Jabbar Asgar oglu Askarzadeh was born in 1885 in the city of Iravan. He received his first education in a mollakhana, and from the age of fifteen he was teaching young children at home. He started his journalistic activity as one of the correspondents of “Qafqaz” newspaper. He also appeared in “Molla Nasreddin” collection with poems and articles.

According to the permission given to Mirmohammed Mirfatullayev and Jabbar Askarzadeh on January 21, 1914 by the governor of Iravan, they published the first issue of the satirical “Lek-Lek” magazine on February 22 of that year. A total of 8 numbers of “Lek-lek” were published. He was persecuted for his satirical poems and journalistic writings published in periodicals. On the other hand, due to his illness, he was forced to move to the city of Marand in South Azerbaijan, where he worked as a teacher at the Ahmadiyya school. Then he was invited to the city of Tabriz. There he helped open a kindergarten, organized a school for deaf and mute children (1922–1927), and continued his teaching activities in an orphanage in Shiraz (1927–1933). Then he opened a school for the blind and the mute in Tehran. There he published a pedagogical magazine called “Zaban” (1942), and at the same time continued his social, literary and pedagogical activities.

His multifaceted creativity was closely related to pedagogy, poetry, art, music, culture and healthcare. He was fluent in Arabic, Persian and Russian languages and translated selected poetry of foreign countries. He wrote his works in Azerbaijani and Russian languages. His published lyric poems with “J. Asgarzade”, “Ajiz”, “Baghchaban” signatures and his satirical poems were published with “Court Cat”, “Nochtali”, “Leylek’s nest”, “Molla haray” his signatures. His verse novels for young children and school children have also been published. For his services in the field of education, he was named a professor of Tehran University.

Jabbar Askarzadeh died in Tehran in the fall of 1966.

Nazim Mustafa
Doctor of philosophy in history, recipient of the State Prize