Mirza Fatali Akhundov

Mirza Fatali Akhundov, also known as Akhundzade, was an Azerbaijani writer, playwright, literary critic and atheist thinker, born in 1812 in Nukha, the capital of the Shaki Khanate, and active for most of his life under the Russian Empire. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern Azerbaijani literature and as a key figure of the Enlightenment in the Caucasus and in contemporary Iran.

After Russia occupied his region, he grew up in Nukha and Ganja, where his uncle Haji Ali Asghar, who had adopted him, arranged his education with a view to a clerical career. In Ganja he met the mystic Mirza Shafi Vazeh, whose conversations turned him away from that path. In 1834 he settled in Tiflis, where he worked as a translator of Oriental languages for the Russian administration and as a teacher, and where contact with exiled Decembrists and Armenian writers shaped his Europeanised outlook.

Around the early 1850s he wrote six comedies, regarded as the first comedies in Azerbaijani literature, in which he satirised the society of his time. In 1859 he published the short novel The Deceived Stars, an early example of realistic historical prose in his language. His plays were translated into Persian and helped shape the birth of modern Iranian theatre.

His thought combined religious criticism and atheist materialism with the belief that Russian rule could bring modernisation to the Caucasus. He proposed replacing the Perso-Arabic script used for Azerbaijani with the Latin alphabet. Although he described his kinsmen as Turkic, he considered Iran his homeland, and his praise of the pre-Islamic past of Iran places him among the forerunners of modern Iranian nationalism. His influence reached Persian writers such as Malkum Khan and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, and Turkish intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.