During the first decades of the twentieth century, literary change in Persia was inseparable from travel, political displacement, translation, and the expansion of print culture. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 had enlarged the public role of journalism and prose, while censorship, foreign intervention, and educational reform pushed many intellectuals beyond the country’s borders. From that movement emerged a transnational field in which books and periodicals could be conceived in one city, printed in another, and read thousands of kilometres away. A clarification of terminology is necessary. Persian speakers had called their country Iran for centuries, and Iranian was already a normal form of national self-description, although Western governments, publishers, newspapers, and travellers generally used Persia until Reza Shah requested that Iran be adopted in international communications from 20 March 1935. In this article, Iran is therefore used as the country’s historical self-designation and as the normal modern scholarly term, while Persia is retained when referring to habitual Western and diplomatic usage before 1935; Persian continues to designate the language, literature, and cultural tradition. The title “Iranian Writers” is consequently accurate for the entire period, including the years before the international change of usage. Berlin first acquired exceptional importance during the First World War, when Iranian nationalists living in Germany sought support against the extensive political influence exercised in Persia by Russia and Great Britain. Sayyed Hasan Taqizadeh, born in Tabriz in 1878, directed the Iranian Nationalist Committee of Berlin and edited the Persian-language journal “Kāveh”, published from 24 January 1916 until 30 March 1922. Its history must be described precisely, since its later cultural reputation can obscure its political origins. During the war, “Kāveh” received German government funding and openly supported Germany, which many Iranian constitutionalists regarded as a possible counterweight to the two powers occupying or dominating parts of their country. Its issues attacked Russian and British intervention, reported the activities of Iranian nationalists, and joined national independence to a revival of historical consciousness. After the conflict, the journal’s New Series, issued from 1920, concentrated increasingly on literature, history, science, education, linguistic reform, and the adoption of selected European institutions. The Berlin circle around Taqizadeh included Mohammad Qazvini, Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh, Hosayn Kazemzadeh Iranshahr, Ebrahim Pur-Davud, and several other scholars, journalists, and political activists. Their weekly and monthly meetings created a disciplined intellectual environment in which knowledge of classical Persian literature could be joined to European historical research, comparative philology, translation, and the modern periodical press. Berlin was therefore more than a refuge for political opponents of foreign domination. It became an external workshop for the reorganisation of Persian intellectual culture, although its members disagreed deeply about nationalism, secularisation, religion, socialism, and the degree to which European civilisation should be adopted. Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh, born in Isfahan around 1892, gave this environment its most consequential literary expression. Having left his homeland as a boy, he received part of his education in Beirut, Lausanne, and Dijon before becoming involved in Iranian nationalist activity during the war and joining the editorial work of “Kāveh”. His long residence abroad sharpened his awareness of linguistic divisions within Iranian society, where educated officials, clerics, returning students, merchants, and ordinary people often employed radically different registers of speech. In 1921 he published “Once Upon a Time”, whose six stories had been written between 1915 and 1920. The collection opened with “Persian Is Sweet”, set largely in a prison where a provincial man encounters a cleric speaking an elaborate Arabicised idiom and a Western-educated traveller filling his sentences with French expressions. The ordinary prisoner understands neither of them, and the comic encounter becomes an exact representation of cultural hierarchy, imported prestige, and the exclusion of the wider population from public language. Jamalzadeh’s prose drew on colloquial expressions, proverbs, social caricature, and the formal discipline of the modern short story. His purpose included literary innovation, social criticism, and the creation of a written language capable of reaching readers outside restricted scholarly circles. “Once Upon a Time” helped establish the foundations of modern Persian fiction, yet its importance did not arise from a mechanical transfer of European models. Jamalzadeh had absorbed foreign narrative techniques while preserving Persian idiom and constructing his stories around Iranian bureaucracy, provincial life, religious speech, class distinction, political violence, and encounters between travellers and their own society. Mohammad Qazvini, born in Tehran in 1877, supplied another element of this transformation. During his long periods in London, Berlin, and Paris, he worked with manuscripts and major European scholars, developing rigorous methods of textual comparison and historical verification that influenced Jamalzadeh and other members of the Berlin group. His scholarship demonstrated how European philology could be incorporated into the study of classical Persian civilisation without dissolving the authority of Persian and Arabic learning. After “Kāveh” ended, the journal “Iranshahr”, published in Berlin from June 1922 to February 1927, continued the discussion of education, women’s position, language, ancient history, philosophy, nationalism, and institutional reform; it circulated throughout Europe, Persia, Afghanistan, India, Egypt, and other regions, revealing how a Persian-language periodical produced abroad could participate directly in debates within the country. France exercised a different kind of attraction. Its universities, schools, publishers, museums, libraries, Orientalist institutions, and literary prestige had influenced Iranian elites since the nineteenth century, while French remained a major language of diplomacy and higher education. Sadeq Hedayat, born in Tehran in 1903, encountered French culture first at the Saint Louis School in the capital and then through a state scholarship that took him to Europe in 1925. He initially studied civil engineering in Ghent, moved to France, spent approximately a year and a half in Paris during 1928–1929, attended courses in Reims, and lived for a further period in Besançon. In April 1929 he received permission to pursue French literature within a teacher-training programme, although he completed no degree and returned home in the summer of 1930. These years contributed to his knowledge of contemporary fiction, psychoanalytic ideas, theatre, cinema, vegetarian