The Azerbaijani Intelligentsia and New Experimentations in Culture

The Azeri intelligentsia, although deeply rooted in Persianate intellectual traditions, formed as a result of Russian conquest. The men (and some women) who comprised this group had typically received a secular education through military schools or the Russo-Tatar schools that the tsarist government had first started establishing in the 1830s.Footnote ⁷ In later years most had also pursued higher education in either the pedagogical seminaries of Gori and Tbilisi or at Russian universities. Familiarity with the Russian language and system of governance created new opportunities for enterprising young men, and the first Azeris to adopt the identity of the intelligentsia typically worked within the imperial bureaucracy. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as Russification became policy and Muslims were purged from the bureaucracy, members of the intelligentsia worked in a variety of professions, the largest contingent being schoolteachers who often engaged in journalism or other literary endeavors on the side.Footnote ⁸ Like their contemporaries among other Muslim populations in the Russian Empire, Azeri secular intellectuals were united by a feeling of alienation from their own society, which often resisted or outright rejected the projects of reform the Azeri intelligentsia was tirelessly attempting to implement.Footnote ⁹ The tension between tradition and innovation, and religion and secularism, characterized the lives of Azeri reformers in the late imperial era, and were major themes in the works they produced.

The origins of a distinctive Azeri intelligentsia begin with the life of Mirza Fatali Akhundzadeh (Akhundov) (1812–78), who abandoned religious studies as a young man in favor of studying Russian and worked for most of his adult life as a translator for the Russian government in Tbilisi. It was there, in the cultural center of Transcaucasia, that Akhundzadeh was introduced to European-style theater and various works of European intellectuals, including Hume, Mill, Moliere, and Voltaire, in Russian translation.Footnote ¹⁰ Under the encouragement of Russian and Georgian intellectuals that Akhunzadeh had befriended, including some exiled Decembrists, he began writing realist satires in vernacular Azeri. Between 1850 and 1855 he wrote six comedies. The history of Azeri theater is as old as the history of the Azeri intelligentsia, and Akhundzadeh wrote the first European-style plays in the Muslim world. Akhundzadeh wrote in Azeri out of a commitment to realism, not out of any sense of nationalism, although this choice would have nationalist implications in the future. In his lifetime, he actively sought to have his plays translated into Persian, and between 1872 and 1874 the work was done by Mirza Mohammad-Jafar Qaracheh-Daghi.Footnote ¹¹ Akhundzadeh’s plays were thus the first works of secular theater for both Azeri and Persian literature. Akhundzadeh also directly inspired the first Persian-language plays through his correspondences with the Iranian writer Mirza Agha Tabrizi, who began writing his own satires in 1870.Footnote ¹² Akhundzadeh lived in an era when an individual could simultaneously identify as a dedicated servant of the tsarist state and as a spiritual, if not literal, Iranian. He also, however, initiated a trend of writing in a simple, vernacular language that was best suited to transmitting social critique and polemics of reform to local populations. The Azeri intellectuals who succeeded him followed suit, and the project of creating an Azeri-language literary tradition widened the gap between Azeris in the Russian Empire and Iranians.Footnote ¹³ Akhundzadeh’s language, themes, and intense interest in Iranian society and politics became foundational aspects of Azeri theater.

After Akhunzadeh, the most influential early Azeri intellectual was Hasan bey Malikov, better known by his penname Hasan bey Zardabi (1837–1907). A graduate of Moscow University and a secondary school teacher in Baku, Zardabi founded the first Azeri-language newspaper, Akinchi (Ploughman), which was published in Baku from 1875 to 1877. He founded the first Muslim Benevolent Society in Azerbaijan in 1872, inspired by the success he saw among the Armenian population in developing associations to promote charity and education, but was disappointed by a lack of support from the Azeri elites and was forced to close the society within two years.Footnote ¹⁴ He was also responsible for the first ever performance of one of Akhundzadeh’s plays in the original Azeri in 1871 when he assembled a group of schoolchildren to perform Hajji Qara in their schoolhouse to raise money for their education.Footnote ¹⁵ After this initial performance, a small community of Azeri actors and playwrights formed and intermittently staged performances. Like his attempt to form a Benevolent Society, Zardabi’s attempt to create a theater culture laid important groundwork but would not truly see results until the years following the Revolution of 1905, around the time of his death. Among Zardabi’s students and one of the actors in that first performance was Najaf bey Vazirov (1854–1926), who would become a prominent playwright.Footnote ¹⁶ Vazirov would later be joined by Abdurrahim Haqverdiyev (1870–1933) and Nariman Narimanov (1870–1925) to form a small community of playwrights who attempted to initiate an Azeri theater culture in the late nineteenth century.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 allowed Azeri theater activities to truly begin to gain traction. Following the revolution, Article 38 of the Fundamental Laws of 1906 specifically outlined “the right of Russian subjects to form societies and associations for purposes which are not forbidden by the law.”Footnote ¹⁷ With the establishment of the Fundamental Laws, Russian subjects embraced their new freedoms and 1906 marked a year of feverish activity among Azeri intellectuals seeking to organize themselves into voluntary associations aimed at the social and cultural advancement of the Azeri people. Through the collection of membership fees and the philanthropy of the elites, these organizations wielded the financial resources necessary to create permanent theater companies that offered regular performances at Baku’s main theater. That theater, Taghiev Theater, had been built by Baku’s richest Azeri industrialist, Zeynalabdin Taghiev, but the cost of booking it for performances had previously been too prohibitive for Azeri troupes to perform there.Footnote ¹⁸ Two of these societies, the Salvation Enlightenment Society (Nicat Maarif Cəmiyyeti), founded in 1906, and Pleasure/Enjoyment Society (Səfa Cəmiyyeti), founded in 1910, included their own theater companies that preformed and toured regularly. This allowed a more stable and organized Azeri theater community to form, and all Azeri intellectuals engaged in some way with these and other societies. Journalist and political organizer Mammed Amin Rasulzadeh (1884–1955), opera composers and writers Uzeyir (1885–1948) and Jeyhun (1891–1962) Hajibeyov, actor/director Huseyn Arablisnki (1881–1919), and actor/director Huseynqulu Sarabski (1979–45), were among the Azeri theater pioneers who were intimately involved with society activities. They were aided in their efforts by an enthusiastic press, most notably Jalil Mammadguluzadeh’s (1869–1932) satirical illustrated journal Molla Nasreddin, published in Tbilisi.

