SOURCE: “About the ‘Black-and-White Thread’ in Šāh-Nāme,” in Folia Orientalia, Vol. XVIII, 1977, pp. 219-31.

In the essay that follows, Krasnowolska examines the contention that the Shah-Nama reflects Ferdowsi's dualistic view of life, maintaining that there is insufficient evidence to support this argument. Rather, Ferdowsi presents his story from a flexible point of view in order to demonstrate that events can be observed from many angles and that nothing is “black and white.”

Comments about the structure of Ferdousi's Šāh-nāme have not been until now, very numerous. They were rather occasional and chiefly included into the more general descriptions of this great poem.

Among the scholars who wrote on this subject chiefly the Russians tried to connect the composition of the poem with its author's view of reality. However, the solution proposed by Bertels¹ and followed, among the others, by Starikov², Gafurov³, partly by Braginskiy⁴, and also...