Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1
Graduated with a PhD in Persian Language and Literature, University of Mazandaran
2
Assistant Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Bojnurd University
10.29252/kavosh.2025.23006.3693
Abstract
The present study aims to introduce retrospection as one of the components of nostalgia for Paradise Lost in this period by analyzing the discourse that dominated the political and literary atmosphere from 1320 to 1332. For this purpose, 9 narratives, including 8 short narratives by Sadegh Hedayat, Sadegh Choobak, and Ebrahim Golestan, were selected due to their socialist and critical nature from the collections " Sag-e Velgard", "Kheymeh Shab Bazi" and "Azar, the Last Month of Autumn", as well as "Bahar-e Omr", a critical narrative by Mohammad Masoud, were studied and examined.
The research findings indicate that the “paradise lost” in critical socialist narratives is in clear contrast to party narratives. While party narratives present a futuristic image of a classless society by emphasizing collective ideals, revolutionary spirit, and hope for the future. Critical narratives describe an individual, experienced, and nostalgic paradise that is filled with despair, dissatisfaction, and passivity. In these narratives, the expression of dissatisfaction with the existing conditions and governance policies is manifested in four ways: temporal and subjective retrospection, spatial retrospection and reconstruction, archaism or antiquarianism, and criticism of authoritarian and superficial modernity. While using these components to paint a static, hopeless, fatalistic image of the characters, dominated by invisible networks of power, the authors have criticized the authoritarian modernization of the first Pahlavi period and have instilled in the audience the implicit ideology of returning to oneself in the form of a mechanism for returning to the past.
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