Early life Mammadguluzadeh was born in the territory of the modern-day
Nakhchivan exclave of
Azerbaijan. He first joined ecclesiastical school and went to Nakhchivan city school and learned Russian at the age of thirteen. Mammadguluzadeh considered himself to be
Iranian, and was proud of the fact that his ancestors hailed from Iran. In 1882 he joined the Gori Pedagogical Seminary in the Georgian city of Gori and it was here that he developed his worldview. Mammadguluzadeh was a strong activist of the language unification. He condemned many of his contemporaries for what he considered a corruption of the Azerbaijani language by replacing its genuine vocabulary with newly introduced Russian, Persian and Ottoman Turkish loanwords, often alien and confusing to many readers. Later he became deeply involved in the process of
Romanization of the
Azerbaijani alphabet.
Career After completing his education in 1887 he moved to the village in the Irevan province to be a teacher. In 1898, he moved to
Erivan; in 1903, he moved to
Tiflis where he became a columnist for the local
Sharqi-Rus newspaper published in the
Azerbaijani language where he published his first short story the Postbox after is read by the writer Muhammad agha Shakhtakhtinski he encouraged him to publish in Sharqi-Rus. In March of 1903, he met one of a close friend and colleague Omar Faig Nemanzade who also becomes a prominent journalist in his own right. However, Sharqi-Rus didn't last long and only after publishing for two years in 1905 it was shut down. In March of 1905 after the closing of Sharqi-Rus and, he requested the government to published newspaper Novruz and were granted in summer of 1905 however he felt that he is limited in the range of content on the newspaper and relinquished the rights to Igbal newspaper owned by M.M. Vakilov.
Molla Nasraddin In 1905, Mammadguluzadeh and his companions purchased a printing-house in
Tiflis, and in 1906 he became the editor of the new
Molla Nasraddin illustrated satirical magazine. The Name Molla Nasraddin come to form the 13th-century Turkish cleric and a fool and name Nasruddin who stories often have a moral lesson. In Azerbaijani, the word Nasraddin it means "to tell it like it is" telling the reader that the magazine's ability is showing the political reality. The magazine accurately portrayed the social and economic realities of the early-20th-century society and backward norms and practices common in the
Caucasus. The Magazine uses illustrations, mainly by
Josef Rotter and
Oskar Schmerling, to reach the illiterate audience. Using stock character, simple illustrations, and symbolic language to attack the conservative religious mores and authoritarianism. In 1921 (after
Molla Nasraddin was banned in Russia in 1917), Mammadguluzadeh published eight more issues of the magazine in
Tabriz, Persia. After
Sovietization, the printing-house was moved to
Baku. Molla Nasreddin ceased publication in 1931 after Mammadguluzadeh's death. Mammadguluzadeh's satirical style influenced the development of this genre in the
Middle East.
Personal life and death In 1907, the twice-widowed Mammadguluzadeh married Azerbaijani philanthropist and feminist-activist
Hamida Javanshir. He died in
Baku in 1932, aged 65. ==Literature==