Mirza Fatali Akhundov §

Born in Nukha (Sheki) in 1812 into a clerical family of Persian-Azerbaijani background; settled with his uncle in Ganja and became fluent in Persian, Arabic, Russian and Turkish before entering Russian imperial service as a translator at the Caucasus viceroyalty in Tiflis from 1834. Wrote the first secular plays in any Turkic language, six comedies in Azerbaijani-Turkic 1850–55 satirising mullahs, miserly merchants and the contradictions of Caucasian colonial society, which inaugurated the Azerbaijani theatre tradition. His 1865 "Letters of Kamal-od-Dowleh" advanced an explicit anti-clerical and proto-secular critique of Qajar Persia; his alphabet-reform memoranda submitted to Istanbul in 1863 anticipated by sixty years the Latinisation of Turkic languages under the early Soviet Union and Republican Turkey. Died in Tiflis in 1878. Standard Azerbaijani historiography (and Soviet historiography) treats him as the founder of modern Azerbaijani secular literature and the originating figure of the Maarifçilik enlightenment.