The creation of a native Azeri theater tradition was one of the most celebrated and controversial components of the Azeri program of cultural reform in the late imperial era. Reform-minded Azeris saw theater as an essential didactic tool for promoting progress among a largely illiterate population. The more conservative elements of Azeri society, meanwhile, were horrified by the fact that Muslim men were dressing up as women and performing for audiences, often for the purpose of critiquing the influence of traditional elites and religious superstition. As the great Azeri actor and singer Huseynqulu Sarabski described it in his 1930 memoir, “from one side the mollas, from one side the tsar’s government, from one side Muslims with guns!Footnote ¹⁹ We had three censors above us. In order to put on a show first we needed permission from the government, then the mollas, then the armed Muslims.”Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, when the Taghiev Theater burned in 1909, Molla Nasreddin marked the event with a cover depicting a weeping Huseyn Arablinski as men dressed in traditional clothing danced in glee before the flames declaring “Allah shukur!”Footnote ²¹

Embattled though they may have been, the members of the Azeri theater community were lauded by their fellow members of the intelligentsia and the Azeri-language press enthusiastically covered and promoted each new production. Members of the Azeri intelligentsia fixated on theater as being particularly important to progress and took great pride in their place as leading cultural innovators in the field. Some Azeris were driven to mob violence in their opposition to the theater, and the first attempt to put an Azeri woman on the stage in 1915 resulted in a riot, with Hajibeyov and the young opera singer, Shovkat Mammadova, hiding in the oil fields for several days after fleeing the theater.Footnote ²² Despite this, a large enough portion of the Baku elites embraced theater-going for four professional Muslim drama companies to regularly produce performances in the city. In addition to the Salvation and Enjoyment Society companies, two independent companies, the Muslim Artist’s Company (Müsəlman Artistler Şirkəti), and Həmiyyət (Zeal), were also active in Baku in the first two decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ²³ The two societies with theater companies relied on ticket sales for their performances as one of their primary sources of income. In its 1907–8 accounts, covering the first full year the Salvation Society had a theater company, the society reported that 5,004.14 rubles of its 8,159.90 rubles yearly income came from its theatrical activities.Footnote ²⁴ This income only grew in subsequent years. With a modest but growing theater-going public, the Azeri intelligentsia saw themselves as at the vanguard of both Turkic and Muslim drama and embraced their self-appointed role as cultural ambassadors. Theater troupes regularly went on tour to perform original Azeri works that promoted the specific reformist sensibilities of the Azeri modernists. Azeri troupes toured throughout the Caucasus, north into the Volga-Ural region, east into Russian Turkestan, and south into Iran.

The Development of Azeri Drama

Azeri plays tended to be overtly didactic, and playwrights saw them as a potentially powerful tool of persuasion in a largely illiterate society. Tragedies and comedies both typically featured a young, educated male protagonist who was open to progress and new ideas in a way his elders were not. In the tragedies, this tended to lead to his death or insanity, while in the comedies he ultimately triumphed over a number of buffoons representing various reactionary figures in society such as bazaar merchants, clerics, peasant women, and aging beys. A common trope throughout late imperial Azeri theater was that of the scheming molla, an untrustworthy figure who often came from Iran and sought to defraud ignorant and naïve peasants out of their money and, occasionally, their daughters.Footnote ²⁵ While these plays were mostly written and performed in urban Baku, they were typically set in the regions, offering both a sharp critique of the backwardness of provincial life and hope for the potential for reform through the efforts of an enlightened youth. Among the societal ills tackled by Azeri plays were opposition to the usul-i jadid (New Method) education,Footnote ²⁶ arranged marriage, polygamy, corruption among both the clerical class and the old elites, and the adoption of European vices by the younger generation.

Opera in particular was a source of Azeri pride, and something they sought to export beyond their boundaries. In her dissertation, theater historian Carmen Gitre discusses how Egypt’s Ismail Pasha commissioned the opera Aida as part of his effort to locate Egypt within the European sphere. “For Ismail, it was evidence of Egypt’s distinction from the rest of Africa and proximity—cultural and political—to Europe. ‘My country,’ Ismail once famously stated, ‘is no longer part of Africa. It is part of Europe.’”Footnote ²⁷ Azeri cultural innovators working several decades later shared this preoccupation with Europe and grappled with where they as a Turkic Muslim people fit within the European cultural sphere. Unlike Egyptians, however, they enjoyed a rather straightforward route to Europe. They were, after all, subjects of one of the great European powers and, with 1905 and the election of the first Duma, increasingly able to think of themselves as citizens of Russia. The young men writing Azeri-language theater had themselves received much of their education in Russian and were able to access European culture and thought through the Russian language. Their cultural products, therefore, were simultaneously European and Muslim, allowing Azeris to position themselves as leaders in Muslim cultural reform and the Islamic world’s window into Europe.

On 12 January 1908, the young composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov conducted the premiere of his first opera, Leyli and Majnun, at Taghiev Theater. Huseyn Arablinski directed the performance, which starred Huseynqulu Sarabski as Majnun and Abdurrahim Farajov as Leyli.Footnote ²⁸ This was the first native Azeri opera ever written, and the press enthusiastically marked the event as a watershed in Azeri progress and a singular cultural accomplishment. Hajibeyov, a recent graduate of the Gori Pedagogical Seminary, where he received instruction in western musical notation and the violin, was just twenty-two years old and had been aided in writing the opera by his brother Jeyhun, who was still a student at the Baku Realni Gymnasium at the time of the performance.Footnote ²⁹ The two brothers were lauded as heralds of a new era of Azeri cultural innovation and models of the new generation of Azeri modernizers. In its glowing review of the opera, the journal New Life (Təzə Həyat) declared “There is no known word that is worthy of every acknowledgement of glory and thanks for the labor of the Hajibeyov brothers in this work, or in showing its virtuous features.”Footnote ³⁰ The reviewer acknowledged that all contributors to “our literature” deserved thanks, but that an opera was “of our literature, the most difficult and rare of dramatic work.”Footnote ³¹ There seemed to be a sense among progressive Azeris that opera was the highest form of culture in Europe, and that should they master the form themselves, they would truly have elevated their own society above the ignorance and inertia that they so decried.

