The 'Azerbaijani Molière' was nearly trained as a Shia cleric
Mirza Fatali Akhundov was being groomed for the clergy until a poet and calligrapher asked him whether he wanted to become a hypocrite. He changed course, moved to Tiflis as a Russian imperial translator, and wrote the first comedies in Azerbaijani, plays that also helped give birth to modern Iranian theatre.
He was born on 12 July 1812 in Nukha, now Shaki, capital of a khanate that Russia occupied during its war with Iran and formally took in 1813. When he was six his mother left his father's household, and he never saw his father again; decades later he condemned polygamy as a practice that oppressed women and poisoned families. Her uncle, the cleric Haji Ali Asghar, adopted him and taught him the Quran, Islamic law and Arabic and Persian literature, hoping he would join the clergy.
In Ganja in the early 1830s he went to learn calligraphy from Mirza Shafi Vazeh, a mystic poet linked to freethinking ideas. Their talks turned to religion and the clergy, and Akhundov later wrote that Mirza Shafi lifted a curtain of ignorance from his eyes. In 1834 he settled in Tiflis, present-day Tbilisi, working for the rest of his life as a translator for the Russian viceroyalty. Friendships with exiled Decembrists and Armenian writers there sharpened his European outlook. His first published work, in 1837, was a Persian lament for Alexander Pushkin, with whom he felt a bond through an African ancestor on his mother's side.
In the early 1850s he wrote six comedies satirising life in Azerbaijan, and a German literary magazine hailed him as a dramatic genius. His 1859 novel The Deceived Stars laid foundations for realistic historical prose. He also argued for replacing the Perso-Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, and he founded the materialist and atheist tradition in Azerbaijan. Politically he was a loyal tsarist official who saw Russian rule as modernising.
His identity was layered. He called his people Turki and wrote social works in their language, yet named Iran as his fatherland and composed lyric poetry in Persian. Scholars credit him as a forerunner of modern Iranian nationalism; Reza Zia-Ebrahimi argues he introduced a damaging opposition between Aryan Iranians and Semitic Arabs, carried on by his disciple Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani. He died on 9 March 1878.
Source: Mirza Fatali Akhundov
