The Reflection of Social Issues in Abolghasem Payandeh’s Short Stories: "Defae az molla Nasr-al-din", "Morde keshane Joozan", "Zolmate Edalat"

Abolghasem Payandeh owes much of his fame to his valuable translation of The Holy Quran as well as his journalistic works. As an Isfahani story-telling writer, however, he has not been accounted for in the literary history of Iran. His stories mainly follow the structure of the writings of the past and are somehow apart from the modern storytelling experience. The settings of his stories usually are weak and ineffective, except some few examples. The stories are mainly character-based and their themes are usually linked to the relationships among human beings.
To understand the relationship between social issues and literature has always been a concern of many social scientists. The literary work in sociology of literature is often looked at with the assumption that the society and the artist have an unbreakable relationship. A researcher of the very social issues of the literature, however, tries to organize the main concerns and thoughts of the writer by considering the literary work as the main part. Accordingly, the work is studied as a reaction of the writer’s personality to the society who is inference by his/her surroundings. That is how the point of view of the creator of the work is explained by researchers of the sociology of literature. This explanation takes place based on the fact that the writer is considered to be affected one way or another, by the environment in which he lives, and by the surroundings by which he/she is inspired. By studying the meaning and message of the literary works the place of the writer will be more explicitly viewed. Payandeh as a writer, who knows this point well, has tried to criticize the leading pains and problems of the society of Iran. He demonstrates the bitter part of the life of the people of his era, and at the same time tries to conceal them by the morals he mentions and by his comic way of writing. Using a comic tone in his short stories, he has written the important social issues of the society in which he lived in. By employing all these modes of organizing his story-telling techniques, he has tried to be a responsible writer and a social peace maker.
In this paper we have tried to categorize the leading social beliefs and thoughts of Payandeh, using the second method, which is to focus on analyzing the reflection of social issues in the literary work. These social issues would include: criticizing the common beliefs, criticizing the present condition of instruction, being critical of the moral corruption of the effective parts of the society, usury, venality, the improper status of the organizations in performing the expected matters, poverty and the social place of women between the years 1330 and 1350. At the end of the paper, we will discuss the social comedy as an important and main part of the short stories written by Payandeh. Social comedy has had a noticeable impact on bringing the element of effectiveness in modes of reflecting social events in his works.