thought, and modern treatments of death, memory, isolation, and unstable consciousness. Several early works were drafted during this period, including stories later collected in “Buried Alive”, published in Tehran in 1930. Hedayat’s foreign reading included French authors and figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, yet his mature writing remained closely connected to Iranian domestic life, popular beliefs, colloquial speech, government employment, provincial settings, religious customs, folklore, and pre-Islamic history. His prose became influential because it placed these materials within forms capable of representing mental disturbance and social cruelty with a severity rarely encountered in earlier fiction. In 1936 he travelled to Bombay, where he studied Middle Persian with the Parsi scholar Bahramgor Tahmuras Anklesaria and privately produced fifty handwritten, stencilled copies of “The Blind Owl” for circulation among friends outside Persia. The work had probably been drafted during his earlier European residence, although its first physical publication occurred in India, and Hedayat returned to his country in 1937. Its fragmented chronology, recurring images, doubled characters, violence, decay, and uncertain division between recollection and hallucination placed Persian prose within international modernism. The book’s language and imaginative substance remained connected to Iranian settings, visual traditions, social relations, and literary memory. During the 1940s Hedayat became a central figure among younger authors in Tehran, contributing through fiction, satire, translations, studies of folklore, and work on Middle Persian texts. He returned to Paris near the end of 1950 and died there by suicide on 9 April 1951. The French capital thus occupied two distinct periods in his life: the formative residence of a young scholarship student and the final residence of a writer whose relationship with his own society had become increasingly difficult. Bozorg Alavi, born in Tehran on 2 February 1904, embodied the German connection across a longer political period. His father, Sayyed Abu’l-Hasan Alavi, had supported constitutionalist activity and joined the Iranian Nationalist Committee in Germany. Bozorg arrived there with his family in 1923, studied education and psychology, developed a strong interest in German Romanticism and contemporary European literature, and graduated from the University of Munich in 1928. His contacts with Taqizadeh, Qazvini, Jamalzadeh, and Taqi Arani encouraged him to reconnect European intellectual experience with classical Persian literature and the political conditions of Iran. After returning home, he taught German and translated Friedrich Schiller, George Bernard Shaw, Stefan Zweig, and Theodor Nöldeke. He also entered the Tehran circle formed by Hedayat, Mojtaba Minovi, and Masud Farzad. His collection “The Suitcase”, published in Tehran in 1935, used changing narrators, psychological ambiguity, frustrated personal relations, and urban settings, showing how techniques acquired through German-language reading could be absorbed into Persian fiction. Alavi’s association with Taqi Arani and the intellectual group later known as the Fifty-Three led to his arrest in 1937. He remained imprisoned until Reza Shah’s abdication in September 1941, after which he published works dealing with incarceration, political organisation, interrogation, and the mechanisms of the authoritarian state. His novel “Her Eyes”, issued in Tehran in 1952, constructed its story around a portrait painted by Makan, an artist involved in underground opposition during the final years of Reza Shah’s reign. Through the testimony of Farangis, an aristocratic woman connected to the painter, the novel examined political commitment, personal attachment, secrecy, betrayal, social privilege, and the moral costs imposed by clandestine activity. Its framed narration and gradual disclosure gave political fiction a psychological and investigative structure. When the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown on 19 August 1953, Alavi was teaching at Humboldt University in East Berlin. He remained in the German Democratic Republic, while his writings were prohibited in Iran from 1953 until 1979. During the remainder of the decade he wrote in German about Iranian politics and society, assisted the translation and study of Persian literature, published “The Land of Roses and Nightingales” in Berlin in 1957, and saw “Her Eyes” appear in German translation in 1959. By 1960, East Berlin had become a centre from which an exiled Iranian author could teach his language, interpret his country for foreign readers, and continue participating in Persian literary culture from outside its political borders. The importance of these foreign centres should not diminish the decisive position of the capital inside the country. Tehran supplied the ministries, schools, prisons, banks, cafés, newspapers, publishing houses, private homes, and new social classes that filled modern Persian fiction. Works shaped or printed abroad acquired their full historical effect when they reached local readers and entered conflicts over language, religion, political authority, foreign influence, sexuality, class, and national identity. Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941 temporarily weakened censorship and allowed journals, political organisations, translation projects, and literary associations to multiply. In 1946 the First Iranian Writers Congress met in Tehran under the auspices of the Iran-Soviet Cultural Association, with Malek al-Sho‘ara Bahar presiding and Alavi playing an important organisational role. Its participants debated classical inheritance, modern poetry, realism, political commitment, and the social responsibilities of literature, revealing a field that had become institutionally visible and ideologically divided. The coup of 1953 closed much of this relative openness, strengthened censorship, forced some intellectuals abroad, and made foreign publication increasingly important for politically suspect authors. By 1960, the movement linking Berlin, Paris, and Tehran had established a permanent pattern in Iranian cultural history. Germany had provided political organisation, periodical publishing, translation, scholarship, socialist debate, and eventually a place of exile; France had supplied educational prestige, literary models, philological institutions, and a powerful image of cosmopolitan authorship; Tehran had provided the language, public, institutions, conflicts, and human material from which the literature itself was made. The modernity of Persian prose developed through this circulation, as techniques encountered abroad were recast within works concerned with the specific history of Iran. Distance gave certain authors a clearer view of social divisions and political violence, while publication and reception inside the country transformed private experiments into a lasting literary tradition.
( Roberto Minichini, July 2026 )
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