“Newly hatched chickens”

In 1973 the literary scholar Don Shojai (Donne Raffat, pseud.) travelled from the United States to the German Democratic Republic to meet the Iranian writer and, in the meantime, scholar of Iranian studies, Bozorg ‘Alavi. Aiming to write a “portrait of the writer in his twentieth year in exile” he held a series of interviews with ‘Alavi. ¹ In reply to Shojai's question about which period he regarded as the most important, the most memorable of his life, ‘Alavi answered:

I think it must have been those years with Hedayat, Farzad, and Minovi. Those years were very rich — for all of us. That stretch of time before Hedayat went to India, Minovi went to London … and I went to prison. … Yes, that was the best period, I think. Every day we would get together for several hours, from about four-thirty or five in the afternoon till about nine or ten in the evening. ²