The Poet’s Knowledge of God: the Work of Parvin Etesami in the Context of the Iranian Spiritual Tradition

Abstract

The subject of this article is the mystical poetry of Parvin Etesami (1907–1941), the article analyzes the religious foundations of the poet's work of the first half of the 20th century (the era of the turning point in Persian culture), continuing the Persian tradition of searching for God on the paths laid by her predecessors and expressing her knowledge of God in old poetic forms (monazere, qasida) with a new poetic language. The study of the poetic ontology of Parvin Etesami, that is, the poet's reflections on God, is based not only on the collection of 60 poems published in Russian (Journey of the Tear, 1984), but primarily on the exact translations of the poems of the Persian poet published for the first time in the article, which could not be included in the Soviet edition and which were carried out by two of the authors of the article. The article analyzes the poet's ideas about God as the creator of man, about God's predestination — the establishment of human mission on earth as a reflection of divine beauty, and about the Grace of God as the essence of human destiny. In the monologues of the dervishes, ideal personalities in the verses of Parvin, the value of the fruits carried by the mystical consciousness of a person who has achieved contemplation of true reality is affirmed. It opposes the ideas of ordinary consciousness, for which the style of behavior of the mystic is like madness. The love to God and the love of God are shown in the poetry of Parvin as the center of the heart, so that externally manifested religiosity (the Kaaba as a shrine is the architecturally revealed center of the world) and inner comprehension of God (the Kaaba of the heart) are affirmed by Parvin in their complementary wholeness. In this way, it is shown that in the verses of Parvin, fidelity to a thousand-year-old spiritual tradition and individual creativity appear as an organic unity.