Arab Shamilov

Arab Shamilov (Kurdish: Ә'рәб Шамилов, also known as Erebê Şemo; 23 January 1897 – 1978) was a Yazidi Kurdish novelist and scholar who lived in the Soviet Union.[1]

Arab Shamoevich Shamilov
Native name
Erebê Şemo
Born23 January 1897
Susuz, Kars oblast, Russian Empire
Died21 May 1978
Yerevan, Armenian SSR
OccupationWriter, poet, journalist, interpreter
NationalitySoviet
GenreNovel, story
Notable awards
Signature

Early career

Arab Shamilov was born on 23 January 1897 in the village of Susuz in the Kars oblast, now located in eastern Turkey but then part of the Russian Empire.[2] During World War I, from 1914 to 1917, he served as an interpreter for the Russian army. Later on, he became a member of the central committee of the Armenian Communist Party. In 1931, he began working on Kurdish literature at the Leningrad Institute of Oriental Studies. He assisted in developing a Latin-based alphabet for the Kurdish language in 1927.[3]

He became a member of the editorial board of the Kurdish newspaper Ria Taza (The New Path), published in Yerevan from 1930 to 1937. In Leningrad, he also met the Kurdish linguist Qanate Kurdo and published his work as a document about Kurdish language in Armenia.

Literary output

His first and most celebrated work, the story Şivanê kurmanca (The Kurdish Shepherd), based on his own life, was published in 1931.[2][4] It is considered the first Kurmanji novel. It treated his early life as a sheperd and how he then became a communist and took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917.[4] In 1937, he was exiled by Joseph Stalin and was only allowed to return to Armenia after 19 years, in 1956, following Stalin's death.

Arab Shamilov's plaque on Abovyan street of Yerevan

In 1959, he published another novel, Jiyana Bextewer (Happy Life) that was then translated into Armenian and later also into Russian (1965). In 1966, he published a historical novel, Dimdim, inspired by the old Kurdish folk tale of Kela Dimdimê about the Battle of Dimdim. It has been translated into Italian as Il castello di Dimdim. In 1967, he published a collection of Kurmanji folk stories in Moscow.

Books
  1. Şivanê kurmanca, the first Kurdish novel
  2. Barbang (1958) (published in Yerevan by Haypetrat, 1959)
  3. Jiyana Bextewer (1959) (re-release: Roja Nû Publishers, 1990, 253 p.)
  4. Dimdim (1966) (re-release: Roja Nû Publishers, 1983, 205 p.)
  5. Hopo (1969) (re-release: Roja Nû Publishers, 1990, 208 p.)

See also

References
  1. Joanna Bocheńska (2018). Rediscovering Kurdistan's Cultures and Identities: The Call of the Cricket. p. 95.
  2. Hambardzumyan, Viktor; et al., eds. (1982). "Shamilov Arab Shamoei" Շամիլով Արաբ Շամոեի. Haykakan sovetakan hanragitaran Հայկական սովետական հանրագիտարան [Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia] (in Armenian). Vol. 8. Yerevan: Hay sovetakan hanragitaran hratarakch’ut’yun. pp. 440–441.
  3. Galip, Özlem Belçim (2014). "Re-visioning "Kurdistan" and "Diaspora" in Kurdish novelistic discourse in Sweden" (PDF). Nordic Journal of Migration Research. 4 (2): 82–90. doi:10.2478/njmr-2014-0009.
  4. de la Bretèque, Estelle Amy (2021), Gunes, Cengiz; Bozarslan, Hamit; Yadirgi, Veli (eds.), "The Yezidis in the Soviet Union", The Cambridge History of the Kurds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 463, ISBN 978-1-108-47335-4, retrieved 22 June 2022
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