Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh
Birth date:
16 August 1925
Death date:
13 February 2009
Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh was born in Sheki. In 1934, his family moved to Baku.
He studied at the Philology Faculty of Azerbaijan State University (1942-1947).
He defended his candidacy on the topic “Samad Vurgun's Lyrics” (1951), his doctoral thesis on the topic “Samad Vurgun's Life and Creativity” (1964), and received the degree of Doctor of Philological Sciences. He taught at Baku State University for more than 40 years.
He began his artistic creativity in 1943 with the poem “Mother and Picture”. He is the author of more than 70 poetry books, 2 monographs, 11 scientific publicist books and hundreds of articles. About 50 of his books have been published abroad. His plays have been staged. He is the author of more than 20 large-scale poems.
He was one of the pioneers of the national liberation movement that began in the 1960s. In his poem "Gulustan" written in 1959, he expressed the historical tragedy of Azerbaijan, which was divided into two parts. For this poem, he was expelled from the University in 1962 with the label of "nationalist", but was reinstated 2 years later. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he published his works, which directly exposed the Soviet dictatorship, under the title "Voices from the Chest".
He was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Azerbaijan (1990), a member of parliament (1995, 2000). Honored Artist (1974), laureate of the State Prize of Azerbaijan (1975) and the USSR (1984), People's Poet (1985), Academician (2000), laureate of the Order of "Independence" (1995). Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh died in 2009 and was buried in the Alley of Honor.
