Short stories
Once Upon a Time
یکی بود یکی نبود
Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh · 1921
Synopsis
Six tales, preceded by a foreword. An Iranian returning from Europe finds himself in the cell at the port of Anzali with a mullah whose speech is heavy with Arabic, a young man stuffed with French words and a man of the people who understands neither; a wool carder rises by chance into politics; an innkeeper helps a wounded Russian Cossack; a mullah tells of his love for the neighbour's daughter; at the bathhouse, a Persian and a European compare their countries; a parasite drags his life from house to house.
Context
The first story, “Persian Is Sugar”, appeared in January 1921 in Kaveh, the journal that Hasan Taqizadeh and Mohammad Qazvini had founded; the five others, written between 1915 and 1920, were collected with it the same year, between a preface regarded as the manifesto of modern Persian prose and a glossary of colloquial speech. The book reached Iran only a year later: part of the clergy judged it blasphemous, copies were burned in public, and its author stopped publishing fiction for twenty years. Five of the stories appeared in French in 1959, in a UNESCO series.
Who it is for
Six short tales, in everyday Persian; five exist in French, all six in English. One should know that this language of the street was then considered unworthy of writing.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first collection of modern Persian short stories and as the major work of its author; Hedayat and Chubak were its first heirs.