Aware of the exotic nature of this new form of performance described in the review, the author offered a brief explanation of opera to his readers. It was, he explained, a type of dramatic performance where the dialogue is sung and set to music, which is played throughout the performance. It originated in Italy in the sixteenth century where, according to the author, it remained isolated for two hundred years before spreading to France and Germany in the eighteenth century. It had since spread farther through the work of various composers; “For example Russia’s first famous opera innovator was Glinka.”Footnote ³² Both this review and the review in Irshad (Guidance) emphasized Leyli and Majnun’s status as a first in Muslim society, with New Life declaring it “not just the first such performance in Baku, but possibly in all of Islamic staged performance” and Irshad’s reviewer, signed “Spectator” (“Tamashachi”) declaring that “for the first time in Muslim theater” an opera had been staged. Azeri commentators on the premier took pride in their ability to stake a claim on the first Muslim opera, proof of Azeri advancement ahead of their co-religionists. (Aida, commissioned by a Muslim leader but composed by an Italian, did not merit mention in these reviews.) This was revealing of the scope of the ambition of Azeri reformists, who saw themselves as leaders among not only the Muslim population of Russia, but vanguards of progress for all Muslims.

Azeri opera was not simply a direct copy of the European form. Hajibeyov melded traditional Azeri music with European classical music both out of necessity and out of a desire to develop a specifically Azeri brand of opera. The necessity was driven by the absence of Azeri musicians trained in the European classical style; he himself could play violin, and some of his fellow Gori Pedagogical Seminary graduates had received training on other instruments, but there were certainly not enough musicians to fill out an orchestra. It seems that one performer, named Daghestani, was able to sing in the operatic style, and did so in his two roles as Ibn-Salamliq and the Sarkar (Chieftain) Nofel.Footnote ³³ All other actors sang in the traditional mugham style. If Hajibeyov wanted to cast Azeri actors he had no other choice than to have most roles sung in this style, but this was also a deliberate choice to appeal to Azeri audiences, to whom European opera singing would have sounded completely foreign and potentially unpleasant. As the New Life reviewer noted, “Of course, from the view of European criticism this would not permissibly be called an opera.”Footnote ³⁴ Rather, the reviewer argued, “our mugham” was a worthy reflection of the culture, while it was “not our domain” to simply recreate European music.Footnote ³⁵

As Iranian theater scholar Jamshid Malekpour points out, the style and content of Leyli and Majnun connected Hajibeyov’s radical experimentations in music to a much longer artistic tradition rooted in Iranian ta’ziyeh theater. Hajibeyov chose one of the best-known stories in the Persianate world as his inspiration. He first resolved to write an opera based on Leyli and Majnun sometime in 1897/98 in Shusha, when he attended a traditional naqqal performance depicting “Majnun mad over Leyli’s Grave.”Footnote ³⁶ Although the reviewers of Leyli and Majnun praised Hajibeyov for “finally” dramatizing the poem, the fact was that Hajibeyov was building on a preexisting tradition of Iranian drama, one largely ignored by the secular press that sought to emphasize his innovation. As Malekpour observes, if we accept the definition of opera as being a drama set to music with singing, there is nothing foreign about opera in Iranian dramatic tradition.Footnote ³⁷ Ta’ziyeh theater is, arguably, native Iranian opera. Hajibeyov staged a tragic reenactment sung primarily in the traditional mugham style. The nature of the production, with more elaborate sets than one would find in ta’ziyeh, the use of western instruments, some operatic singing, and the setting of a theater, were new and novel for Azeri audiences. It would not have been entirely alien, however. Although little acknowledged in the coverage at the time and completely elided in Soviet literature, Hajibeyov’s operas owed as much to traditional theatrical forms as to European influence.

Hajibeyov’s operas continued to draw on Persian literature for inspiration and often erred toward the tragic in content. Asli and Kerem, a “love across the void” tragedy set in Isfahan recounting the doomed love of the shah’s son Kerem and the Christian woman Asli, was based on a popular dastan (ballad) that had been transmitted over the centuries by ashiqs (bards), while Shah Abbas and Khurshidbanu, an opera with a happy ending, was set in historic (if of indeterminate era) Iran, and told the tale of a humble and moral young woman teaching a despotic shah to become a more benevolent leader. It was his comedic operettas that marked a more definitive departure from native dramatic tradition. His two most famous, If Not That One, Then This One (O olmasin, bu olsun) and The Cloth Peddler (Arşın Mal Alan), were set in contemporary urban settings and actively critiqued Azeri society. These two operettas in addition to Leyli and Majnun were his most frequently performed works.

Hajibeyov’s operas became one of Azerbaijan’s primary cultural exports, with theater innovators promoting it through touring in the late nineteenth century, and the Soviet state harnessing an even wider audience in the early 1920s with performances throughout the Soviet Union and its near abroad.

Azeri Troupes on Tour in the Russian Empire

Azeris were by no means the only Turkic population fostering a nascent theater culture in the early twentieth century. As Madina Goldberg shows in her 2009 dissertation on Tatar theater in imperial Kazan, Tatar intellectuals were similarly occupied with encouraging a native theater culture as a key aspect of cultural reform. What Goldberg presents, however, is a view of theater as a key tool in a very Tatar project. She regularly cites themes of Tatar nationhood and pride in Tatar identity in late Imperial Tatar plays, and quotes Zhamal Validi, a key Tatar intellectual, as rejecting the idea of a unified Turkic nation as a fantasy constructed by Ismail Gaspirinskii, noting that language was an insurmountable barrier between Turkic populations.Footnote ³⁸ In her discussion of the touring activities of Kazan’s only professional theater troupe, Sayar, she notes that they traveled extensively throughout the Middle Volga region to cities including Ufa and Astrakhan, and annually to the Makariev Fair in Nizhniy Novgorod.Footnote ³⁹

