Bozorg Alavi

Seyyed Mochtaba Alavi, better known as Bozorg Alavi, was an Iranian novelist, political figure and intellectual, born in Tehran in 1904 and dying in Berlin in 1997. He wrote in Persian but spent much of his adult life in Germany, so his path reflects that of a generation of Iranian intellectuals shaped by politics and exile. His importance lies chiefly in his part in the modernization of Persian literature.

He came from a educated, comfortably off family; his father had taken part in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. In 1922 he went to Berlin with his elder brother to study, and after returning in 1927 he taught German in Shiraz and Tehran. In those years he formed a close friendship with Sadegh Hedayat, one of the central figures of Iranian letters. In 1937 he was jailed, together with other members of his literary circle, on charges of communist activity. He maintained that he had no political involvement and had simply belonged to a group of literary men who read, among other things, communist writings. He was sentenced to seven years but was freed in 1941, after four, under a general amnesty.

After his release he published his prison writings and the novel Fifty Three Persons, and became a founding member of the communist Tudeh Party of Iran, editing its paper Mardom. He was in Germany when the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh took place, and that event confirmed his exile: he settled in East Berlin and taught at Humboldt University until 1979.

His best-known work, Her Eyes (1952), was banned in Iran. His novels, some shaped by Freudian ideas, focus on the inner lives of their characters and on the social and political tensions of his time. He made brief visits to Iran in 1979 and 1980, but was dismayed by the repressive turn the revolution took, and he went back to Berlin, where he died. His legacy rests on his contribution to modern Persian fiction and on titles such as Mirza and Fifty Three Persons, which are still taught in Iranian schools.