His dark crow’s eyes half hidden by bushy eyebrows cast a severe yet benevolent gaze on the world around him. The way he talks harks back to the days when no one got a Humanities degree without being able to speak in public; his words are carefully chosen and artfully assembled into sentences. He still writes by hand “as everyone did before the war”, doesn’t have a cell phone and wears his trench coat with a combination of British rigour and Eastern flair that amply supports his claim to be a citizen of the world. In the space of an hour, Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani can give you the impression that you already know a great deal about 16th-century Persian literature and Iranian art. How does he do it? By combining a young man’s powers of memory with an old man’s accumulated wisdom, with a generous dose of conviction as well. The erudition of which Souren Melikian is both the guardian and transmitter (although he modestly denies this honour) is an invitation to a voyage in time and space, a captivating ride accompanied by the music of Persian names, the breeze of cosmological metaphors and the inner peace of a man who is both master of and slave to his subject.

Chance and necessity
Souren Melikian was born in France of the unlikely union between two exiles from North Azerbaijan, now a republic. His future father moved west during the 1920s; his future mother left Baku at about the same time but only arrived in Paris in 1933. The story began where these almost parallel destinies finally met. Which is perhaps the source of his tendency to regard life as a miraculous compromise between determinism and the illusion of free will, between the unforeseeable and the necessary. “When research achieves its goal, it is very often largely the result of a series of chances that landed on their feet. What makes us what we are? I know it’s not very fashionable these days but my view is that only God knows. God, or rather – to use the term that Muslims prefer when trying to describe Divinity – ‘He who causes all causes.’ I believe that everything that happens to us is ordained and that, happily for us, we are not equipped to understand this mechanism. I am at the centre of the compass; I am not the one holding the tool.” This “proactive fatalism” has meant that Souren Melikian’s life has been dominated by the search for lost time, the Proustian “remembrance of things past”. His quest began during his student days at the Political Science Institute in Paris and continued at the Oriental Languages Department where he began studying Persian and classical Arabic, going on to a BA in Persian and Arabic literature at the Sorbonne. In 1968, while some of his contemporaries were trying to change the world order by looking for “the cobblestones under the beach”, he earned a PhD with a thesis that analysed a 13th-century unicum(1) to prove that the celebration of ideal beauty in Iranian art during its Golden Age stemmed from an exclusively Buddhist substrate.

Polygraph erudition
In January 1970, Souren Melikian joined the CNRS. After finishing a D.Litt thesis in 1972, he pursued research on the culture of Iran and Moghul India, where Persian was the language of literature as well as the upper crust of society until 1835. This period of his life came to a close in 2004 when he had exhausted all possible ruses to defer retirement. But that certainly didn’t mean he was going out to pasture. As early as 1969 Souren Melikian was writing an art column for the International Herald Tribune and in 1984 he started writing a monthly column for the “bible” of the American art market, Art & Auction. He also contributed, under a variety of names, to Réalités, Connaissance des arts, l’Express and l’Œil. Souren Melikian is also an experienced photographer and has published countless articles in specialist periodicals in addition to books on drinking horns in Islamic Iran and the friezes in the Book of Kings, or Shahnameh.(2) Souren Melikian is a researcher who gets around a lot; friends are most likely to find him between two trains, in the store-room of the Tehran Museum or the France Culture radio studios in Paris. He commutes between Paris, London and New York, putting up with this nomadic life, yet often grumbling about the time wasted in travelling when he could be writing. Retirement hasn’t changed Souren Melikian’s life much at all. When the director of the Louvre Museum, Henri Loyrette, asked him in late 2006 to put together a major exhibition on Safavid art he cheerfully accepted – despite the fact that what should normally take two full years to organise had to be finished in only six months! “You don’t often get the opportunity to highlight this extraordinary culture and bring together a few of its masterpieces. And Iran hasn’t been getting good press lately so I didn’t want to miss this chance. I put on hold the books I was planning to write, informed my wife and got down to work.” The exhibition, in the Napoleon wing of the Louvre, ran from 5 October 2007 until 7 January 2008. For those who missed it, the Safavid period, from 1501 to 1736, is regarded as a Golden Age of Iranian civilisation. The art that flourished during this period is an intimate blend of painting and literature whose overriding theme – a celebration of the beauty of the world – is expressed in a host of objects covered with symbols and in colourful manuscripts whose masterpiece is the Shahnameh with its 50,000 couplets. Souren Melikian spent six months negotiating with private and public collectors throughout the world in order to prepare this feast of art: exquisite paintings, finely chiselled arabesques, ceramic baby elephants, carpets with metaphorical motifs, velvet cloaks, trays using the Garden of Heaven motif to convey eternity. And writing a 100,000-word exhibition catalogue, an invitation to embark on a magic carpet ride through a conceptual art where everything is a symbol.(3)

71 years young
At his age, Souren Melikian admits wondering, not without angst, just how much time he has left. He reckons that he would need fifteen lifetimes to become a real expert in his field and has nothing but scorn for those who claim such learning already. But that doesn’t mean the researcher has lost any of his fervour or the teacher his savant loquaciousness. Stopping before a polychrome miniature featuring diaphanous clouds and men dressed in leopard skins, his eyes light up with inner passion; Souren Melikian still has the ability to marvel, a quality that so many specialists have unfortunately lost. If you don’t stop him he can go on forever about the symbolism of the lotus and the pomegranate, of the circle and the star, of the lion and the hind. And all the while quoting 15th-century Iranian poets in the original. Then he talks with a worried look about all the books he still wants to write. And if he doesn’t stop talking soon he’ll miss his train.

1- A single-copy manuscript.
2- The Shahnameh is a fundamental book of the Iranian culture. The book, completed towards the end of the 10th century, is a 100,000-line epic relating the history and legends of the country. The work, which is also dotted with metaphysical themes and moral lessons, had the same importance for Iranians on a social or community level as the Koran had on a metaphysical level.
3- Le Chant du monde, l’Art de l’Iran safavide, Louvre/Somogy.