Kazan’s Tatar theater was meant, it seems, exclusively for Tatar audiences. Baku’s theater leaders, meanwhile, apparently had no naysayers like Validi making similarly valid observations on the limits of language. Although, with their language enjoying widespread use in Iran and mutual intelligibility with Ottoman Turkish, perhaps they were able to conceptualize themselves as part of a broader trans-Imperial network than their Tatar contemporaries who had lived for centuries in the heart of the Russian Empire. While Azeri plays do articulate a growing sense of Azeri distinctiveness, they are largely devoid of any concept of Azeri nationhood. Starting with Akhundzadeh’s first plays, Azeri theater was closely entwined with the culture and politics of Iran, and many Azeri intellectuals harbored pan-Turkist sentiments that made them emotionally invested in progress in Central Asia. Azeri theater troupes took a missionary approach to their craft, embarking upon numerous tours throughout the empire and into Iran. Certainly, their primary touring activities were to other Azeri towns and cities in the Caucasus; an Azeri theater troupe spent the summer of 1906 performing in Lankaran, a town on the Iranian border, before taking their performance to Derbend, at the very north of the Baku governorate.Footnote ⁴⁰ Azeris brought their productions to Tbilisi, Ganja, Shusha, and Yerevan. In 1913 the Salvation Society’s Muslim Opera Company traveled to Shusha, under Sarabski’s leadership to perform Hajibeyov’s Asli and Kerem. A flier for the event featured a portrait of a dashing Sarabski and excitedly declared that the “Muslim Opera Theater Company from Baku” would be performing “for the first time in Shusha, the Caucasus’s famous opera Asli and Kerem.”Footnote ⁴¹ Through their touring, Baku-based theater troupes were able to promote the innovations occurring in the Azeri cultural center throughout the Transcaucasian Azeri populations. Their arrival in provincial towns was likely a major event, and a way for the elites in the regions to engage with the same activities as their peers in Baku. Touring was not limited to Azeri regions, however, and Azeri troupes set their sights on audiences much farther afield than Derbend.

Azeri theater troupes began touring in Central Asia early in the twentieth century, and played an important role in the development of Uzbek jadidism. Troupes performed in population centers including Ashgabat, Samarkand, and Tashkent.Footnote ⁴² According to Adeeb Khalid, these touring Azeri troupes served as the “most significant model” used by the Uzbek intellectuals who first started experimenting in theater production in the 1910s.Footnote ⁴³ This influence was the result of a conscious effort on the part of Azeri reformers to leave a mark on their Central Asian brethren, whom they viewed as woefully lagging in the Turkic quest for cultural reform.

Central Asians were, in the minds of Azeri reformers, sorely in need of Azeri innovation. This rather patronizing attitude was expressed quite clearly in the writer, politician, and medical doctor Nariman Narimanov’s drama Ignorance (Nadanlıq), written in 1895 and staged throughout the early twentieth century. Ignorance tells the tale of the uphill efforts of a young Russian-educated Azeri teacher, Mehemmed Agha, to bring enlightenment to a village in the Central Asian steppes. The village’s elders, the play’s representatives of Central Asian backwardness, are resistant to Mehemmed Agha’s efforts to keep their sons in school. The elders express anxiety over the modernization surrounding them, acknowledging that “Reading illuminates this iron road, telegraph, and different machines,” yet remaining resistant to the modern education offered by the young Azeri teacher.Footnote ⁴⁴ Mehemmed Agha is much more comfortable with the modern technology and Russian authorities than the village elders. Hailing from the land of the oil boom, where millionaire Muslim industrialists funded schools, theaters, and charitable societies, the young Azeri was a model of Turkic progress heroically working among to the ignorant populations of the steppe. The play ends with Mehemmed Agha’s efforts thwarted and his one dedicated student, Omar, shot to death. As Mehemmed Agha desperately asks who shot him Omar gasps out with his final breath “I was killed by ignorance!” In its entirety, the play reveals a rather pessimistic impression of Central Asians.

Azeri acting troupes also ventured to the Middle Volga region, and in May 1913 the Bakı Baku Muslim Artist’s Company (Müsəlman Artisləri Şirkəti) began a residency in Astrakhan with a performance of Uzeyir Hajibeyov’s comic opera The Cloth Peddler, which confronted the issues of arranged marriage and women’s inability to participate in public life. This performance was followed by performances of the Hajibeyov operas Shah Abbas and Khurshidbanu,, Leyli and Majnun, Asli and Kerem, and the Zulfuqar Hajibeyov (brother of Uzeyir) opera Ashiq Qerib.Footnote ⁴⁵ The themes of these operas, which included women’s role in society, the need for educated young men to find educated wives, and the damage caused by despotic rule, presented concerns that were not unique to Azeri reformers. Such themes would have resonated with like-minded Tatars, whose work in the realms of educational reform predated that of Azeris by over a decade. Whether these performances were well received or not is a question I have not answered, though the choice of exclusively performing operas was likely a calculated one to reach the widest possible audience on the Tatar tour; audiences in France, after all, did not need to understand Italian to enjoy Verdi.

Azeri Theater Troupes on Tour in Iran

When Iran erupted into revolution in 1906, Azeris in the Russian Empire took a keen interest. Azeris of the South Caucasus regularly crossed the border into Iran for business or in flight from tsarist authorities, while Baku was home to hundreds of thousands of migrant Iranian workers who came to work in the oil fields. Between their shared imperial history and constant population exchanges, Azeris felt invested in the outcome of Iran’s constitutional movement. Fresh off a revolution of their own, many radical-leaning Caucasians headed south to support the Iranian struggle.

The role of Azeri revolutionaries in the politics and armed struggles of the Constitutional Revolution is well documented. Mammed Amin Rasulzadeh, the Social Democratic-leaning journalist and scholar who had founded a number of leading Baku dailies, was in Iran during the revolution, avoiding arrest by tsarist authorities for his pan-Turkist activities. In 1909 Rasulzadeh became editor of the Iranian Democratic Party’s organ, Iran-i No, and used his connections to the Salvation Society, which he had helped found, to funnel money to Iranian revolutionaries.Footnote ⁴⁶ Rasulzadeh likely relied on his fellow political organizer Nariman Narimanov to transfer the money to the revolutionary cause. Narimanov was the leader of a shadowy organization identified in Russian police reports as the Mujahedin, that moved between Azerbaijan and Iran, especially Tabriz, fighting for the revolution. Financial and ideological support for the movement in the South Caucasus was largely overseen by Narimanov.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was not just financial support and the movement of fighters that men like Rasulzadeh and Narimanov facilitated, however. Throughout the constitutional era, Azeri theater troupes regularly crossed the border to perform in Tabriz, Rasht, and Tehran. Reformist Azeris who sought to support Iranian constitutionalists viewed Azeri theater as one of their most valuable exports. Performances by Azeri troupes were meant to be didactic events that invited Iranian audiences into enlightened society.

