 'Giaconda and Si-Ya-U', about Leonardo's famous Mona Lisa, the Giaconda of the title, who fells in love with a young Chinese man visiting the Louvre museum in Paris. Miraculously, she escapes from the wall of the museum, and joins revolutionaries. At the end she dies in flames. "And so it was that in Shanghai, on this day of death / The Florentine Gioconda lost / A smile more famous than Florentine."In 1935 Hikmet married Piraye Altinogly, a woman with striking red hair, whose father was editor of the newspaper Tercuman-i Ahval. With Piraye he had two children; she had also two children from her first husband, Vedat Örfi Bengü, who had moved to Paris. Some of his best poems Hikmet wrote to her.Hikmet was condemned in 1938 to prison for 28 years and four months for anti-Nazi and anti-Franco activities. According to the Military Court, he had provoked naval soldiers to rebellion. Hikmet spent the following 12 years in different prisons, unable to publish his work. During this period he fell in love with Münevver Andac, the daughter of his uncle. In the poem 'Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison' (1949), Hikmet