Novel
Studentlər
Not translated into English
Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli · 1934
Synopsis
Rüstəmbəy, son of a family of beys, studies law in Kiev between 1910 and 1915 among a small colony of Azerbaijani students. They drift away from religion, discover science and freedom, debate the emancipation of Muslim women and want to found a mutual aid association. They comment on the news from Baku: Cəlal denounces the rivalry between the rich and the intellectuals, Rüstəmbəy believes in the future of his people, Səlman, from a poor background, turns to Marxism, and the colony divides into socialists, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and national democrats.
Context
The book is autobiographical: its hero, whom critics link with the author, pursues the same studies in Kiev in the same years, and its writing was begun during the First World War, in Galicia. A sequel, 1917-ci ildə, takes up Rüstəmbəy in 1917. The preface, dated April 1936, extols Soviet student youth; it has been read as an attempt at self-justification in the face of the repression, at the time when the author was burning his nationalist manuscripts. The novel also alludes, under thinly disguised names, to the affair that set the engineer Lütfəli Behbudov against the patron Tağıyev in 1911.
Who it is for
A novel in Azerbaijani, with no translation; it helps to know the parties of the period, whose quarrels will lead to the republic of 1918.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a major work of twentieth-century Azerbaijani prose and as a portrait of the youth of its time.