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Персидский соловей в саду страны Советов: поэма Абулькасима Лахути «Повесть о розе»
Abulkasim Lahuti entered the history of Iranian literature as a poet-revolutionary, who made a significant contribution to the “renewal” of Persian poetry and the development of Iranian poetic modernity. He began his career with Sufi ghazals, wrote civil poems imbued with the ideas of Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911, and in the USSR became the founder of modern Tajik poetry. He dedicated a lot of Persian lines to the victory of October Revolution, and building of socialism. Almost all his poems follow the classical norm, both in form, and in their narrative techniques. This article focuses on Lahuti’s poem The Story of a Rose, created in 1938 as a private letter to Josef Stalin to convey a private message to the ruler asking to help Solomon Michoels and his Jewish Theater (GOSET). We preface our publication with the story behind the poem; shedding some light on the poem’s goal and the subsequent fate of its author. Dāstān-e gol is published in Persian, with Russian prosaic translation and Banu Lahuti’s verse rendition, sent to Stalin along with the original, and conclude this article with an analysis of the poem, focusing mostly on the rhetorical strategy of persuasion chosen by Lahuti in his attempt to influence the ruler by means of poetry.