Jeyhun Hajibeyov
Encyclopedia
Jeyhun Hajibeyli (1891–1962) was a Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...

i publicist, journalist and ethnographer.

He was born in Shusha
Shusha
Shusha , also known as Shushi is a town in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus. It has been under the control of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic since its capture in 1992 during the Nagorno-Karabakh War...

, a brother of the great composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov
Uzeyir Hajibeyov
Uzeyir bey Abdul Hussein oglu Hajibeyov was an Azerbaijani and Soviet composer, conductor, publicist, playwright, teacher, translator, and social figure from Azerbaijan. He is recognized as the father of Azerbaijani classical music and opera...

. Jeyhun continued his education in Baku
Baku
Baku , sometimes spelled as Baki or Bakou, is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. It is located on the southern shore of the Absheron Peninsula, which projects into the Caspian Sea. The city consists of two principal...

 after graduating from the Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n-Tatar Azeri school in Shusha. Later he went to St. Petersburg under the sponsorship of oil baron millionaire Murtuza Mukhtarov
Murtuza Mukhtarov
Murtuza Mukhtarov was an Azerbaijani Oil industrialist and millionaire.Mukhtarov was born into a poor family in a village of Amirajan near Baku. Mukhtarov managed to become one of the most reputable drilling experts in Baku through his ability and many years of experience. He set up his own...

 where he entered the Law Department of the university there. After this, he continued his education at the Sorbonne University in Paris. For many years in Paris, he was one of the two most active authors of Kaspi Newspaper. For some time he was the editor of the daily literary-social newspaper called Azerbaydjan published in Russian.

Exile

In 1919 Jeyhun Hajibeyli went to France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 as a member of the delegation led by Alimardan Topchubashev
Alimardan Topchubashev
Alimardan Alakbar oglu Topchubashov was a prominent Azerbaijani politician, foreign minister and speaker of the Parliament of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic....

 to take part in the Versailles
Versailles
Versailles , a city renowned for its château, the Palace of Versailles, was the de facto capital of the kingdom of France for over a century, from 1682 to 1789. It is now a wealthy suburb of Paris and remains an important administrative and judicial centre...

 Peace Conference
Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The Paris Peace Conference was the meeting of the Allied victors following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers following the armistices of 1918. It took place in Paris in 1919 and involved diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities...

. Due to the political events that took place in Baku and throughout Azerbaijan in 1920, he was not able to return to Baku and had to live out his life in France never to return. Jeyhun bey brought his Motherland that he always longed for and carried in his dreams, with him to France. He lived two lives in Paris. One was the real Paris life, the other one was the life related to his Motherland which he created in his dreams and longings and memories. Dreaming was the only way he could “communicate with his dear ones” because all mail was cut off.

He wrote in his diary:
“Yes, I have to admit that during these 40 years of separation from my dear ones that I have often longed for my sisters; and sometimes the images of my mom and my middle brother (Uzeyir) replaced the images of my sisters in my mind.

Both of them were crying bitterly when we were saying good-bye. I was trying to convince them that I was going away for only two months. I was asking them why they were crying? Now I tell myself, Jeyhun bey, you deceived them because you yourself were not aware of what would happen. Now you’re living 41 years separated from them. You never saw them again nor will you ever see them in the future - your dear ones—men and women are passing away one by one… And you yourself will, too.”



It turns out that especially the remaining years of his 43 years living in exile were so sad.

Hajibeyli died in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 in 1962 and was buried there. Uzeyir Hajibeyov
Uzeyir Hajibeyov
Uzeyir bey Abdul Hussein oglu Hajibeyov was an Azerbaijani and Soviet composer, conductor, publicist, playwright, teacher, translator, and social figure from Azerbaijan. He is recognized as the father of Azerbaijani classical music and opera...

 died in 1948. In 1990 Azerbaijani diplomat Ramiz Abutalibov brought Jeyhun’s archive to Baku from France and presented it to the Central State Literature and Art Archives. This archive consists of 20 folders. There are approximately 500 articles in those folders. It was discovered from these documents that Jeyhun Hajibeyli also wrote narratives and stories, and was involved in scientific research work. He also carried out interesting research on Azerbaijan’s history, ethnography, folklore, literature and language. He also wrote the narrative, “Haji Karimin Sahari” (“The Morning of Haji Karim”) which was published in the Kaspi newspaper in Baku.

