About Sokhan (magazine)

Sokhan (magazine)

Sokhan, meaning Speech, was a monthly literary magazine published in Tehran, Iran, from 1943 to 1979. Founded by the scholar Parviz Natel Khanlari, who remained its editor throughout its existence, it became one of the most respected Persian literary journals of the twentieth century. Sokhan covered Persian and modern literature, art and history; it aimed to develop literary criticism in Iran and to introduce young Iranian writers; and its contributors included some of the defining figures of modern Persian letters, among them Sadegh Hedayat, Bozorg Alavi and Ehsan Yarshater. Scholars credit Khanlari with safeguarding the journal's integrity through the politicised years of the 1940s and the period after 1953, and its run of some thirty-five years made it a standard tool for the study of Iranian literary life.

Founded by Parviz Natel Khanlari in 1943

Parviz Natel Khanlari (1914–1990) was an Iranian literary scholar, linguist, author and professor at the University of Tehran. He graduated from the university in 1943 with a doctorate in Persian literature — the same summer, according to the historian Ali Gheissari's study of twentieth-century Iranian intellectuals, in which he founded Sokhan in Tehran. Khanlari also studied linguistics at the University of Paris for two years and founded a new university course on the history of the Persian language. The magazine was thus a scholar's journal from birth: edited by a young professor with a fresh doctorate, committed to lucid prose and high standards, and intended to give Persian literature the serious critical forum Khanlari believed it lacked. He remained its editor for the whole of its life, a continuity of editorship that reference works single out as the source of its reputation.

A lucid literary publication

Gheissari's study describes Sokhan as the best of the group of periodicals that combined an academic and scholarly approach with a more up-to-date selection of topics and material, publishing historical and literary contributions by Iranian authors alongside translations of foreign works. Khanlari, the study notes, was responsible for the journal's high reputation as a lucid, literary publication. Lucidity was a deliberate programme: the writer Iraj Bashiri observed that Khanlari as a writer was distinguished by the simplicity of his style, following neither the traditionalists nor the advocates of the new, but accommodating the entire spectrum of creativity and expression in Persian literature. Sokhan embodied that middle course in print, month after month, offering readers classical scholarship and contemporary writing within the same covers.

Aims: criticism and new writers

The batch record drawn from Persian journal listings states Sokhan's aims plainly: it covered Persian and modern literature, art and history, aimed to develop literary criticism, and introduced young Iranian writers. Those two aims — criticism and discovery — shaped its contents. Established scholars could publish research and essays, while younger writers found a first serious venue whose editor read for quality rather than faction. Khanlari's translations and the journal's translations of foreign works, including Pushkin and Rilke among the European authors Khanlari himself rendered into Persian, connected Iranian readers to world literature through the same pages that carried Persian poetry and prose. For a literary culture negotiating tradition and modernity, Sokhan provided a meeting ground moderated by a single, consistent editorial intelligence.

Contributors

Sokhan's contributor list reads as a roll of modern Persian literature. The batch record names Sadegh Hedayat, the author of The Blind Owl and the central figure of modern Persian fiction; Bozorg Alavi, novelist and a founder of modern Persian prose; and Ehsan Yarshater, the great scholar of Persian literature who later founded the Encyclopaedia Iranica. Accounts of Khanlari's circle add the bibliographer Iraj Afshar and the poet Nader Naderpour among those who contributed to the magazine. That breadth — fiction writers, poets, linguists and historians publishing side by side — reflects Khanlari's own range as scholar, poet and translator, and his conviction that literature, language study and history belonged to one conversation. A young writer appearing in Sokhan stood in company that certified seriousness.

Safeguarding the journal through political decades

Sokhan's life spanned some of the most turbulent decades in modern Iranian history: the Allied occupation and abdication of Reza Shah, the oil nationalisation crisis and the 1953 coup, and the long consolidation of Mohammad Reza Shah's rule that followed. Gheissari records that Khanlari succeeded in safeguarding the integrity of the journal during the politicised years of the 1940s and the post-1953 period. That achievement should not be understated. Many Iranian periodicals of the era were party organs, or were closed when politics shifted; Sokhan endured by insisting on literary and scholarly standards rather than political alignment. In his later life, the same historian notes, Khanlari was unfairly cast by more radical intellectuals as an Iranian Malraux — a man of culture too close to power — a criticism that followed from his public career rather than from the journal's pages.

Khanlari's public career and the magazine

Khanlari's life outside the magazine was substantial, and it framed how Sokhan was read. He served early in his career as governor of Azerbaijan Province, later as deputy prime minister and as Minister of Culture — reference works give his tenure as minister as August 1962 to March 1964 — and he represented Mazandaran as a senator from 1964 until the 1979 Revolution. He founded the Iranian Culture Foundation and was instrumental in establishing cultural institutions including the Iran Academy of Arts and Literature. His academic career at the University of Tehran continued until the 1979 Revolution. Through all of this, the editorship of Sokhan continued: the monthly journal with wide circulation among Iranian intellectuals and literary scholars, as his biographies uniformly describe it, was the constant thread of his working life from 1943 onward.

Satire and style in Sokhan's pages

Scholarly attention to Sokhan continues in unexpected corners. A study of satire in Khanlari's articles, published in an Iranian academic journal, analyses his use of satire in his writing for the magazine and divides it into political and social categories, expressed sometimes in single sentences and sometimes in single words, and through humorous allegory. The study frames satire as a tool Khanlari chose for the reform of society: laughter first, then recognition of the flaw it exposed. Such research matters for understanding Sokhan because it corrects any picture of the journal as dry scholarship alone. Under Khanlari, criticism could be witty as well as learned, and the editor's own prose — simple, exact and occasionally ironic — set the stylistic standard his contributors were expected to meet.

The end in 1979

Sokhan's run ended with the world that had sustained it. Reference works date the magazine's life from the early 1940s to 1978, and the historian Iraj Bashiri, as quoted in biographical accounts, describes the magazine of Sokhan as lasting, with some interruption, for some thirty-five years, from 1944 to 1979, and as having provided scholars in Iranian studies a most useful tool for the study of aspects of the Iranian scene. The batch record likewise gives 1943 to 1979. The 1979 Revolution closed Khanlari's academic and public career — he died in Tehran on 23 August 1990 — and with it the journal he had edited for more than three decades. Sokhan was not revived under his editorship, and its identity remains bound to his name.

Legacy and scholarly value

Sokhan's legacy is unusually concrete: a near-complete record of Persian literary life across thirty-five years, edited to a consistent standard. Because it published scholarship, criticism, new writing and translation together, its back issues serve researchers as both source and subject — evidence of what Iranian writers were reading, writing and arguing about from the 1940s to the 1970s. Ferdowsi University's listings of Persian journals and academic studies of the magazine preserve its standing among Persian periodicals. In the history of Iranian magazines, Sokhan stands with the small group of titles whose reputation rests on editorial quality sustained over decades, and whose founder-editor became, through the journal, one of the custodians of modern Persian literary culture.

Sokhan in summary

Sokhan was a monthly literary magazine published in Tehran from 1943 to 1979, founded and edited throughout by Parviz Natel Khanlari (1914–1990), professor of Persian literature at the University of Tehran. It published Persian and modern literature, art and history, developed literary criticism in Iran and introduced young writers, with contributors including Sadegh Hedayat, Bozorg Alavi, Ehsan Yarshater, Iraj Afshar and Nader Naderpour. Praised for its lucidity and safeguarded by its editor through the politicised 1940s and the years after 1953, it ended with the 1979 Revolution. Its thirty-five years of issues remain a principal record of twentieth-century Persian letters.