Azeri, Armenian, and Ottoman Turkish theater troupes had sporadically toured in Iranian since the late nineteenth century, but prior to the constitutional era these performances were too infrequent to seriously influence theater in Iran.Footnote ⁴⁸ The political and social engagement enflamed by the Constitutional Revolution resulted in Iranian audiences being more receptive to the theater, and Azeri and Armenian theater troupes started performing more regularly. According to Malekpour, Azeri theater in particular became dominant in Iran during the era, with the majority of performances occurring in Turkish compared to only a few in Persian.Footnote ⁴⁹

By looking at two examples of performances by Azeri theater troupes in Iran, one in 1910 and one in 1916, we can see how these troupes approached their performances, and how Iranian audience engagement with the performances evolved during this important period of theatrical development. On 9 January 1910, Iran-i No published an account of a performance the previous evening of a Turkish play by actors from the Caucasus. The actors performed at Farous Printing House on Lalezar. Farous Printing House printed Iran-i No and regularly hosted theatrical performances, becoming home to Tehran’s first permanent theater in 1911 with the establishment of the Ta’atr-e Melli (National Theater) by Abdol-Karim Mahaqeq-al-Dowle.Footnote ⁵⁰ The acting troupe was described simply as “from the Caucasus,” but based on the fact that they were performing an Azeri play at a printing house closely associated with Rasulzadeh, they were almost certainly from Baku. The actors performed two short comedic plays by the Azeri pedagogue and writer Sultan Majid Qanizadeh, Dursunali and the Tulumba (Dursunali və Ballibadi),Footnote ⁵¹ a one-act play, and It is Good to Be Patient in the Evening (Axşam Səbri Xəyir Olar), a play in two acts. The author of the article noted that at the end of the performance “one of the actors delivered a detailed speech about constitutionalism and freedom with great eloquence.”Footnote ⁵²

The two plays by Qanizadeh were short, didactic comedies that included Iranian characters—the Dursunali of the first play’s title is a servant at a Caravanserai who is described as wearing “hamshari’s clothes” (“hamshari” or “fellow countrymen” being the term used in Russian Azerbaijan for Iranian Azeri labor migrants), while a peripheral character in the second play is a Persian-speaking student who is played for comedic value in an exchange with the main character as they discuss the exoticism of eating cutlets at an Italian market. It is Good to Be Patient in the Evening is a particularly notable choice for a touring theater troupe to perform, as it is a play about the moral values of the theater. The bulk of the play features a conversation between two men—the middle-aged Mashadi Shaban and the young Agha Javad. At the beginning of the play Mashadi Shaban and his wife, Gol Jamal, discuss the need to find a husband for their daughter, Chamnaz, and lament how expensive it will be to marry her off. After Gol Jamal departs, Mashadi Shaban continues to contemplate his finances, which leads to his musing over the expensive recreation of Baku’s youths. for one night! It’s a fact that for one night thirty-forty manat is a lot of money.”Footnote ⁵³ Experienced theater-goers would be immediately in on the joke of Mashadi Shaban’s ignorance over the theater, since tickets could often cost as little as fifty kopecks. Since enlightenment societies viewed theater as their single most effective tool for spreading their reformist message, ticket prices were kept deliberately low to encourage attendance. Mashadi Shaban is unaware of this, however, associating theater with the wealthy. With this in mind, he hatches a plan to put on his own theater performance in order to make sufficient money to get his daughter married, thinking it will be easy money. He invites Agha Javad, who has a reputation as a cultured young man, to advise him in this endeavor.

Agha Javad represents the new generation of educated men who were engaged in associational life and committed to reforming society. When he first calls upon Mashadi Shaban, he is happy to share his experience with the theater, describing a recent performance that had been organized to raise money for orphans. The tickets, he noted, were three abbas.Footnote ⁵⁴ Mashadi Shaban then interrogates Agha Javad about the profitability of the venture:

The incorrigible Mashadi Shaban then tries a different approach, inquiring about the money from performances that were not explicitly organized to benefit orphans. Agha Javad then patiently describes how societies keep account books, and that all profits are entered into them and then used for various expenses, concluding “This rule is not unique to us. Other nations accomplish great, great works with this kind of money.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In this exchange Agha Javan is essentially describing to Mashadi Shaban, and by extension the audience, how voluntary associations work.

Concluding that Mashadi Shaban’s interest in theater is for all the wrong reasons, Agha Javad decides to continue their conversation in order to teach him a lesson (and also with the hopes of catching a glimpse of Chamnaz, whom he had heard singing earlier). Since Mashadi Shaban has decided to put on a comedy, Agha Javad explains the didactic value of comedy by quoting Saadi: “Luqman, being asked from whom he had learned civility, answered from those who are uncivil!”Footnote ⁵⁷ He then uses the example of a famous comedy, Akhundzadeh’s The Vizier of the Khan of Sarab (more commonly known as The Vizier of the Khan of Lankaran) to explain satire to Mashadi Shaban, primarily so that he can goad him into dressing up like one of the female characters as they practice acting. The farce culminates with the newly born theater enthusiast creating enough of a commotion that his wife and daughter rush in thinking he is dying, giving Agha Javad the opportunity to lay eyes on Chamnaz. The play concludes with Mashadi Shaban holding a more nuanced appreciation for theater, and Chamnaz engaged to a modern man who is not interested in the traditional expenses surrounding engagement and marriage.

This profoundly self-referential satire functioned on two levels depending on an audience member’s experience with the theater. The veteran theater-goer was invited in on the jokes at Mashadi Shaban’s expense. They would know that his assumptions about the costs of theater tickets was grossly exaggerated and would immediately spot his unfamiliarity with the art form. When first formulating the idea of putting on a play, Mashadi Shaban states that actors are “shameless people.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The term he uses for “actors” is oyan amala, literally “player workers,” an awkward descriptive term which shows that he lacks the appropriate vocabulary to even formulate opinions about the theater. When he meets with Agha Javad, the young man uses the term aktyorlar in his explanation of theater, comfortably using a European loanword. For those in the audience who were also already conversant with the theater, Agha Javad offered a congratulatory reflection of themselves. For those who were new to the theater and perhaps unfamiliar with the appropriate terminology and not yet convinced of theater’s value, Agha Javad’s explanations to Mashadi Shaban served a didactic and validating purpose. To be in the audience meant that you were on your way to becoming a member of enlightened society, so even those learning about theater from this work could rest assured that they were nothing like Mashadi Shaban.

