Echoes across the iron curtain: the letters of Münevver Andaç to Nâzım Hikmet

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Nâzım Hikmet is perhaps Turkey’s best-known literary figure from the twentieth century, due at least in part to his dramatic life story and flight from Turkey to the Soviet Union in 1951. During the course of the ten years which followed, Nâzım's common-law wife Münevver Andaç sent him more than 750 letters, only a handful of which have ever been cited in biographical works relating to Nâzım’s life. Drawing upon over 400 letters housed in Moscow’s restricted RGALI archive – to which no Nâzım Hikmet biographer has previously gained access – and another 100 located at the Aziz Nesin Vakfı outside Istanbul, this article constitutes the first time that any of these letters have been analyzed in a systematic manner. The letters, combined with other archival and published materials, are employed in this article as a means of gaining insights into Nâzım’s Soviet years, a notoriously understudied period of his life, as well as Münevver’s life in Istanbul and their shared relationship across the Iron Curtain.