Fereydoon Parsanejad
Leonid's longtime friend and companion
FRIENDS
9/22/20264 min read
Their paths crossed geographically in an almost cruel way in later years. Leonid eventually left Tehran for Los Angeles, while Fereydoon returned from Germany to Iran. They would never meet in person again. Yet separation did not bring their friendship to an end. They spoke through long-distance telephone calls, but even more remarkably, they continued an old-fashioned correspondence through handwritten letters sent across thousands of miles. From the late 1990s into the 2020s, the two men wrote to one another about memories of their youth, the frustrations and absurdities of everyday life, and their observations and criticisms of the cultural and social environments in which each now lived. And, true to the friendship they had developed as young men, apparently no letter was complete without several jokes.
When Fereydoon Parsanejad first met Leonid Sarvarian at Dabirestan-e Emrooz in Tehran in 1959, there was little indication that the two young men were at the beginning of a friendship that would last for more than six decades. In fact, their first encounters were not particularly warm. Leonid—with his Armenian background, distinctive manner, and unique figure of speech—stood apart from many of his classmates, and Fereydoon later recalled that their relationship initially had its share of friction.
It was theater that gradually changed things. As Fereydoon became involved in a school production, Leonid began helping him with makeup materials, theatrical knowledge, and advice during rehearsals. Creative disagreements remained, but something more important was forming underneath them. After one of Fereydoon’s first performances, Leonid rushed to the backstage to embrace his friend, congratulating him enthusiastically and declaring, “You were born a comedian!” It was an early expression of the affection and encouragement that would characterize their friendship for the rest of their lives.
Through Leonid, Fereydoon was introduced to the cultural world surrounding the Sarvarian family and Kakh-e Koodakan—a place filled with theater, music, painting, cinema, and conversation.
Fereydoon would later describe this environment as something like his “first university.” Leonid’s most consequential gift to his young friend, however, may have been a simple theater invitation. He took Fereydoon to see Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, performed by the Anahita Theater Group founded by Mostafa and Mahin Oskouei, who had studied the Stanislavski method in Moscow before returning to Iran to teach and practice their craft. For Fereydoon, the experience was transformative. He became enchanted with theater and would later remember that evening as an event that changed the direction of his life. What had begun as an unlikely school friendship was becoming something deeper: two young men encouraging one another toward a life in the arts.
History eventually carried them in different directions. After the Iranian Revolution, Fereydoon moved to Germany, where he established himself as a theater director and scholar in Bremen. There he married a German woman and started a family. He named his son Toofan, meaning “Storm” in Persian, and his daughter Anahita—after the very theater group whose performance Leonid had taken him to see years earlier in Tehran. In this way, a memory from the beginning of their friendship quietly became part of Fereydoon’s family story. His children, in turn, became important to Leonid. He kept their photographs on a shelf in his home and, whenever the two friends spoke, regularly asked about Toofan and Anahita and how their lives were unfolding. Leonid and his brother George later visited Fereydoon and his family in Germany and stayed with them, allowing a friendship that had begun between two schoolboys in Tehran to grow into a bond between families.
Theater continued to travel between them. When Fereydoon staged Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in Bremen in the late 1980s, he sent Leonid a poster from the production. Leonid proudly displayed it for years in the living room of his Tehran home—a small object that represented far more than a theatrical production. It was evidence of what his old friend had accomplished and perhaps also a reminder of that first evening, decades earlier, when the two had gone to the theater together.
Those surviving letters tell a story larger than correspondence. They document two friends who continued to be present in one another’s lives despite revolution, migration, careers, families, and continents separating them. The theater that helped bring Leonid Sarvarian and Fereydoon Parsanejad together as young men remained an invisible thread between them throughout their lives. One friend helped open a door through which the other discovered his calling; decades later, Leonid was still hanging Fereydoon’s theater poster proudly on his wall and keeping photographs of his children nearby. Their friendship endured until Leonid’s death in Los Angeles in 2023—a relationship that began with youthful friction in a Tehran classroom and became a sixty-four-year conversation about art, family, society, memory, humor, and life.