Читать книгу My Prison, My Home - Haleh Esfandiari - Страница 16

I WOULD NOT COME INTO contact with such fierce political loyalties again until I attended university—in Vienna, at my mother’s insistence—five years later. Many of my fellow Iranian students were active in the opposition movement against the shah. The principal student organization, the Confederation of Iranian Students, was left of center rather than revolutionary, dedicated to the memory of Mossadegh and loyal to his political party, the National Front. But more radical currents, some Marxist, some Islamic, were already stirring among the students, and two decades of authoritarian rule in Iran would turn a future generation of students into outright revolutionaries.

While I stayed clear of the student movement (my father having instilled in me both patriotism and caution about getting mixed up in politics), my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture. I studied journalism, philosophy, and art history, but I also attended poetry readings and literary debates. I heard Sviatoslav Richter play the piano and Yehudi Menuhin play the violin; I even heard a young and yet unknown Zubin Mehta conducting a student orchestra. I spent a summer in London improving my English, and traveled to East Berlin, Munich, Rome, Venice, Paris, and Geneva. Even if I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time, it was during these years that I came to appreciate the value of freedom of thought and expression, the right to travel and explore, and freedom from authoritarianism.