In his memoir, Huseynqulu Sarabski offers a second informative example of an Azeri theater troupe in Iran that shows how the relationship between Azeri troupes and Iranian audiences had evolved. In 1917, Sarabski toured Iran with members of the newly formed artist’s union, including the comedic actor Mirzaaga Aliyev, Huseynagha Hajibababeyev, Nurmehemmed Mehemmedov, Mustafa Mardanov, several female actors identified as Tanylidi Khanim, Bashmanova, and Asya Khanim (based on the names and the fact that there were almost no Muslim women acting at this point, likely Armenian and/or Russian actresses), and the Armenian tar player Vartan. Upon arriving in Anzali, the group performed Hajibeyov’s comedic operettas The Cloth Peddler and If Not That One, Then This One.Footnote ⁵⁹ According to Sarabski, Iranian audiences then specifically requested that the Azeri actors perform the Ottoman writer Shams al din Samibey’s 1876 tragedy Gaveyi-Ahenger (Kaveh the Blacksmith). Gave was based on the legendary hero of the Shahnameh, Kaveh, a blacksmith who lived under the tyrannical rule of the foreign king Zahak. After losing two of his sons to Zahak’s serpents, Kaveh led a successful uprising against him, restoring native rule to Persia. In the age of colonialism and empire, the legend of Kaveh was particularly resonant for Muslims living under European rule, and in the nineteenth century thinkers from the Persianate sphere, including Akhundzadeh, began to use the story as inspiration for political resistance.Footnote ⁶⁰ The year before Sarabski’s group received the request from Iranian audiences to perform Gave, the Persian literary newspaper Kaveh was founded, taking its name from the same legend. In its first issue, the newspaper recounted the story of Kaveh, referring to his rebellion against Zahak as a “national uprising” and encouraging readers to follow his example in similar revolt against British and Russian interference into Iran’s affairs.Footnote ⁶¹ One wonders if the Iranian audiences who petitioned the Azeri actors to replace their comic operas with Samibey’s nationalist tragedy were themselves readers of Kaveh, eager to see the ancient legend, reimagined as a nationalist allegory, played out on stage.

Sarabski and the other actors indulged their audience’s request and, with some additional amateur Iranian actors to fill out the cast, prepared Gave for performance. The actors did not have permission to perform that particular play, however, and found themselves torn between their audience’s requests and threats from tsarist authorities that they would be arrested upon their return to Baku should they perform the play.Footnote ⁶² It is unsurprising that the tsarist authorities would have been concerned over a drama troupe of Russian Turkic subjects performing this overtly nationalist play for an Iranian audience that chafed under Russian political domination, especially in the final years of the war when the tsarist government was increasingly losing its grip on its vast imperial domain. The Russian demand that the opera company cease performance of Gave put the actors in the awkward position of having sold tickets advertising the new program yet being unable to perform the play. These performances were in Rasht, however, a region under the sway of the Jangali revolt, where neither the Russian nor the Iranian governments held much authority any longer. The actors thus appealed to the Jangali leader Mirza Kuchak Khan for permission to perform Gave. Described by the British as a “whole-hearted nationalist,”Footnote ⁶³ the themes of the play would have resonated with Kuchak Khan. As the troupe had hoped, he granted permission for the performance. Sarabski describes himself and his fellow actors as becoming unwitting agents of revolution, stuck in a power struggle between the rebel Kuchak Khan and the imperialist authority of the Russian and the Iranian governments. When a deputy of Kuchak Khan encouraged them to perform the play anyway, the actors cast their support behind the Jangalis and performed, he recalls, creating a “revolutionary spirit” among the people.Footnote ⁶⁴ The actors managed to avoid arrest, and returned to Baku at the dawn of the revolution.

It should be noted that we have only Sarabski’s account, and it is entirely possible that he exaggerated the events around the tour. We have no idea of exactly how involved Kuchak Khan truly was in the performance, if at all. Sarabski’s memoir was written in 1930 and must be understood as functioning within the constraints of Soviet ideology and censorship. While there is no reason to doubt his account of touring in Iran, his assertion that his performance created a “revolutionary spirit,” revolutionary though the time was, must be qualified within the Soviet context of the work. What is striking here, however is that the Iranian audiences encountered by Sarabski and his companions in 1917 were familiar enough with the repertoire of the era to make specific requests, and that the Azeri actors had seemingly no trouble recruiting enough Iranian amateur actors to fill out their cast. Theater culture had developed deeper roots since the constitutional era, changing the relationship between Azeri actors and Iranian audiences to one of a more reciprocal nature.

Azeri Drama as a Tool of Sovietization

Entry into the Soviet Union supplied Azeri reformers not only with long-sought influence at home, but also with the clout they had long desired to export their brand of cultural and social reform to Iran and promote it in Central Asia. The first, and until the creation of the Uzbek SSR in 1924 only, Turkic, Muslim, Soviet Socialist Republic, the Azerbaijan SSR acted as the model for progress and development that the Soviet Union presented to both its internal Muslim populations and its Muslim neighbors while pursuing good relations with Iran and Turkey.Footnote ⁶⁵ This policy continued into the early 1930s, when Soviet relations with its two southern neighbors soured as Turkey moved closer to the West and Iran drew closer to Nazi Germany. Thus Azeri actors, for whom travel to Iran had previously carried with it the threat of arrest upon their return home, and whose activities within the empire were constantly under scrutiny from censors, now engaged in these same activities as representatives of the state.

