[13] Nâzım Hikmet and Celile Hanım's cousins included Oktay Rifat Horozcu, a leading Turkish poet, and the statesman Ali Fuat Cebesoy.

In 1921, together with his friends Vâlâ Nureddin (Vâ-Nû), Yusuf Ziya Ortaç and Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel, he went to İnebolu in Anatolia to join the Turkish War of Independence.

In Ankara, they were introduced to Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later called Atatürk, who wanted the two friends to write a poem that would invite and inspire Turkish volunteers in Istanbul and elsewhere to join their struggle.

The poem was much appreciated, and Muhittin Bey (Birgen) decided to appoint them as teachers to the Sultani (high college) in Bolu, rather than to send them to the front as soldiers.

However, their communist views were not appreciated by the conservative officials in Bolu and so both of them decided to go to Batumi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to witness the results of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and arrived there on 30 September 1921.

A Lawsuit was filed against him with the accusation of "making communist propaganda" because of his poems and writings (Jokond ile Si-ya-u, Varan 3, Sesini Kaybeden Şehir).

[15] On 31 January 1934, Nazım Hikmet was found guilty on other charges related to promoting communism and sentenced to 5 years of prison, but this decision was not enforced because of the general amnesty of 1935, which set him free.

Many intellectuals around the world such as Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre [18] joined the protests, and famous Turkish authors Orhan Veli Kanık, Oktay Rıfat and Melih Cevdet Anday went on a 3-day hunger strike.

Although Ran's work bears a resemblance to these poets and owes them occasional debts of form and stylistic device, his literary personality is unique in terms of the synthesis he made of iconoclasm and lyricism, of ideology and poetic diction.

[21] On 8 April 1950, Nâzım began a hunger strike to protest the Turkish Parliament's failure to include an amnesty law in its agenda before it closed for the upcoming general election.

His mother, Celile, began a hunger strike on 9 May, followed by the renowned Turkish poets Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet and Oktay Rıfat the next day.

[31] Persecuted for decades by Turkey during the Cold War for his communist views, Nâzım died of a heart attack in Moscow on 3 June 1963 at 6.30 a.m. while he was picking up a morning newspaper at the door of his summer house in Peredelkino, far away from his beloved homeland.

[citation needed] His poems depicting the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland (Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları, "Human Landscapes from my Country"), as well as the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş Savaşı Destanı, i.e.

The Epic of the War of Independence"), and the Turkish revolutionaries (Kuvâyi Milliye, "Force of the Nation) are considered among the greatest literary works of Turkey.

[citation needed] After his death, the Kremlin ordered the publication of the poet's first-ever Turkish-language collected works in communist Bulgaria, where a large and recognized Turkish national minority still existed.

The eight volumes of these collected works, Bütün eserleri, appeared at Sofia between 1967 and 1972, in the very last years of the existence of the Turkish minority educational and publishing system in Bulgaria.

Ran influenced the peasant and educated him, who had finished only a three-grade village school, in forming his own ideas in the fields of philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics.

Ran greatly admired Balaban and referred to him in a letter to the novelist Kemal Tahir as "his peasant painter" (Turkish: Köylü ressam).

It has achieved worldwide popularity as a powerful anti-war message and has been performed and translated in many languages as a song by a number of singers and musicians both in Turkey and many countries.

[45] In 2005, famous Amami Ōshima singer Chitose Hajime collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto by translating "Kız Çocuğu" into Japanese, retitling it Shinda Onna no Ko [死んだ女の子] "A dead girl").