Iranian Literature and Toodeh Party

Investigating the Iranian fiction literature during 1953 to 1978, it seems being influenced by a common trend of thought and sane ideas of humbling the rich and adoring the poor. They are all full of critiques to the inequalities in the society, the ruling calls, or in general, the capitalism. Our main hypothesis in this research was that Iranian literature was subjected to Toodeh Party’s interpretation of Marxism. Studding the contemporary history of Iran, we realize that Toodeh Party has been the most organized and popular political party in this country since ever. Reaching the remarkable number of 300 thousand members within the 40s, we can assume how influential this party has been in this society. Our hypothesis grows stronger when we notice that almost every Iranian writer and intellectual in that era has been a member or at least fan of this party. But, what was the interpretation of Marxism this political party relied on? Here, we come to the other hypothesis of this article. We believe that Toodeh Party had applied the interpretation of Marxism dominant in the Soviet Union at that time, which has used to be called Leninism. In order to testify our hypothesis, we first drew ideal types of the characteristics of the interpretation of Leninism and then Toodeh Party. Comparing them we realized that they had two points in common out of three (which are revision in Marx’s ideas to legitimate the revolution in unindustrialized countries and authoritarian structure of the party which did not allow the members to stand against the ideas of the heads.). Thus, we concluded that this hypothesis has been fairly verified. To assess the second hypothesis, we decided to investigate through a sample of Persian stories, written by the most influential writers of that era, in order to distinguish ideas associated with Marxism in them (such as critiques against the rich and inequalities in wealth, hostility to the capitalist word and so on). Meanwhile we provided a succinct biography of the writer of these books too, to indicate the potential reasons of their sympathy for Toodeh party. This hypothesis was verified too by discerning a reasonable account of such ideas in the books. Finally, we can claim that Iranian prose literature in the studied era has been considerably subject to Marxist ideas, which were represented in Iran by Toodeh party, a political party which had been following the Leninist trend of Marxism in Iran.