By Vestnik Kavkaza
A presentation of the research novel by the Azerbaijani writer Elmira Akhundova “Heydar Aliyev. Personality and Epoch” took place in the Rudomino Library of Foreign Literature. The novel is based on archival and official documents and hundreds of tape-recorded interviews with friends, relatives, and supporters of Heydar Aliyev.
“Heydar Aliyev is such a many-sided and outstanding person in history that a lot of books will be written in the future, many films will be shot, and many plays will be staged, I think” Polad Byul-Byul Ogly, the Azerbaijani ambassador to Moscow said. “His multi-facetedness, his prominent life, his outstanding fate was imprinted in history and every new generation will study his life in a different way, consider his activity in a different way, everything that he did in Azerbaijan for the Azerbaijani people and in the period when he was one of the heads of the Soviet Union.”
“Heydar Aliyev remains one of the most outstanding figures of Azerbaijan in the 20th century,” PhD Konstantin Dolgov is sure. “He always impressed people with his wonderful energy. He was a man who was always focused on painful problems of the republic and the Soviet Union when he was the first deputy chairman of the Cabinet of the USSR. When I met him in Azerbaijan and Moscow, he never spoke about insignificant things, never wasted his time on empty chat. He always had certain tasks on settling this or that problem. From this point of view he was a remarkable person, and his fate is not “rosey.” His fate was difficult in all senses. But he was always a personality, never betrayed his views, ideas, the ideals in which he believed and tried to implement them.”
The author of the book, Elmira Akhundova, told Vestnik Kavkaza: “Heydar Aliyev was a great person. I communicated with him closely; I was lucky to accompany him during his foreign visits. We became friends and communicated actively. I began to write articles about him, later books. He liked the book titled “Death of A Printer”, it was a political detective novel about one of the difficult periods in his life. After this I had the idea of writing a biographical research novel. I told him about this in April 2003. Actually he blessed me, he said that it would be wonderful. Thus, 10 years of my work, hundreds of tape-recorded interviews with those who worked with him, archival materials, the personal archive of the president – it is a huge volume of data which was difficultly composed into 7 books.”
Elmira Akhundova hopes that “the books will be interesting to read as they are written as fiction, even though they are based on documents. The language is clear and simple. We are preparing a foreign version of the book for “export” – two or three volumes, we’ll see.”
