Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) has long been the subject of considerable biographical treatment internationally, and especially in Turkey. The Turkish poet-communist, whose flight by motorboat to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951, has been the subject of hundreds of books. Among historical figures from modern Turkish history, only Mustafa Kemal Atatürk surpasses Nâzım with respect to the pure volume of biographical attention received in Turkey and elsewhere. Wherever they have been published, books on Nâzım typically employ three principal sources: Nâzım’s own writings, the memoirs of Nâzım’s loved ones, and other biographies of Nâzım. Partly because of the nature of the sources used in these books, Nâzım’s years in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc (1922-1928 and 1951-1963) have received relatively little attention, focusing mainly upon Nâzım’s somewhat overstated connections to well-known Soviet cultural figures, like Mayakovsky, Meyerhold, and Yesenin. In this paper I discuss the new kinds of sources that I have brought to my research relating to Nâzım Hikmet and his generation. In working with party, state, and personal archival material in Russia and elsewhere, a different Nâzım Hikmet emerges, and the contexts in which he can be seen expand. Drawing upon ten months of research in the Moscow-based archives RGASPI, RGALI, and GARF, among other sites in Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Washington, D.C., this paper discusses the types of information pertaining to Nâzım that can be found in these archives, and the ways in which this previously-untapped material changes our understanding of Nâzım as both a writer and an historical figure. Whereas Nâzım Hikmet is typically discussed mainly in the context of his writing or his politics, this paper looks more closely at his border-crossing, i.e. the ways in which Nâzım’s international travels were reflected in his life and his writing. I further argue that Nâzım’s border-crossing, and its impact upon other important aspects of his life, was something that he shared with many from his generation, and in particular among his former classmates at Communist University of the Toilers of the East, where Nâzım had studied and worked between 1922 and 1928. While Nâzım Hikmet’s adventurous life story may appear, at first glance, to be unique or unparalleled, in other ways his biography is very much that of his generation.