Abdulla Shaig

Abdulla Shaig (Abdulla Talibzadeh) was born in Tbilisi. He took his first education at the city's Muslim school. In 1893, due to family circumstances, he moved to Khorasan, where he continued his education at Yusif Ziya's school. For seven years in Khorasan, he studied history, logic, psychology, Eastern, Azerbaijani, and Russian literature. He came to Tbilisi in 1900, and to Baku in 1901. In Baku, he acquired a large library of a Russian intellectual. Since 1901, he began teaching as a reserve teacher in Russian-Tatar schools, dedicating 34 years of his life to the development of Azerbaijani education. He contributed to the organization of the First Teachers' Congress held in Baku in 1906. At the congress, he took the initiative to teach the native language and literature. New textbooks were published less than a year after the First Teachers' Congress: "Alifba", "Uşak çeşmeği", "Ikinci il", "Gulzar", etc. He agreed with the leading intellectuals in the idea of ​​an independent Azerbaijan. In 1919, he wrote the play "Student Life" in connection with the establishment of the Azerbaijan State University, and completed the unfinished novel "Heroes of our Age". His poems written during these years, such as "Yeni ay doğerken", "Türk edami centricıyet Musavat ithaf", "Arazdan Turana", are among the examples of poetry valued in the literary environment. In the poem "Vetənin yanıq sesi", the heroism of the Oghuz, the Altai Turks, the Elkhan and Altun armies are given as examples. In the poem "Iki mujahid" or "Ati yaralı törol", he brought to the forefront the wounds of the world war, the brutality of the Armenian Dashnaks in the lands of Azerbaijan, and the mischief in Karabakh. During the APR period, he nationalized several schools and created Azerbaijani Turkic classes in Russian schools. He worked as a member of the commission that prepared programs and textbooks. Although he began his creative work with translations and ghazals, his first printed work was a children's poem called "Laylay". Starting in 1906, he created the pearls of national children's poetry with a series of poems. As the founder of Azerbaijani children's drama, he preached openness, humility, and love of nature in his verse stories "Tulku hajj gedir", "Yakhshi arxha", and "Shelayguyruq". He laid the foundation for the national children's theater with the play "Gozel bahar" written in 1910. The writer, who began his prose work in 1905 with the unfinished novel "Two Muztaribs or Suffering and Conscience", wrote stories, narratives and novels such as "The Letter Did Not Arrive", "Migration", "Flood", "Suicide or Living", "Goblin", "In the Presence of the Devil", "Dursun", "Heroes of Our Century". The stories "Migration", "The Letter Did Not Arrive" and the novel "Heroes of Our Century" are considered the first examples of national prose. "We Are All Particles of a Sun" is one of the poet's romantic poems that shows the worldview of that time, the forces of evil causing discord among peoples, causing war, the future of humanity, and the fate of people. Writer, educator, public figure, Honored Artist (1940) Abdulla Shaig died in 1959 and was buried in the Alley of Honor.