Hamid Arasly

Hamid Mammadtaghi oglu Arasly (Azerbaijani: Həmid Hacı Məmmədtağı oğlu Araslı; 23 February 1902 – 20 November 1983) was an Azerbaijani literary critic, Doctor of Sciences in Philology, and an academic at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences. He is acknowledged as one of the most prominent literary critics and philologists of Azerbaijan.

Hamid Arasly has conducted extensive critical research of the works of well-known Azerbaijani and Persian poets as Nizami Ganjavi, Fuzûlî, as well as Imamaddin Nasimi. He has authored multiple works on Azerbaijani literary history. One of his most important contributions to his field is the release of the first full-text Russian edition of the Book of Dede Korkut in 1939.

His period of activity corresponds with heightened repression in the Soviet Union. In 1936, using the eastern manuscripts he had been collecting for a few years, Hamid Arasly created the Manuscripts Bureau within the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences. However, a year later, some of the manuscripts preserved in the bureau were found to be against the principles of Soviet ideology. The academic was subsequently fired from his position. He has also been pressured by the Soviet authorities for his publication of the Book of Dede Korkut. The Book, which is a collection of epic stories describing the lifestyle of the nomadic Turkic peoples and their pre-Islamic beliefs, was criticized by the Soviet government for allegedly promoting bourgeois nationalism. Nevertheless, the publication of dastans did not wholly cease during that period.