Alexander Shirvanzade
Encyclopedia
Alexander Shirvanzade (April 18, 1858 – August 7, 1935) was an Armenian playwright
and novel
ist. His original name was Alexander Movsesyan.
. At the age of 17, Shirvanzade went to work in the city of Baku whose fortunes were beginning to rise with the boom in oil production. He immersed himself in Armenian, Azeri and Russian literature as well as reading Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Shakespeare, his greatest love.
Working first as a clerk and then as an accountant for oil companies, Shirvanzade saw first-hand the social impact of industrialized oil production. He turned his shock and anger into a literature of protest, writing in many genres: novels, plays, short stories, and newspaper articles.
His later literary activities resulted in his imprisonment in Tiflis, an experience which led to his masterpiece, Chaos (1896–97). Returning to Baku, he became increasingly interested in women's issues, as shown in his play Evgine about women's suffrage, and Did She Have the Right? Shirvanzade's concerns with capitalism and feminism fuse in his drama, Namus (For the Sake of Honor) (1904). In 1916, Maxim Gorki wrote that Shirvanzade's works "were known and read not only in the Caucasus but also in England, in the Scandinavian Peninsula, and Italy."
In his later years, Shirvanzade lived abroad, finally returning permanently to the USSR in 1926 and became a member of the Union of Azerbaijani Writers. He died in Kislovodsk in 1935, and was buried in Yerevan.
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
and novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
ist. His original name was Alexander Movsesyan.
History
Aleksandr Movsesian was born on April 18, 1858, into a tailor's family in the province of Shirvan, Azerbaijan, and later adopted the pen-name Shirvanzade (son of Shirvan). He brought to fruition the social realist school blossoming in the Caucasus and particularly in Azerbaijan promoted by the philosopher and playwright Mirza Fatali AkhundovMirza Fatali Akhundov
Mirza Fatali Akhundov , former – Akhundzade , was a celebrated Azerbaijani author, playwright, philosopher, and founder of modern literary criticism, "who acquired fame primarily as the writer of European-inspired plays in the Azeri language"...
. At the age of 17, Shirvanzade went to work in the city of Baku whose fortunes were beginning to rise with the boom in oil production. He immersed himself in Armenian, Azeri and Russian literature as well as reading Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Shakespeare, his greatest love.
Working first as a clerk and then as an accountant for oil companies, Shirvanzade saw first-hand the social impact of industrialized oil production. He turned his shock and anger into a literature of protest, writing in many genres: novels, plays, short stories, and newspaper articles.
His later literary activities resulted in his imprisonment in Tiflis, an experience which led to his masterpiece, Chaos (1896–97). Returning to Baku, he became increasingly interested in women's issues, as shown in his play Evgine about women's suffrage, and Did She Have the Right? Shirvanzade's concerns with capitalism and feminism fuse in his drama, Namus (For the Sake of Honor) (1904). In 1916, Maxim Gorki wrote that Shirvanzade's works "were known and read not only in the Caucasus but also in England, in the Scandinavian Peninsula, and Italy."
In his later years, Shirvanzade lived abroad, finally returning permanently to the USSR in 1926 and became a member of the Union of Azerbaijani Writers. He died in Kislovodsk in 1935, and was buried in Yerevan.
Books
- Chaos (1898), a novel describing the life of a large industrial city
- The Evil Spirit, a novel about an epileptic woman.
- Namus (1911), a play about the ill fate of two lovers, who were engaged by their families to each other since childhood, but because of violations of namusNamusNamus is the Arabic word of a concept of an ethical category, a virtue, in Middle Eastern patriarchal character...
(a tradition of honor), the girl was married by her father to another person.
Quotes
Source: Ara BaliozianAra Baliozian
Ara Baliozian is an Armenian author, translator, and critic, born in Athens, Greece on December 10, 1936. He received his education at the Mekhitarist College of Moorat-Raphael in Venice, Italy, where he also studied economics and political science at the University of Ca Foscari. He now lives in...
- "The esthetic judgment of our people has been corrupted. What we need is a literary periodical that will explain to us what exactly is this thing called literature. "
- "The narrow partisan propaganda line that is espoused by our press is the enemy of all literature."
- "You cannot be both a writer and a political activist. Those who say you can, have no conception of what literature really is."