In 1925 “Arshin Mal Alan”, the musical operetta written by Uzeyir Hajibeyov was staged at the Women’s Theater in France based on Jeyhun Hajibeyli’s translation and staging.

Accomplishments

As an academic, Jeyhun Hajibeyli’s had a very broad range of interests. He did research on “Babak and Ancient State of Arran” and “The History of Baku and Barda”. He also wrote articles about the creative work of the great Persian writers Ferdowsi
Ferdowsi
Ferdowsi was a highly revered Persian poet. He was the author of the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran and related societies.The Shahnameh was originally composed by Ferdowsi for the princes of the Samanid dynasty, who were responsible for a revival of Persian cultural traditions after the...

 and Shirazi
Shirazi
- People :*Shirazi , a social group among the Swahili people of East Africa*Grand Ayatollah Mirza Hassan Shirazi, the leading marja of his time, and is widely known for his 1891 fatwa against the usage of tobacco...

.

One of the most valuable of his works is Karabakh’s Dialect and Folklore. Bayram Aghayev, a member of the staff of the Nizami Literature Institute who is a Philology Sciences Candidate prepared this work for publication that had previously been released in Paris in Asia Magazine in 1934.

From the first words that Jeyhun Hajibeyli wrote in this monograph, we can see that he had begun work on this Karabakh Folklore volume prior to the Revolution (1920) when he was still in his Motherland. In Paris, he would enrich his work with new material that he gathered. This work was written at the request of famous Turkologist V. V. Radlov (1837–1918) who played a historical role in deciphering the Orkhan-Yenisey literary monument.

The Karabakh Folklore volume was written for a special publication — A Collection of Turkish-Tatar Dialects that Radlov was organizing. After the academician died, his successor the famous Orientalist, Professor A. N. Samoylovich studied the short research and praised it in an article. But because of World War I, provocations brought on by Armenian Dashnaks and Russian Bolsheviks against Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...

 in the Caucasus
Caucasus
The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...

, finally Azerbaijan’s was forced to become part of the Soviet Union. Consequently Jeyhun’s scientific work about this region could not be published.

Hajibeyli had to seek asylum in France isolated from the sphere of Russian Orientalists’ that he had developed networks and connections with and also separated from his native land Karabakh, Azerbaijan which was the object of his research.

In order to present his work to the Collection of Turkish-Tatar Dialects, the author wrote his work in Russian and prepared the examples about Karabagh’s dialect, folklore and ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

 in the Cyrillic alphabet (although Arabic script was the official alphabet in Azerbaijan those days). But later in order to present his work to the French scientific community, Hajibeyli again had to revise his work and convert all the samples to Latin transcription.

This concise collection is a good source for Europeans who want to learn about the East and about the Azeri language, about Azerbaijan and about the ethnography of its inseparable part—Karabakh. It includes both general and specific information about our traditions, national literature and dialects. Up until that time such information was not known in France and Russia, nor even in Azerbaijan as it had not been researched and published systematically.

Karabakh
Karabakh
The Karabakh horse , also known as Karabakh, is a mountain-steppe racing and riding horse. It is named after the geographic region where the horse was originally developed, Karabakh in the Southern Caucasus, an area that is de jure part of Azerbaijan but the highland part of which is currently...

 folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

consists of 33 small sections—bayatis, praises, supplications, threats, vows, elegies, lullabies, endearments, jokes, humorous anecdotes used by ordinary people. Hajibeyli also showed the phonetic features of Karabakh dialect and its typical features and compares them with dialects from other Azerbaijani regions.

Source

A Few Words about Jeyhun Hajibeyli
By Bakir Nabiyev (Academician) and Bayram Aghayev (Sciences Candidate in Philology)

Translated by Gulnar Aydamirova

Document

http://hajibeyov.com/research/jeyhun/karabakh.pdf

http://southcaucasus.org/Jeyhun_Hajibeyli.htm
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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