Mikayil Mushfig

Mikayil Mushfig (Mikayıl Müşfiq, born Mikayil Ismayilzade) (5 June 1908, Baku – 6 January 1938, Baku) was an Azerbaijani poet of the 1930s.

Mikayil Mushfig is considered to be one of the founders of new Azerbaijani poetic style.

Most of his poetry is about romance, nature, feelings.

Despite this, he soon became one of the slandered and criticized poets in the Union of Soviet Azerbaijani Writers, and soon afterwards, Mushfig was arrested and executed by Soviet authorities at the age of 30 during the Stalinist purges in the USSR.

Mikayil Mushfig was born in the city of Baku of Baku Governorate in 1908.

His father Mirza Abdulgadir Ismayilzade was a teacher and a poet.

He lost his parents in early childhood, so was brought up by the relatives.

He received his elementary education at Russian-language School in Baku.

After the establishment of the Soviet regime in Azerbaijan in 1920, he studied at Baku Teacher's School and in 1931, he graduated from the Department of Language and Literature of the Baku State University.

His first poem Bir Gün ("The Day") was published in the Ganj fahla newspaper in Baku in 1926.

At about this time, he adopted the pen name Mushfig (Perso-Arabic for "tender-hearted").

According to Mushfig's wife, Dilbar Akhundzadeh, Mikayil welcomed the transition from the Perso-Arabic script to the Latin script that took place in Azerbaijan in 1927.

His excitement was expressed in the following verse:

When Stalin and Mir Jafar Baghirov decreed that traditional Azerbaijani musical instruments, including the tar, were to be banned, Mushfig wrote a poem in response titled "Sing Tar, Sing".

The popularity of his poem with the public convinced the authorities to rescind the tar ban.

Along with Samad Vurgun and Rasul Rza, Mikayil Mushfig became one of the founders of new Azerbaijani Soviet poetic style in 1930s.

He translated a number of poems from Armenian and Russian as well.

Mikayil Mushfig actively promoted traditional Azerbaijani musical instruments, which had been forbidden at that time.

In his poetry, Mushfig glorified the work of industrial workers and peasants and lauded the construction of industrial enterprises in Baku and other cities.

In late 1930s, as confessed by writer Mehdi Huseyn in one of the Ilyas Afandiyev's memories, it was very common among poets and writers to slander each other and accuse each other of nationalism or spreading religious propaganda.

The reasons of such slanders were generally connected with personal problems and bitter rivalries between certain poets and writers.

Mushfig himself came under the barrage of criticism in the Azerbaijani Writers' Union along with some other literary figures of the era such as Huseyn Javid, Ahmed Javad and Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli.

Literary figures who were serving the interests of Stalin's regime in the USSR branded Mushfig as a "chauvinist" and a "petit-bourgeois poet".

Mushfig married Dilber Akhundzade in 1933.

Mikayil started his professional career as a school teacher.

While being involved in teaching he started writing poems.

He was arrested in 1937, charged with treason as "the enemy of the state", and executed in 1939 in the Bayil prison near Baku.

He was later officially exonerated.

Even though Mushfig wrote poems about Joseph Stalin, during the de-Stalinization policy of the USSR he was portrayed as an "anti-Stalinist" poet.

In 1956, he was exonerated posthumously.

Nikita Khrushchev era of de-stalinization has resulted in Mushfig's poetry being famous in Azerbaijani society.

On May 23, 1956, under the decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of USSR, Mikayil Mushfig was acquitted after his death.

In October 2018, a working group consisting of the members of National Academy of Sciences, the ministries of Health and Culture, and other relevant authorities was set up under the instruction of the President Ilham Aliyev in order to investigate the most recent information about the unearthed remains of the poet.

School No.18 in Baku, No.14 in Ganja, No.34 in Sumgait, secondary school in Gilazi settlement in Khizi are named after Mikayil Mushfig.