Carton d'invitation à la soirée "Présence de Nazim Hikmet" à la Salle Pleyel

Invitation card to the evening "Présence de Nazim Hikmet," organized in tribute to the poet who had died the previous year and which took place at Salle Pleyel on December 8, 1964, with notable attendees including Aragon, Charles Dobzynski, Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Piccoli.
A very fine copy in excellent condition.
A citizen of a society with heavy constraints, the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (1901-1963) aspired from his earliest age to freedom. Initially through his poems which he composed - and he was one of the very first poets in his country to dare - in free verse, but also through very early political engagement. From 1920, he joined the independence movement led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whom he would support until his accession to the presidency in 1924. But young Hikmet continued his travels to the Soviet Union, became a member of the clandestine communist party and never stopped writing poetry. Arrested numerous times for Marxist propaganda or incitement to revolt, he served several short prison sentences before finally being sentenced in 1938 to 28 years and 4 months of detention. At the initiative of the Union of Progressive Young Turks, a support committee was then created in Paris, chaired by Tristan Tzara and supported by several important French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso, Philippe Soupault and Charles Dobzynski. Hikmet would spend twelve years behind bars before being released in 1950 following a general amnesty granted by the new democratic government. Irony of fate and ultimate affront, this same government asked him in 1951, when he was forty-nine years old, to perform his military service. Hikmet then left Turkey clandestinely to join Moscow and was stripped of his nationality. The poet in exile then traveled between the Russian capital, Beijing, Cuba, Prague, Warsaw and Paris where he reunited with his French friends and asked Charles Dobzynski to translate his poems. At that time, he was the only contemporary Turkish writer whose texts were rendered into French. His works, banned from sale until the 2000s in his native country, would only circulate through Western translations. Reviled by the Turkish government, the subversive poet was celebrated beyond his borders, and achieved great success in France where his poems were set to music (Yves Montand, Bernard Lavilliers...). In 1955, he received the International Peace Prize, the Soviet equivalent of the Nobel. At his death in 1963, Philippe Soupault devoted a radio program to Nazim Hikmet, recommending to his listeners that they immerse themselves in reading the verses of Paris, ma rose... The one who was nicknamed in his country the "blue-eyed giant" would only be rehabilitated in 2009 and Turkish nationality would be restored to him posthumously.