Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” in interpretations of Iranian literary critics

Abstract

The eastern reception of Leo Tolstoy’s oeuvre remains in the list of topical issues. It primarily refers to the Persian perception of the Russian writer’s literary and philosophical heritage because Iran, unlike other Asian countries, has been a closed country for a long time. In the pre-Soviet period (during the lifetime of the author of “War and Peace”), there was no information about the state of Tolstoy Studies in Iran, except for the Russian newspaper and magazine chronicles, which reflected the facts of the general Persian cultural reception of Leo Tolstoy. The situation did not improve during the Soviet period. It is enough to point out that despite the efforts of Iranian philologists, a complete bibliography of Persian translations of Leo Tolstoy’s works was not compiled, and in the works, presenting a general idea of the problem, information on the topic “Tolstoy in Iran” was taken from second-hand sources, without proper verification. In Iran itself, objective factors, related to the unsystematic nature of the source base about Leo Tolstoy, had an impact. The post-Soviet period has not observed Russian Tolstoy scholars’ sustained interest in the problem of the Persian image of Leo Tolstoy. At the same time, Iranian researchers prefer to consider the mechanisms of perceiving Russian literature as a single text, without its special and detailed disclosure based on the example of Leo Tolstoy. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of literary viewpoints on Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” in Iran. It should be emphasized that this review does not claim to be complete: the chronological series, without which it is impossible to describe the receptive dynamics in the spectrum of assessments and interpretations, is far from being complete; the problem of the first references of Iranian literary criticism and literary studies to the novel (apparently, the 1920s) has remained unsolved. The task of the article is more modest: to a certain extent to fill in the gap of understanding how the famous novel was interpreted in Iran.