Jamalzadeh, Sayyid Mohammad Ali

Jamalzadeh, Sayyid Mohammad Ali 

Born in 1890 in Isfahan. Iranian writer. Received a law degree in France.

Jamalzadeh’s first satirical short story, “Persian Is Sugar,” was published in the Berlin journal Kava. His first collection of short stories, Once Upon a Time (Russian translation, 1935), appeared in 1921 and introduced the genre of the anecdote into Persian literature. The author’s foreword to this collection is considered the manifesto of contemporary Persian prose. His works ridicule the backwardness of Iranian society. They include the collections Uncle Husein Ali (1942) and The Bitter and the Sweet (1955) and the novellas The Madhouse (1942), The Valley of the Last Judgment (1944), Qultashan-i Divan (1945), and Story of the Water Channel (1947). His autobiographical novella The Beginning and End of a Web, or the Book of Isfahan was published in 1955. Jamalzadeh has also written many plays, articles on the cultural history of Iran, and the Dictionary of Popular Speech and Idioms (1962).

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Vsiakaia vsiachina. Moscow, 1967.

REFERENCES

Chaikin, K. Kratkii ocherk noveisheipersidskoi literatury. Moscow, 1928.
Komissarov, D. S. Ocherk sovremennoi persidskoi prozy. Moscow, 1960.