For over a thousand years imaginative Persian literature has more directly and comprehensively than any other art medium reflected and nurtured distinctively Iranian cultural themes and orientations and has more than any other single indigenous phenomenon defined Iranian culture for literate Iranians themselves, who through the centuries have often pointed to this literature as a sign of their special place in and distinctive contributions to human cultural expression.

Now the phrase “imaginative Persian literature” can refer to various distinct traditions on the Iranian plateau. There is a folk tradition that emerged upon the heels of the appearance of the neo-Persian language in the 9th century. Then there is the better known belletristic court tradition that began in the same era and that persists today, albeit without court patronage, in the writings, particularly verse, of literary traditionalists who feel that the norms, forms, and themes of poets from Rudaki (d. 940) to Jami (d. 1492) constitute still relevant prescriptive standards.

Two impulses, the desire to create and the desire to withdraw into oblivion and death, lie at the heart of Sadeq Hedayat's character. He was painfully sensitive to human weaknesses, loneliness, and suffering in a world that seemed all the darker through his eyes because the values against which he measured it were so demanding. He expected more of and for humanity than could be attained. A part of him sought to reject a life doomed to such imperfection, to draw back from the searing pain of a consciousness without hope.

Yet it is also through this pain of consciousness that the creative act arises. This second force, the impulse to objectify the vision of Absurdity by transforming it into art, provided for Hedayat a somewhat precarious counterbalance to the impulse of negation. For creation, however tentative, constitutes a challenge to the forces of darkness. In the very act of depicting a universe without meaning, the artist implicitly contributes meaning of his own.

In recent years we have begun to see more of Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) as a political writer. An anonymously printed pamphlet of four previously unpublished works, including an excerpt from his political satire, Tup-e Morvari [The Pearl Cannon] (1947), appeared in Berkeley in 1973, giving us a glimpse of the other Hedayat, even at the height of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi's power. In 1978 it became possible after many years to buy Haji Aqa (1945); and briefly in 1979 an edition of The Pearl Cannon was available. As we see more of Hedayat as an engaged political presence, and the Hedayat who spent two months in Uzbekistan in 1945 as a guest of the Soviet Government becomes less of an anomaly for us, Buf-e Kur [The Blind Owl] (1937, 1941) becomes more of a problem. It is patently his greatest work; and yet it is the work in which his referentiality is most in question.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-1969) is an author whose writings during a 25-year career would warrant attention in any consideration of literature and society in Iran. That he has assumed special significance in the post-Pahlavi era can be explained by his efforts in the 1960s, in Nikki Keddie's words, “to achieve a kind of return from secularism to what he understood to be the true, progressive Islam…Al-e Ahmad found cultural roots and ties to the Iranian people in Islam [and] defended Islam against the policy of Westernization at any price championed by the [Pahlavi] regime.” The lip service paid Al-e Ahmad in recent years by Iranian writers and other intellectuals, including the publication of a 30-page eulogistic tribute to him in the first issue of the Association of Writers of Iran's Nameh-ye Kanun-e Nevisandegan-e Iran (1979), is an indication of their awareness of his distinctive potential appeal in an Islamic republic.

No documents chart more accurately the difficult road to liberation and the arduous journey of the Iranian woman than her poetry. It is a rich, virtually unexplored record of the development of her consciousness and identity, experienced within, but not limited by, traditional Iranian culture. Furthermore, an evaluation of the Iranian woman's poetry is indispensable to an understanding of her life and the cultural pressures she experiences.

I am talking about the poetry of, among others, Tahereh, better known as Qorratol'ayn (1819-1852), ᶜAlam Taj Zhaleh Qa'em Maqami (1884-1946), Parvin E'tesami (1907-1941), Parvin Dowlatabadi (b. 1922), Simin Behbahani (b. 1927), Lo'bat Vala Shaybani (b. 1930), Mahin Sekandari (b. 1940), Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), and Tahereh Saffarzadeh (b. 1936).

Unfortunately, most criticism of Iranian woman's poetry is rife with misconceptions, sexually biased assumptions, and tenacious refusals to confront this poetry on its own terms.

In modernist Persian literature there are at least two important features shared by the majority of contemporary Iranian poets and writers, namely, experimentation with form and social commitment in content. Experimentation with novelistic technique, narrative voice, and colloquial and literary language characterizes the works of such authors as Sadeq Chubak, Ebrahim Golestan, and Hushang Golshiri in fiction; and a continuing search for new means of poetic expression pervades the poetry of Ahmad Shamlu, Yadollah Ro'ya'i, and Ahmad Reza Ahmadi, among others. Furthermore, the content of this literature is almost always implicitly and often explicitly engagé, with engagement or social commitment broadly defined to include the author's choice of subject matter and conscious or subconscious treatment of the shortcomings of society and of the hardships of the individual or the masses.

Nader Ebrahimi (b. 1936), one of the most prolific yet least studied writers of the 1960s and 1970s, is by no means an exception in this regard.

Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni [The Secrets of the Treasure of Possessed Valley], hereafter The Treasure, is the name of both a novel and a film by Ebrahim Golestan (b. 1922), the important short story writer and filmmaker now living in London. Golestan made the film in the fall and winter of 1971, and later, in the summer and fall of 1974, reworked the screenplay into a novel. This perspective is critically useful, for it helps to explain the presence of certain cinematic touches in the novel's composition. But, before a review of these touches, here is a summary of the contents of The Treasure.

The action of The Treasure betrays the simplicity of a parable. While plowing his field, a poor farmer accidentally uncovers an ancient burial chamber loaded with gold artifacts. Realizing that the trove would somehow liberate him from his bumpkin existence, he brings pieces of it to a jeweler in the city.

Tahereh Saffarzadeh is the only major Iranian poet who sees the afflictions of contemporary Iran in terms of a spiritual wasteland and turns to Islam as the sole cure for those ethical and sociopolitical afflictions. This essay examines Saffarzadeh's conviction that faith is the only source of deliverance from the wasteland of contemporary Iran.

Saffarzadeh (b. 1936) was born in Sirjan, where she lived through her high school years. Then she went to Shiraz to study English language and literature at Pahlavi University, receiving her B.A. in 1958. In 1962 she published her first collection of poems, Rahgozar-e Mahtab [The Passerby of Moonlight], under the pen name of “Mardomak” [Pupil of the Eye].

The poems of The Passerby of Moonlight, composed during the period from 1956 to 1962, are mainly love lyrics in the chaharpareh quatrain form.