2024-02-10 22:21:30
After the fall of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1920, many families of government officials were forced to leave the country. One of them was the family of Mirza Asadullayev, who served as Minister of Trade and Industry during the ADR period. Mirza Asadullayev was the son of the famous oil magnate Shamsi Asadullayev and the son-in-law of another Azerbaijani millionaire – Agha Musa Nagiyev.
As Day.Az reports, today marks the 119th anniversary of Umbulban, the daughter of Baku oil industrialist Mirza Asadullayev, an outstanding Azerbaijani writer who lived most of her life in France.
She was born in 1905, but she never knew her mother, who died during childbirth – the girl only had a name to remember her. Having received an education in her parents’ home that was brilliant by European standards of that time, Umbulbanu, nevertheless, according to the then Eastern tradition of early marriage, married an influential man at the age of 15. In 1924, at the age of 19, she divorced her unloved husband and emigrated to Paris. It is Paris that becomes her second home.
In Paris, she had to work as a saleswoman and fashion model, but at the same time she continued her education. Then Umbulbanu began to engage in translations, journalism, and edited radio programs in French. She later became one of the famous figures of French literature under the pseudonym Banin.
Gradually, Banin entered the literary circles of Paris and became famous among Russian emigrant writers, who formed a special layer of the emigrant elite. Here, among her acquaintances were philosophers N. Berdyaev, L. Shestov, N. Lossky, poets and writers V. Ivanov, M. Tsvetaeva, K. Balmont, I. Severyanin, I. Bunin, Teffi, A. Remizov, D. Merezhkovsky and his wife Z. Gippius, A. Kuprin, B. Zaitsev, A. Adamovich. In her memoirs, Banin especially singles out Teffi and Ivan Bunin, who were part of her circle of close friends.
Banin’s first novel “Nami” (1943), which told about the events in Azerbaijan in the pre-revolutionary period and the socio-political catastrophe that affected all layers of society, was not particularly successful. However, this did not stop Banin; two years later she published the novel “Caucasian Days” (1945), which made her name known to the French reader. Following the novel “Caucasian Days”, Banin’s new books were published one after another: “Parisian Days” (1947), “Meeting with Ernst Junger” (1951), “I Chose Opium” (1959), “After” (1961), ” Foreign France” (1968), “Call of the Last Hope” (1971), “Portrait of Ernst Junger” (1971), “Ernst Junger in Various Faces” (1989), “What Maria Told Me” (1991).
Banin lived a long life. She died at the age of 87 and was buried in Paris.
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