In the preface to his 1921 short story collection, Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud, Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh presented a manifesto which both urged and predicted an imminent novelization of Persian prose. The novel, and specifically the realist and socially critical novel, Jamalzadeh argued, would unite the Iranian polity, educate the masses, preserve the knowledge of Iranian history and tradition, and acquaint both Iranians and world citizens with the reality of Iranian custom, heritage, and daily life. Ironically, then, the first Iranian novel to acquire both national and global fame after this manifesto stand was Sadeq Hedayat’s Blind Owl, a surrealist labyrinth of shadow doubles, false awakenings, extreme alienation, and everywhere a deeply realism-resistant atmosphere of anachronism. What Irving Howe ironically termed “history as nightmare” in reference to Orwell’s 1984, manifested itself as one of Hedayat’s dominant literary devices in the novel: the protagonist constantly fights against an apparent “awakening” into a dark, ambiguous historical past, in which all of the idealized, Romantic/Symbolist imagery of his apparent waking life takes on sinister connotations. This paper argues that a progressively developing theme of “history as nightmare” can be traced in works by Hushang Golshiri, arguably Iran’s most prominent modernist writer of the generation following Hedayat’s. In these works (Golshiri’s novels Shazdeh Ehtejab – Prince Ehtejab – Ma’sum-e Panjom – the Fifth Innocent – and Shah-e Siahpushan – King of the Benighted), history not only lacks any morally positive qualities such as the ability to bestow national pride or a sense of collective heritage, but is in fact presented as a deeply unstable, ontologically distinct, and nihilistically deceptive alternate reality. As one might argue Faulkner’s Quentin Compson learned between Absalom Absalom and The Sound and the Fury, the reconstruction of history is both epistemologically fraught and impotent, ultimately, to provide “answers” to the existential crises of the present. Golshiri’s heroes do not study the past to learn from its mistakes and educate their contemporaries, as Jamalzadeh envisioned, but rather become trapped in nightmare worlds of past time from which they cannot awake. Besides Irving Howe, this paper draws upon notions of the “historical nightmare” developed in studies of European Gothic fiction, as well as upon the narratological theories of Brian McHale, Thomas Pavel, and Marie-Laure Ryan, which explore the notion of history as an alternate reality with a troubled and complex relationship with objective, “present” time.