On 9th Ridge Street

Rustam Ibragimbekov is a Soviet and Azerbaijani writer, screenwriter, and film director. His fame came after Rustam Ibragimbekov, together with Valentin Yezhov, wrote the screenplay for the film “White Sun of the Desert.” In the early 1970s, Nikita Mikhalkov made his first film “A Calm Day at the End of War” based on a screenplay by Rustam Ibragimbekov. The result of their creative partnership was a whole series of works recognized internationally: “Urga. Territory of Love,” “Burnt by the Sun”—a film that won an “Oscar” for Best Foreign Language Film and “Siberian Barber.”

The novella “On the 9th Ridge” was written in 1968. It tells of the clash between the old and the new—of their strange, quirky, comic, and, not infrequently, unsettling combination in the life and everyday life of Baku in the 1960s.