A Comparative Study of Positivism in The Patient Stone (Sang-Ṣabur) and Jerminal

Today, the debate over the comparison of literary works across various linguistic and geographical fields is regarded as one of the most serious issues in literary criticism. The present study is a comparison of two influential literary novels: a Persian novel, The Patient Stone (Sang-E Ṣabur) by Sadeq Chubak and a French novel, Germinal, by Émile Zola. No dynamic literature can overlook the influence of other countries’ literary works. Iranian and French novels yield to comparative analysis. Emil Zola, the founder of naturalism, introduced positivism to literature, and Sadeq Chubak is the Persian representative of this school. Studies show that Zola considers the chief principles of positivism such as empiricism, observations, in detail analysis of surrounding facts, factors such as inheritance, genetics and human physiology. Choubak too, has a preference for features of positivism such as observation and experiment, inheritance and genetics, and rejection of superstitions in The Patient Stone (Sang-Ṣabur) but there exist some differences in methods of applying positivism in these novels, which will be dealt with in this research through comparison. In this article, with a descriptive analytical method, similarities and differences in the positivistic approach of the two writers will be enumerated and analyzed.