We used to feel we knew what it meant to say "Iran." We could imagine that cat-shaped territory and visualize a single culture more or less contained by its boundaries. Whatever its fabled diversity, we could imagine a national character shaped by its geography and see its literature as a reasonably direct, unmediated transcription of the national character, a spiritual secretion emerging spontaneously, organically from the national soil. But what do we do with the culture that has been refracted through the events of 1979? Now we are faced with a subject which refuses to be defined by the map—a country whose writers are in large numbers (even more than in the shah's time) living overseas, whose patterns of life at home are molded by a peculiarly distorted version of a popular culture which we have never really had to study as a serious political phenomenon.

Triumphant or turbulent, cultures are at once symbolized by and constituted from their arts and sciences. Literature celebrates, as law canonizes, the grand ideals of a living culture. Traditional or transitional, societies and their institutional structures of authority find elaborate expressions in the literature they produce.

This volume of Iranian Studies is devoted to an examination of the modern Iranian writer and contemporary Persian literature in their dialectical, interaction with a transitional Iranian culture and society. Its focus is on a revolutionary literature within a revolutionary social context. The term "revolutionary" is used here in its fundamental cultural sense, embracing both the social and the political.

This paper is devoted to a sociological examination of the problem of "commitment" in modern Persian literature. To reach for the political nature of the problem, it traces the formation of the intelligentsia in modern Iranian society.

The Writers Association of Iran, called Kanun-e Nevisandegan-e Iran in Persian, was founded in 1968 and was in many ways a unique experience in Iranian intellectual history. Its fortunes, consisting of periods of feverish activity and lifeless dormancy, epitomize the pattern of intellectual life in Iran, reflecting its problems and promises, its intellectual validity and artistic vitality, its ideals, achievements, and failures. While it did not succeed in its historical fight against censorship, it nevertheless played a major role in the course of the Iranian Revolution. While it could not transcend the factionalism that has historically plagued the Iranian elite, it nevertheless made an indelible impact on the intellectual community and on Iranian society at large. Between us and an objective account of this important intellectual institution stands the barrier of the Iranian Revolution itself.

From December 1930, when the first Iranian feature film was made to the 1980s, the connections between Persian literature and the Iranian cinema have been intimate, varied, and significant. In fact, an examination of the Iranian cinema in terms of the roles literature plays in it demonstrates that the cinema constitutes an important aspect of the sociology of the Iranian writer, especially from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s.

This essay surveys the role of literature and Iranian writers in the Iranian cinema and then focuses on a prominent example of the relationship between literature and movies, the popular 1971 film called Dash Akol, for the purpose of indicating differences in the aims and effects of the two art forms.

Bayal. Squat mud huts, twisting alleys. And the village center, a large pool of nothing but stagnant water. And by the pool, an earthen platform; this is the village teahouse. All the alleys lead to the pool. The area surrounding the pool is the public meeting place.

Censorship has been as much a part of Iran's literary history as betrayed love, bewitched lovers, and broken love affairs. In other words, it began long before the establishment of the "Imperial Printing Office" during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (ruled 1848-1896).

In earlier times some dissident writers were forced to lick off the ink from pages of their writings. Others had their mouths filled with gold or silver. Some were thrown in dungeons or seas. Others were exiled or executed.

Modern rulers have been no less adamant or imaginative in their methods of silencing opposition artists. "Mohammad 'Ali Shah had the two writers and orators, Malek-ol-Motakallamin and Sur-e Esrafil, hanged in the Bagh-e Shah Garrison, while he himself sat on the balcony facing the gallows and ate an entire plateful of rice and kabob as he watched." Farrokhi Yazdi (1889-1939) had his lips sewn together.

Most Iranian writers view Pahlavi rule over Iran (1921-1979) as a period of secular dictatorship. Many writers during the Pahlavi era responded to what they perceived to be an atmosphere politically repressive and restrictive on their artistic and social activities through the production of a significant amount of fiction, essays, and poetry which may, on the whole, be described as a literature of protest.

Hence, a major concern of Iranian writers since the first days of Reza Shah Pahlavi's rule has been how they could deal with government-imposed censorship of literary works and restrictions on social liberties.

Ahmad Shamlu is the primary, most prolific and most popular engagé Persian poet of post-Mosaddeq Iran. While critics in general view Shamlu's poetry as a mirror reflecting the stages of modernist Persian poetics from Nima Yushij (1895-1960) onward, Reza Baraheni has also described it as "a biography of our society." As a sociological study of this very important Iranian writer, this essay provides a chronology and analysis of Shamlu's relationship with his reading public and "the people," an overview of the nature of modernist engagé Persian poetry in general, and an assessment of the influence the "committed" poet has been able to exercise on Iranian society during the past three decades, in" particular.