He studied in the Russian school in the city of Shamakhi and later (after receiving a government scholarship) in Tiflis before being admitted to the department of mathematics and physics at Moscow University in the 1860s (his relative Lieutenant general Faraj bey Aghayev helped him get an education).

In their struggle for change and transformation, as Audrey Altstadt explains, the Azerbaijani intelligentsia grew to understand that it need not, indeed could not, reject its own cultural heritage.

[4] In 1873 Zardabi with another intelligentsia activist Najaf bey Vazirov staged the first Azerbaijani theatrical production based on the play by Mirza Fatali Akhundov, The Adventure of a Miser.

[5] Naming itself as Akinchi (ploughman), this paper addressed itself primarily to the peasant reader in accordance with Zardabi's Narodnik(Populist) ideas, that was dominant in universities of Russia in that era .The preferred language of expression among literate people was Persian and they reacted with hostility to using "unprintable idiom of common folk" (Azeri).

The circle of its contributors consisted mainly of Sunnis like Zardabi, whose innuendos that Persia was a backward and inhuman country provoked widespread indignation.