Ebrahim Golestan Archive
The Ebrahim Golestan Archive was donated to Stanford's Green Library in 2023. This collection is essential for anyone interested in studying Iran's modern intellectual history and specifically contemporary Iranian writers and poets. It includes hundreds of letters exchanged between Golestan and a generation of Iranian writers, intellectuals, and poets.
Ebrahim Golestan (1922-2023), was an Iranian filmmaker, writer, literary critic, and art collector. He completed his studies in Shiraz and Tehran. Early in the 1940s, he became a member and subsequently an editor of Iran’s Communist Party's (the Tudeh Party) main journal. His aversion to dogma and docility to the Soviet Union led to his early separation from the party. He founded the Golestan Film Studio in 1957 and produced a series of internationally acclaimed documentaries, including Forough Farrokhzad’s pioneering work, The House is Black. Golestan’s career as an artist and public intellectual spans more than seventy years. Golestan published his first book in 1948 and continued publishing fiction and non-fiction works until the last years of his life. The vast Golestan collection consists primarily of his correspondence in Persian and English with many of the most influential writers, scholars, and artists of his time. The archive also contains manuscripts of his published works, notes, and research files.
Read more about Ebrahim Golestan in Dr. Abbas Milani's Eminent Persians
Highlights From the Golestan Archive
Sadeq Chubak Correspondence
Letters between Golestan and his close friend Sadeq Chubak (1916-1998), a prominent 20th century Iranian author of short stories and novels. Letters include an intimate note from Golestan in 1967 in which he grieves the loss of the iconoclastic feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad, and a discussion of Chubak's decision to burn all his unpublished works shortly before his death.
Photos of Sadeq Chubak
Photos by Morteza Negahi. These were some of the last photos taken of Chubak before his death in 1998.
The Ebrahim Golestan Collection at Stanford's Green Library is among the numerous Iran archives housed at the Green Library and the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford.
The collection will be available for on-site use at the Green Library Special Collections Reading Room after the processing is complete. The general public can enter the Green Library to study these materials by placing their requests online in advance of their visit through the AEON system. For instructions on how to request the Iran collections, users can specialcollections [at] stanford.edu (contact the Special Collections Department).
An Encounter with Dylan Thomas by Ebrahim Golestan
On Ebrahim Golestan's 100th birthday, the Iranian Studies Program published An Encounter with Dylan Thomas by Ebrahim Golestan in collaborationwith Mage Publishers in 2022. The English translation includes an introduction by Dr. Abbas Milani and scholar Alina Utrata as well as a personal essay by Dr. Milani on Golestan's life and work.
About the Book: Abadan, Iran, 1951. Twenty-nine-year-old Ebrahim Golestan, who was to become a towering figure in Iranian cinema and literature, encounters Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet, who died two years later at the age of thirty-nine from bronchial disease and pneumonia. More for his celebrity than an intimate knowledge of the subject, Thomas had been sent to Iran by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to write a script for a propaganda…