Художнє слово та «Мовне Питання» (за творчістю М. А. Джамаль-Заде)

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the research of the specifics of the reflection of the “language issue” in the writings of M. A. Jamalzadeh – the founder of the modern short story in the Persian literature and to the influence and role of the artistic word in addressing this issue. In spite of the fact that there was one official national language in Iran and that it was the Persian language there was a great gap between the strata of the Iranian society and a huge misunderstanding between those strata because of the language differences of the Persian language spoken by them. The representatives of the Iranian clergy, the majority of poets, writers and scientists used plenty of Arabic words, phrases, quotes, whole sentences in their “Persian”. On the other hand, the Europeanized intellectuals used plenty of words borrowed from Western European languages, mainly from the French language. Both of these versions of the “Persian” were not understandable for common people, neither was the Persian literature, especially prose, created in Iran since XVI–XVII centuries till the very beginning of the XX century. Those were the issues to be addressed and the prominent intellectuals of Iran took the responsibility to deal with them. In 1921 young but much talented writer Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh published his first book – the collection of short stories “Yeki Bud Va Yeki Nabud” (“Once Upon a Time”) and wrote a detailed preface to it in which he expressed his thoughts and ideas on the issue of the Persian language and the Persian literature. He invited the Iranian writers to write their works using new European literary genres, to use clear and understandable Persian and to enrich language of their writings by using elements of live folk speech. This preface became a manifesto of the new generation of the Iranian writers and intellectuals and played a great role in the formation of new Persian prose and in the solution of the problem of the national language of Iran. The stories of the collection “Yeki Bud Va Yeki Nabud” were the artistic illustrations of the ideas of its author proclaimed in the preface. In the brightest way the ideas of Jamalzadeh were embodied in the short story “Farsi Shekar Ast” (“The Persian is Sugar”) which is recognized to be the first Persian short story written in accordance with the rules of this genre in the modern European literature. In this short story M. A. Jamalzadeh managed using artistic methods and means to show much of beauty, richness and diversity of the Persian language and at the same time to show the problem of misunderstanding between the strata of the Iranian society, to show the huge cognitive dissonance between clergy and intellectuals on one hand and those who they were responsible for on the other. The next generation of the Iranian writers followed M. A. Jamalzadeh and in the next years the situation with the Persian language and literature in Iran has much changed.