The French literary review Les Lettres Nouvelles offers a deeply moving article entitled "Nazim Hikmet, a Nonconformist Revolutionary" in the current issue [December 1963- -Januery 1964],
The author of the article, Joseph Berger, was the representative of the Palestinian Communist party in the Communist International dur ing the twenties... It was at that epoch in Moscow that he met Nazim Hikmet who had just come to study at the "Stalin University for Workers of the Orient" [KUTV]. The two were not to see each other again until 1957 in Warsaw. Nazim Hikmet had spent almost twenty years in Turkish prisons, Joseph Berger had spent twenty-two years in Stalin ist prisons and concentration camps.
"In a few minutes," he writes, “we resumed fraternal enthusiastic contact; we talked like friends who had separated the evening before ° e e @
"We discussed many hours, exchanging memories, mentioning mutual friends, figures and events of the past: a wnole life since our first meeting; we had a lot to cover end decide on."
“ In homage to his poet comrade who died ‘recently, ‘Berger felt it necessary to say who he really WAS: 4 sThe men of the Apparatus sought’ to present. him as being ton the. “line, ' but I am sure that in the Soviet Union many are aware of this | true revolutionary's nonconformist principles. The day will come when the entire world will know it. Meanwhile these few lines constitute the contribution of a friend to the immortalization of his memory."
‘From this noteworthy article we cite some paragraphs of consider-
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"T saw from his first words that the poet understood what had been happening in the world during these decades; the significance of this epoch had not escaped him. He still believed in the great ideal to which he had adhered in his youth; he had remained faithful to the principles of social justice, of truth, liberty, to the memory of Lenin (too young to have known him personally, he had followed his burial in 1924), Nevertheless, or more accurately just because of that, he showed fierce hatred of the deviations of the Soviet power ‘during the Stalinist epochs; he confessed that he was convinced that only His absence from Soviet territory between nineteen=-thirty and forty had enabled him to escape the bitter destiny of tall the most faithful friends of Lenin, who fell: victim to the fury of a mad tyrant. ru
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"IT had learned from the newspapers the story of his life, the details of the battle conducted throughout the world for his freedom, his hunger strike just before. freedom, his escape to the Soviet Union at the beginning of the fifties... Nazim Hikmet told me about the other side of the coin. He described with irony the festivities with which he was received after having left Turkey: ‘Yes, it sure was a royal reception; they placed at my disposition all the resources of the country; they gave me a magnificent apartment and a !datcha!t for the summer; they invited me to sumptuous feasts; I had a special cook, an auto; the papers never stopped writing about me, my books were circu-~ lated in Russian in very satisfying editions. . . but (and his hand- © some face puckered) they were badly mistaken; they didn't succeed in tpuying me! and they never will,!" .
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"On his arrival in the Soviet Union, Nazim Hikmet was handed over to the solicitous care of celebrated writers. They fastened on to him, tried to guide and watch over him, He gave me his opinion of Surkov, Simonov, Ehrenburg. He knew them well, meeting them daily.
"tt will mention only the most gifted and I know how their talents were degraded by the political conjuncture. I associated with Bhrenburg; we talked a Lot about art aintin sculpture and Soviet architecture, I was sure had found in him a faithful ally in my - @piticism, in the profound disgust that filled me at the byzantinism
ity in. the Sovist art of that. epochs; I was. sure.of, it
gEeat surprise, Ehrenburg did not join in with me at all, a Let out some prat oud_ voice; 1 was ready to argue with him but
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: Are you crazy? I'm sixty and I want to live another ten © YEerse « « and we continuedto visit the exposition side by side, in silence,!
“Nazim Hikmet's opinion of Surkov was clear and explicit: ta functionary, in charge of Soviet poetry who received inspiration not from his conscience a3 from his superiors,!
