Sakina Mirza Heybat qizi Akhundzadeh was an Azerbaijani playwright. She was the first known female playwright and dramatist in Azerbaijani literature.
Life and contributions
Sakina Akhundzadeh was home-schooled by her father who was a poet writing under the pen-name Fada. Her later attempts to establish secular education in Quba ended in a tragic way: religious fanatics retaliated by killing Akhundzadeh's husband. She herself fled to Baku, where she became one of the first teachers at the Empress Alexandra Russian Muslim Boarding School for Girls, established in 1901, where she taught Azeri, literature and religious studies. This was an important appointment as the school was the first secular school for Muslim girls in the entire Russian Empire. It had opened only because the Azeri oil magnateZeynalabdin Taghiyev had funded it, and it is said that the school was named after he had written a letter to Czarina Alexandra. The local theatre was also funded by Taghiyev. She began her career as a playwright upon founding a drama club at that school and adapting her plays to stage performance by the students. Her first play entitledElmin manfaati was stagedfor the first time in 1904. Encouraged by the successful performance, Akhundzadeh went on to write more plays; among them, Hagg soz aji olar and Galin va gayinana. This was a time of change, in 1901, Baku had seen the first female actresses appearing without veils. Following a more liberal approach by the Czarist government, freedoms such as the first magazine written by and for women was in seen in 1911. Sakina was to be acknowledged as the first feminist playwright, with many of her plays dealing with the plight of Azeri women. In 1911, Huseyn Arablinski staged Akhundzadeh's remake of Namık Kemal's play Zavallı çocuk, which soon began being performed in amateur theatres outside the Caucasus. She continued to work with Arablinski until his death in 1919, as well as with Abbas Mirza Sharifzadeh in 1917–1922. Finally in 1917, Akhundzadeh's Zulmun natijasi was staged at the Taghiyev Theatre in Baku. The performance was a great success and brought fame to Akhundzadeh leading to her being recognized as the first female Azeri playwright in history. Sakina Akhundzadeh was also known for writing fiction. In 1918, she published her novel Shahzadeh Abulfaz va Rana khanim. The novel also contained poetic verses composed of 260 hemistiches.
