Regarded as the father of eastern Armenian realism, both fiction and drama, Shirvanzadeh was born in Shirvan, Azerbaijan, and had little formal education. He worked as an accountant in the oil city of Baku, and his novel Chaos describes the early days of the oil industry. He lived in Paris (1905--10), in the United States for seven years, and returned to Russia in 1926, where he died of alcoholism. His plays, adapted from his novels, are still widely performed and have been turned into successful films and operas. He had a bitter vision of society, depicting it as dominated by greed, superstition, puritanism, and gossip.
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