In the early 1920s Azeri reformers seized upon the opportunity to assist in the Sovietization of Central Asia. Sarabski was deployed to Turkestan in 1923 to aid in the organization of theater troupes and construction of theaters. In his memoir he recounts encountering a man he took to be an intellectual in Bukhara, to whom he explained the purpose of his journey; that he and his companions were actors who were there to put on several performances and help develop Turkestani theater. In Sarabski’s telling, the man had no idea what he was talking about, asking “what is an actor? What is a play?” When Sarabski asks if they have theaters or perform plays, the man replies in the negative, then asks “Are you a mutrub [dancing boy]?Footnote ⁶⁶ Do you dance?”Footnote ⁶⁷ Sarabski proceeds to explain the theater to the Bukharan, noting that he could not tell if the man actually understood him or not, and then asked him to sell tickets for their performances. The man agreed, but ultimately sold no tickets, stating that he was afraid to do so.Footnote ⁶⁸ Sarabski, like many European travelers before him, offers up the practice of dancing boys as a symbol of Central Asian backwardness, and presents himself as the civilizer, bringing the people a morally superior form of staged performance and facing considerable obstacles in his quest to do so. Sarabski depicts the modern theater as a moral space that would serve as a replacement for such immoral, un-modern practices as dancing boys.

By the 1920s Iranian theater was increasingly well-established. A number of theater companies emerged in Tabriz and Rasht in the 1920s, foremost among which was the “Aryan” theater troupe, founded by Buyuk Khan Nakhjavani, a transplant from Russian Azerbaijan who had arrived following the Bolshevik Revolution.Footnote ⁶⁹ Tabriz’s position as a center of Iranian theater was strengthened in 1927 with the opening of a new theater, the Red Lion and Sun.Footnote ⁷⁰ An ornate building that could seat an audience of 800, the theater was the largest and grandest in Iran.Footnote ⁷¹ The theater hosted regular performances by the local theater troupes, which drew heavily from the works of (now Soviet) Azerbaijani playwrights for their repertoires, performing the operettas of Hajibeyov and the plays of Haqverdiyev and Mammadguluzadeh.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, according to historian Christoph Werner, performances of Hajibeyov’s works, in both Azeri and Persian translation, made up a full third of all performances at the Red Lion and Sun in the 1930s–40s.Footnote ⁷³ In addition to these original works, Russian-educated Iranian, Azeri, and Armenian directors led the way in translating European works for the emergent Iranian stage.Footnote ⁷⁴

Despite these developments in Iran, newly Sovietized Azeri intellectuals began to more harshly criticize what they viewed as its backward religiosity and resultant failure to develop culturally in the 1920s. A 1923 issue of Molla Nasreddin included a satirical announcement for an upcoming tour by an Ardebil theater company led by the comedic actor “Shaykh … ” The company, read the announcement, would be touring during the holy month of Muharram, and assured readers that a “walled and ceilinged” section of the theater would be prepared for women, a play upon imperial-era theater advertisements that always promised a curtained off theater box for Muslim women who wished to attend performances. The announcement is followed by a list of the scheduled performances, many of them traditional ta’ziyehs reimagined as operas and plays with invented genres, authors, and runtimes added for comedic effect. These included “The Troops on Both Sides Are Prepared,” a tragedy in six acts, the opera “Qasim and His Bride,” “Abbas, or the Bloody War,” a tragedy in fifteen acts, and “Jinn Jafar’s Troops,” a comedy authored by “a jinn poet.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The announcement served not only to lampoon Iranian religiosity, but also shame Iran for the weakness of its theater culture. Molla Nasreddin did not reserve such criticism only for Iran, however. Just the year before it had published a cartoon depicting the image of a crowded room of gamblers, labeled “Our lotto houses,” contrasted with a theater occupied solely by a few bats and owls, labeled “our theaters.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In the early years of Soviet Azerbaijan, Azeri intellectuals faced much of the same challenges they had in the late imperial period, and as before found themselves battling traditional culture at home and abroad. As Soviet power consolidated and the state increasingly invested in the promotion of national culture, the status of Azeri theater changed. Now able, and expected, to openly declare the theater the morally superior communal space to the mosque, Azeris engaged in theater became increasingly emboldened. There was an initial backlash; Jalil Mammadguluzadeh had adopted increasingly atheist rhetoric in Molla Nasreddin under pressure from Soviet authorities and saw his readership drop as a result, but ultimately through a combination of forceful coercion and energetic promotion Soviet ideology took root.Footnote ⁷⁷ By World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied northern Iran, Soviet Azerbaijani artists took up residence in Tabriz with the backing of a world power and a sincere conviction in their mission to promote Azeri nationalism through a Bolshevik lens.

In 1941 Soviet troops invaded Iranian Azerbaijan as part of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, an operation designed to secure Iran’s oil fields and Allied supply lines to the Soviet Union. The Red Army faced minimal resistance when they entered Azerbaijan in August 1941 and within a month the Soviets had stationed 40,000 troops in northern Iran, stopping just south of Qazvin.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Soviet occupation of Azerbaijan lasted almost five years, and culminated in the short-lived People’s Government of Azerbaijan (November 1945–December 1946), the secessionist state that, as historian Touraj Atabaki argues, was born of genuine Iranian Azeri political currents magnified by Soviet influence, and only made possible through Soviet backing. During the occupation, Soviet Azerbaijani artists spent extended periods in Iranian Azerbaijan, acting as representatives of the state and promoting Soviet ideology around nationality and culture. This was both a continuation of a long tradition of cultural outreach in Iran and something new. Shaped by Soviet nationalities policies, Soviet Azerbaijani artists brought with them a newly articulated national identity that precluded the fluid national identities of the imperial era. Iranian policies under the Pahlavi Dynasty similarly strived for homogenization, in their case through Persianization. The resultant suppression of the Azeri language created a political opening for Soviet Azerbaijan that agents of the Soviet Union, artist and politician alike, were eager to exploit.

The writer Suleyman Rustam (1906–89) was among the Soviet Azerbaijani artists sent to Iran during the occupation. Rustam was of the first generation of truly Bolshevik Azerbaijani writers. Most famous for his poetry, he also wrote several “dramatic poems,” multi-act plays with poetic dialog. His most famous, Qachaq Nabi, tells the story of a Robin Hood-like figure of the late imperial era whose travels take him from Karabakh to Tabriz. Qachaq Nabi may have been an actual historical figure, but much of the legend around him was produced in the Soviet era, casting him as a socialist rebel against corrupt landowners. Iranian Azerbaijan thus held an important place in Rustam’s literary imagination well before he traveled there.

