A Comparative Study of Elements of Socialist Realism in Persian and Russian Novels (Case Study: Mothers, How the Steel Was Tempered, Neighbors, and Her Eyes)

Persian and Russian socialist realist literary works can be comparatively studied for their differences in language as well as the historical encounter between literatures of the two countries. The goal of this paper is to draw on the French school of comparative literature to study the influence of the Russian socialist realism on Persian literature with a focus on four famous Persian and Russian novels, that is, Maxim Gorki's Mother (1906), Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1936), Bozorg Alavi's Her Eyes (1952) and Ahmad Mahmoud's Neighbors (1974). According to the results, the most important elements of socialist realism in the two Persian novels are: attention to the masses and the rise of the lower class, partisanship, typification, metamorphosis of the characters and apostasy, elements that did not exist in Persian novels before the emergence of Tudeh Party of Iran and the familiarity of Iranian writers with leftist ideas.