Authors

• Samira Roknizadeh ¹
• Sayyede Maryam Rozatian ²
• Sayyed Ali Asghar Mirbagheri Fard ³

¹ Associate Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, University of Isfahan.

² Ph.D. in Persian Language and Literature, University of Isfahan(rozatian@yahoo.com).

³ Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, University of Isfahan.

Abstract

Lef Nikolaevich Tolstoy, a wise and mystic Russian writer, in addition to creating valuable and universal scholarly works, collects valuable collections of speeches and teachings from leading scholars of literature in the East and West of the world, from ancient times to that time. The story of Moses and the Shepherd written by Rumi is one of the masterpieces of mystical literature that Tolstoy, without knowing the poet of this poem, included it in his excerpts under the title of an Arabic anecdote, and since he found this story a description of his own mental conditions, in addition to his collection of works, he frequently quoted it in his circles and writings and comprehended its benefits.
In this article, based on the library and documentary methods, in addition to  the story of Moses and shepherd written by Rumi in various works of Tolstoy, the works which have not been translated to Persian and hence reminded unknown, and in the meetings and correspondence that he mentioned it, were identified and examined, also, the reason for his attachment to this story and how he to be acquainted with someone and why it found its way into his scholarly work as an Arabic story was explained. It turned out that Tolstoy had encountered this story in a book by a jurist named Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev. In his work, Pobedonostsev, while presenting a Russian translation of the story of Moses and the Shepherd, had mentioned the author of this story, Jalaluddin, a famous teacher, whose story is found in a poem in Arabic.
During the research on the origin of Tolstoy in quoting the story of Moses and the shepherd, a first hand and new information was obtained. One of them is the discovery of a story in Russian fiction that is both structurally and in terms of content very close to the Rumi’s story of Moses and shepherd. This information was also presented as other achievement of this research.

Keywords

• Keywords:Tolstoy
• Rumi
• the Story of Moses and the Shepherd
• the Story of Milk for God