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Laman Ismayilova

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This year marks the 145th anniversary of Abdulla Shaig, one of the most influential figures in Azerbaijani literature, AzerNEWS reports.

A poet, prose writer, playwright, translator, and educator, Shaig was honored as an Artist of the Azerbaijan SSR in 1941.

Born on February 24, 1881, in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia), Abdulla Shaig came from a family of scholars. His fascination with poetry and literature emerged at the age of seven while studying at the city school in Tiflis, where he memorized poems in Azerbaijani, Russian, and Persian. His first textbook, "Vətən Dili", included the fables of I.A. Krylov, translated by Hasanaliaga Khan Garadaghi.

After completing his early education, Shaig moved with his family to Khorasan, Iran, where he studied Persian, Arabic, and classical Eastern literature. Spending about eight years in Iran, he returned to Tiflis and shortly thereafter relocated with his family to Baku.

In Baku, Shaig mastered Russian through self-education and passed the exam to become a teacher in Russian-Azerbaijani schools. He combined his pedagogical work with literary pursuits, creating stories and poems that vividly depicted the lives of workers and peasants. His early short story "The Letter Did Not Arrive" tells the tragic tale of a worker from Iran who dies in a Baku oil well.

The writer began publishing in 1906, producing plays, stories, poems, and long-form narratives. In the 1920s, he taught in schools while continuing to write, publishing the play "Lightning" and completing "Deceived Stars", an adaptation of a story by M.F. Akhundov.

Abdulla Shaig is widely recognized as Azerbaijan's first writer for children. His whimsical, lyrical tales "Tyk-Tyk Khanum", "Good Friend", and others as well as plays like "Good Spring" and "The Shepherd", remain beloved by Azerbaijani schoolchildren to this day.

His plays also enjoyed great success on stage. Beginning in 1938, works such as "Khasay" and "El-oglu" captivated audiences at the Theater of the Young Spectator. That same year, a collection of his translations of 97 Krylov fables was published. In 1946, his play "Nushabe" premiered at the Azerbaijan Drama Theater.

A prolific translator, Abdulla Shaig introduced Azerbaijani readers to the works of Nizami Ganjavi, Ferdowsi, Saadi, Rumi, Shakespeare, Swift, Defoe, Krylov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Chekhov, Gorky, and others. His own works have been translated into Russian, Georgian, Uzbek, and numerous other languages.

Abdulla Shaig passed away on July 24, 1959, in Baku at the age of 78.

His name lives on through the Azerbaijan State Puppet Theater, founded in 1931 and named after him in 1974, and the Abdulla Shaig House Museum, opened in Baku in 1990 in the very apartment where he and his family once lived.