Failure of Communism in Iran A Symptomatic Reading of Hamsayeha

Communism was the most significant political and social movement of the twentieth century. Several nations were affected by this movement and tried to establish a communist government. One of these nations was Iran. Hizbi Tudeh or the Party of the Masses was a communist party founded in 1942 which fought against the Shah regime for many years. Although it was suppressed by the authorities, it continued its underground activities. Finally, the party was disbanded after the Islamic Revelation of 1979. Ahmad Mahmud (1932-2003) a well-known Iranian novelist; his novel, Hamsayeha (The Neighbors) depicts the gradual involvedness of a teenager in Tudeh Party. It also depicts the internal structure of Iranian society and its deep layers. Althusser asserts that a literary work is the product of a “complex network of mutually influential social systems that compromise a society at any given historical moment”. He proposes symptomatic reading that helps a critic to unravel the hidden ideologies and contradiction in a text. Accordingly, this study intends to read Hamsayeha Symptomatically to explore the social reasons of the failure of Communism in Iran.