= "Aas for Simonov (many of whose recitations end poems are popular with the Soviet public and whose talent I myself appreciate), Nazim Hikmet said: 'tI, too, respected him and there was great warmth between us, up to the time, just recentl when something happened; it was in
> 9 when blished in "Nov i he editor in chief was then Constantin Simonov) my piece Ivan Ivanovitch, Does He Exist? No doubt you have read it or seen it?! (I had read it and had likewise witnessed the enthusiasm which this vigorous and biting criticism of the bureaucracy and the hypocrisy had aroused among the Soviet youth and all those who inspired the spirit of the Twentieth Congress.)
"Here is what Nazim Hikmet told about the history of this piece:
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tyou found the piece biting and vigorous? But if you could have read what 1 wrote in the first vérsiont “It was necessary to correct it, and it was my friend Simonov who devotéd himself to it; he conscien= ~tiously dic his work;"he tried to transform it “into a little self- ~~ criticism, limited, perfectiy safe, He tried to weaken the satire, ‘Suppressing the most violent passages, the clearest atlusions. TE tm doing it for you,;™ Simonovtold:me, "I> want=:to~help you understand our reality." Simonov's remarks, his paternalistic tone, irritated and disturbed me, because in fact, IL was fighting for communism when he was still being carried under his mother's skirts; in brief, I am not at_all satisfied with the definitive version of my piece, despite the great success it won on the stages of the Soviet Union and the popular democracies,!
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av ra a profound nostalgia was visible in his expression; he longed for his. homeland, his country which he loved so much3 we began talking about his youth and soon he was describing the magnificent Anatolian countryside, the beauty of Constantinople, the Golden Horn, the small islands of the Sea of Marmara, He had faith in the final victory of the Turkish working class but knew that he himself would not have the pleasure of being there. .'My fate is to die in a foreign land, in emigration, far from my beloved Turkey.' For him, this fate was the most tragic.
“These regrets were linked to another sorrow, the value he had. placed on the close ties which he hadyessociated with internationaliss ideas, such as those expressed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and those that. had begun to be coneretized in the October Revolution, in the first Soviet Constitution. He returned in imagination to that epoch, when the brotherhood of peoples was not simply e propaganda theme or a May Day slogan; when it was freely expressed on Soviet territory. 'Me, for example, exiled from my country, I arrived in Soviet Russia at the beginning of the twenties, J immediately had all the rights and all the duties of a Soviet citizen, I participated in elections of the Soviets, like my Russian comrades. I could run as a candidate for any official post, I could even be elected president of the whole Republic. Limitations, administrative differences were for us, forty ears ago, notions of the past, bourgeois prejudices. How things have changed! When I returned to the Soviet Union at the beginnin ofr the fifties, not only could I not receive Soviet citizenship, but they told me that my application for membership in the Sovieb Communist party could not be accepted, “on account of the rules," that was after decades of struggle in the service of communism, after eignteen years in prison tor my communist faithfuiness.!' (Nazim Hikmet Eoia me that he went to the Polish government for naturalization, one of the ancestors of his mother having been a Pole living in Turkey.)
"The rise of nationalist sentiment in the world was a great disappointment for Nazim Hikmet: 'tOur hopes of forty years ago were wrong then.' (He reminded me of the conference | had held at the KUTV university at the beginning of the twenties, at the time we first met.) "More accurately, we were born at Jeast a half century. too soon. it_seems that the world must still go through a phase of national awakening before the internationalist ideal penetrates the masses,
CORRECTION >
In our last issue [Januery 3] we published the second part of B, Germain's article, "The Law of Value in Relation to Self-Management and Investment in the Economy of the Workers." On page 32, the second peragraph contains an error which changes the meaning. The paragraph should read:
_"The more backward a country.is,. the more conditions of almost universal scarcity rule not only in the means of production sector but also for much of the industrial means of consumption (at least for vhe great mejority of the population); and the more detrimental the actice of self-investment is, the more detrimental is it to oon t the self-management collectives to determine for themselves the projects for priority of productive investments." X
Directeur-Gérant: Pierre FRANK.