Akhverdov, Abdurragim Asabekogly

Born May 16 (28), 1870, in Shusha; died Dec. 12, 1933, in Baku. Soviet Azerbaijani writer; Honored Art Worker of the Azerbaijan SSR. Born into a landowning family. Studied at St. Petersburg University.

Akhverdov participated in the social and cultural life of Shusha, Baku, and Agdam from 1899 on. He staged his own plays, in which he scoffed at backwardness (The Unfortunate Youth, 1900) and exposed despotism (Aga Mukham-medshakh Kadzhar). In the journal Molla Nasreddin he published stories and topical satires (“Letters From Hades,” “Bomb,” “The Journey of Mozalanbek,” and “My Deer”) which were critical of bourgeois and feudal society. The plays written during the years of Soviet rule were devoted to pressing contemporary problems (The OldGeneration, In the Shade of the Tree, A Holiday for Women, and others). Akhverdov was the author of a brief sketch on the history of the Azerbaijani theater (1924). He translated into Azerbaijani the works of W. Shakespeare, F. Schiller, Voltaire, and É. Zola and stories by M. Gorky, A. P. Chekhov, and V. G. Korolenko.