Prince Arfa was an Iranian diplomat of modest origins and exceptional linguistic ability, being fluent in several languages, especially Russian. He combined an empathy with foreigners unusual for an Iranian of that time with diplomatic skill and presence of mind. An intriguing aspects of this memoir is the manner in which the Qajar regime deployed an official with these talents ... Read moreand the kind and degree of responsibility they gave him. His memoirs will be of particular interest to scholars of Iranian-Russian relations for his negotiations on the north-west boundary of Iran; his averting of a clash in Khorasan between the Islamic clerics of Mashhad and a Russian military presence dealing with quarantine; his account of the traditional practice at the Russian court, and public resentment of its expenditure; and the significant role he played in the negotiations for the Russian loan to Iran in 1900. His diplomacy also extended to other countries, such as involving Sweden in a dispute between Iran and Italy. His memories are of more general interest for their amusing portrayal of the events of Nasr al-Din Shah s journey to Europe in 1887 89. He also provides a lively account of aspects of life in Iran in the Qajar period, of the culture of childhood and traditional education; of health, diet and, the variety of practice in traditional medicine; and of the role of poetry daily life. His memories demonstrate the Iranian fascination with European women, already highlighted by recent research on their images in the Iranian houses of the time. Michael No?l-Clarke has provided a clear, lively and concise translation accompanied by informative annotation and biographical notes.
Vanessa Martin, Royal Holloway, University of London ;Memories of a Bygone Age: Qajar Persia and Imperial Russia 1853-1902, by Prince Arfa'. Translated and edited by Michael Noel-Clarke. Gingko Library, 2016, 306 pp, ISBN 978-1-909942-86-8, GBP30.00 Reviewed by James Buchan Mirza Reza Khan, Arfa' od-Dowleh, later Prince Arfa', was an Iranian diplomat and man of letters of the late Qajar period. Born in modest circumstances in Tabriz in about 1853, and bred to the seminary, he entered Nassereddin Shah's service and became in succession Consul-General in Tiflis in Georgia, Minister in St. Petersburg, Ambassador in Istanbul, Minister of Justice, and Iran's representative to the League of Nations. Having amassed a fortune, Prince Arfa built fine houses in and near Tiflis and the Moorish villa in the Moneghetti district of Monaco now known as the Villa Ispahan. Just before his death in 1937, Prince Arfa' returned to Tehran and put in order his memoirs, which were published as the Khaterate perans Arfa' in Tehran in 1965, and re-issued in 1999. Michael Noel-Clarke, a former chairman of this society who is married to Prince Arfa s great-granddaughter, has translated into English much of the first half of the memoirs, ending in 1901. Noel-Clarke's version casts a brilliant side-light on Iranian life and Nassereddin's Court and administration under the shadow of British and Russian encroachment. It portrays an attractive young man who through his talent as a linguist and versifier, luck, boldness and prudence, and by attaching himself to a succession of great men, negotiates a perilous and illusive Court. It is a handsome book, wellmade, -printed and -illustrated, not expensive, and provided with not one but two silk bookmarks. As so often with political memoirs, the early pages have the most charm before success, money and power bring in what Adam Smith called the corruption of our moral sentiments. Reza's youth passed in the last truly Iranian age, before the pressure of the world caused that people to modify distinctive habits of thought and conduct. Son of a cloth merchant in Tabriz, Reza was destined for the turban before a flood in 1872 destroyed his father's stock. He was sent to Istanbul to work in the shop of a relation, Hajji Reza Aqa Salmasi. Passing through Erivan, he heard for the first time the words geography and Australia and saw, in a sort of epiphany, the shortcomings of his traditional education. In Istanbul, Mirza Reza learned good French and some English, but the climate disagreed with him. Returning through Tiflis, he was engaged as a clerk at the Iranian Consulate-General, where he learned to speak Russian and to please European ladies, the guardian angels of his career. In 1878, as Nassereddin Shah travelled through the Caucasus on his second European trip, his Russian-language interpreter took the wrong pills, and Reza was taken on as substitute. He acquitted himself so well as to be appointed a secretary at the ConsulateGeneral in Tiflis, and then, in 1883, the interpreter for the joint commission to delimit the border between Russia and Khorasan. There, he gained the favour of the Shah by persuading the Russians to withdraw the frontier so as not to cut off the village of Lotfabad from its farms and pastures. He also attached himself to the Amin osSoltan, later prime minister. Despatched to Enzeli to accompany to Tehran the new Italian minister, Alessandro de Rege di Donato and his countess and her companion, Mirza Reza started to see his homeland through a foreigner's eyes. In 1889, Mirza Reza was included in the party for Nassereddin Shah's third visit to Europe. He records unforgettable scenes: the Shah trying to give his courtiers the slip to roam Warsaw incognito, or leaving a ball in Edinburgh because he could not bear to see the kilted Scotsmen's knees. At Buchanan Castle near Stirling, seat of the Duke of Montrose, after the Shah had gone to bed, Mirza Reza and the prime minister were rowed by moonlight across the lake by two sisters, one of them singing. The Amin os-Soltan said in his ear: If I spend the rest of my life in prison and in fetters, I would not exchange this moment. On his return, Mirza Reza was appointed Consul-General in Tiflis, and given a charge on the issue of all Iranian passports in the Caucasus. He discovered a taste for money. Five years later, he became minister in St Petersburg, and his memoirs go downhill. 48 His good fortune, which up to then had been a matter of providences and premonitions, becomes his own doing. The ladies cease to be angels, but frail creatures who cannot resist his charm. At the Empire Theatre in London, he had hypnotised the Princess of Wales. Now, the Tsarina seeks him out in a crowded room. The reader begins to doubt him. His account of how he outwitted Counts Lamsdorf and Witte over the terms of the Russian loan to Iran of 1900 is especially hard to credit. At this point, the translator, with the ruthlessness of all posterity, calls a halt and, but for a haunting account of the classical dancer Monavvar-e Shirazi, ends his labours. We thus miss, amid much of little value, some matters of interest and importance. Noel-Clarke has aimed his translation at the general reader, or rather that general reader who can navigate what the founder of the Iran Society, Edward Browne, called the appalling complexity of Qajar nomenclature: that confusion of Molks, Dowlehs and Saltanehs that is one of the great obstacles to the popularization of Persian history. Noel-Clarke attends to this problem, providing from the best sources a glossary of the leading figures of the late Qajar Court and public service. Hence the second book-mark. Show Less