Rustam wrote a series of brief memoirs in the mid-1960s, several of which addressed his travels in Iran during the war. In his piece “The Other Side of the Aras” (Arazın o Tayında), he recounts his eagerness to travel to Iranian Azerbaijan: “Soviet Azerbaijan sent a group of leading intellectuals to Tabriz. I was among them … I was supposed to be in Tehran with some people. But this did not interest me at all. For the purpose of intimately knowing and deeply learning the lives of my brethren (‘qan qardaşları’), I did not go to Tehran. I stayed in Tabriz.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Rustam was initially deputy of the group but later replaced the head. Although his position was largely defined by his standing as an artist, the role was highly political. In addition to the leading intellectuals he counted himself among, Rustam’s group included Communist Party functionaries whose role was to advise local Iranian socialists and promote Soviet interests.Footnote ⁸⁰

Rustam painted a dismal image of the state of Azeris in Iran. After commenting on the poverty of Tabriz, he highlights the cultural repression he saw there: “In the schools lessons occurred only in Persian. Those who spoke their own mother tongue (Azeri) within the walls of the school were expelled.”Footnote ⁸¹ Rustam and his fellow artists focused on language as a means of political mobilization and spent their time in Tabriz sponsoring newspapers in Azeri and introducing Soviet Azerbaijani theater and literature as a way to encourage nationalist sentiment. The Azerbaijan Opera Theater (Azərbaycan Opera Teatri) toured in Tabriz performing Blind Man’s Son (Koroghlu), the only opera Uzeyir Hajibeyov composed post-Sovietization. The opera starred Bulbul, Soviet Azerbaijan’s celebrated opera tenor.Footnote ⁸² A later visit from a group of artists included Sara Qadimova, a famous singer of both mugham and opera, and Qurban Pirimov, one of the greatest tar players in Azerbaijan. The two performed traditional mugham together at the Red Lion and Sun (the name of the theater is not specified, but based on Rustam’s description it is the main theater in the city).Footnote ⁸³ The caliber of artists sent to Tabriz is indicative of Soviet Azerbaijan’s commitment to exerting cultural influence in Iranian Azerbaijan. Suleyman Rustam, Bulbul, Sara Qadimova, and Qurban Pirimov were major figures in Azerbaijani and broader Soviet artistic circles. Rustam was formerly director of the State Academic Drama Theater and would later be appointed People’s Poet of Azerbaijan SSR. Bulbul would be awarded the distinction of People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, while Qadimova and Pirimov would both be recognized as a People’s Artist of Azerbaijan SSR. Enthusiastic though the Soviet Union was in doling out awards, these four individuals held distinctions that marked them as particularly successful in their careers.

In addition to importing top performers to Tabriz, Rustam’s group came up with creative incentives to entice the local populace into the theater. As Christoph Werner has shown, Tabriz’s residents had become enthusiastic theatergoers before Soviet occupation.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is possible the newly arrived artists had to win over the locals, however, as the Soviets had disbanded the popular theater troupe Aryan for its pro-Pahlavi stance upon arrival in 1941.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Soviet Azerbaijani artists first had to disrupt the extant local theater ecosystem before instituting a more socialist, strictly Azeri one. With some of the favorite actors of Tabriz now absent from the stage, the Soviet theater troupes needed to win their audience. One of their overtures to the local populace occurred during Ramadan, when they opened the theater for iftar, serving plov, kebab, and other dishes to the audience seated in the loges while they watched performances.Footnote ⁸⁶ Rustam also began importing the films of Azerfilm, the state film production company, and provided them at low prices to theater owners so that they would be widely screened in the city.Footnote ⁸⁷ Although initially disruptive, the effects of Soviet influence on Tabriz’s theater scene was apparent to outside observers. Nilla Cram Cook, a cultural attaché of the American embassy, who became the head of the office of theater in the early 1940s, noted just three years after the Soviet Union ended its occupation that

When the People’s Government fell in 1946 and the Iranian military occupied Azerbaijan, Soviet influence in the region receded. The Communist Party of the USSR had been hesitant to get too involved in Iran’s affairs, while Mir-Jafar Baghirov, First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party, had advocated and facilitated much more direct involvement throughout the occupation.Footnote ⁸⁹ Baghirov was able to defy party preferences for so long because he enjoyed high status in the Soviet Union through his close association with Stalin, but ultimately the Soviet commitment to intervention in Iran declined. As Cram Cook’s observation’s show, however, some of the cultural influences took root.

The Soviet Union’s cultural outreach efforts in the 1940s were not limited to Azerbaijan, and included less dramatically interventionist activities such as the establishment of the Iran and Soviet Cultural Relations Society, which published the monthly literary journal Payam-i No (New Message). The journal was run by leading Iranian leftist intellectuals, including the great novelist Bozorg Alavi, who was appointed editor upon its foundation in 1944.Footnote ⁹⁰ Payam-i No’s entire fifth issue was dedicated to Soviet Azerbaijan, beginning with a profile of Akhundzadeh in which he was reimagined as “the first person from the past who worked day and night for the progress of freedom and democracy.”Footnote ⁹¹ Other profiles included those of Uzeyir Hajibeyov, still alive and the dominant figure in Azeri opera, and Jafar Jabbarli, Azerbaijan’s first writer and playwright who could be considered a truly Bolshevik literary figure. A multi-page profile of Soviet Azerbaijan’s theater praised the progress brought by the revolution, noting that while before there were but two theaters in all of Azerbaijan, now there were twenty-five, with 2,262 men and women employed in the theater and a full 1,532,300 theater-goers in a year. This, the paper concluded, was an example of how “in a short period of time (a quarter century) theater in Azerbaijan was created without pause, and every day goes further down the evolutionary road.”Footnote ⁹² In this article the author presents Azerbaijan’s theatrical development, which overcame religious opposition and colonial suppression of native writers, as a roadmap for how to create a robust theater society that Iran might follow. Many of the contributors to Payam-i No traveled to the Soviet Union and returned to publish accounts of the great intellectual, social, and cultural progress they saw there and advocate for similar programs in Iran. Instead of realizing these goals, many of them, including Alavi, would end up in exile in the Soviet Union and its satellites following the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh’s government. The journal naturally focused on the Soviet Union and the revolution as the source of Azerbaijan’s successful theater culture, but in its profiling of Akhundov, Hajibeyov, and Jabarli (whose early writing career was in the journals of the late imperial era), it implicitly acknowledged Soviet Azerbaijani theater’s late imperial roots.