The Blind Owl (Bufe kur) Buried Alive (Zende be gur) The Stray Dog (Sage velgard) Three Drops of Blood (Seh ghatreh khoon)
Sadegh Hedayat (
Persian: صادق هدایتPersian pronunciation:[ˈsɑːdɛqɛhɛdɑːˈjæt]listenⓘ; 17 February 1903 – 9 April 1951) was an Iranian writer and translator. Best known for his novel The Blind Owl, he was one of the earliest Iranian writers to adopt
literary modernism in their career.
Hedayat was educated at Collège Saint-Louis (French catholic school) and
Dar ol-Fonoon (1914–1916). In 1925, he was among a select few students who traveled to Europe to continue their studies. There, he initially went on to study
engineering in Belgium, which he abandoned after a year to study
architecture in France. There he gave up architecture in turn to pursue
dentistry. In this period he became acquainted with Thérèse, a Parisian with whom he had a love affair[citation needed]. In 1927 Hedayat attempted suicide by throwing himself into the
Marne but was rescued by a fishing boat. After four years in France, he finally surrendered his scholarship and returned home in the summer of 1930 without receiving a degree. In Iran, he held various jobs for short periods.[citation needed]
Career
Hedayat subsequently devoted his whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore. The works of
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Edgar Allan Poe,
Franz Kafka,
Anton Chekhov, and
Guy de Maupassant intrigued him the most. During his short literary life span, Hedayat published a substantial number of short stories and novelettes, two historical dramas, a play, a travelogue, and a collection of satirical parodies and sketches. His writings also include numerous literary criticisms, studies in Persian folklore, and many translations from
Middle Persian and French. He is credited with having brought the Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing.
In his later years, feeling the socio-political problems of the time, Hedayat started attacking the two major causes of Iran's decimation, the monarchy, and through his stories, he tried to impute the deafness and blindness of the nation to the abuses of these two major powers. He felt alienated by everyone around him, especially by his peers, and his last published work, The Message of Kafka, bespeaks melancholy, desperation, and the sense of doom experienced by those subjected to discrimination and repression.[citation needed]
Hedayat traveled and stayed in India from 1936 until late 1937 (the mansion he stayed in during his visit to Bombay was identified in 2014). Hedayet spent time in Bombay learning the
Pahlavi (Middle Persian) language from the
ParsiZoroastrian community of India. He was taught by Bahramgore Tahmuras Anklesaria (also spelled as Behramgore Tehmurasp Anklesaria), a renowned scholar and philologist.[3][4] Nadeem Akhtar's Hedayat in India[5] provides details of Hedayat's sojourn in India. In Bombay Hedayat completed and published his most enduring work, The Blind Owl, which he had started writing, in Paris, as early as 1930. The book was praised by
Henry Miller,
André Breton, and others, and Kamran Sharareh has called it "one of the most important literary works in the Persian language".[6]
In 1951, overwhelmed by despair, Hedayat left
Tehrān and traveled to Paris, where he rented an apartment. A few days before his death, Hedayat tore up all of his unpublished work. On 9 April 1951, he plugged all the doors and windows of his rented apartment with cotton, then turned on the gas valve, committing suicide by
carbon monoxide poisoning. Two days later, his body was found by police, with a note left behind for his friends and companions that read, "I left and broke your heart. That is all."[8][9] He is widely remembered as "a major symbol of Iranian nationalism."[10]
The English poet
John Heath-Stubbs published an elegy, "A Cassida for Sadegh Hedayat", in A Charm Against the Toothache in 1954.
Censorship
In November 2006, republication of Hedayat's work in uncensored form was banned in
Iran, as part of a sweeping purge. However, surveillance of bookstalls is limited and it is still possible to purchase the originals second-hand. The official website is also still online. The issue of censorship is discussed in:
"City Report: Tehran" in Frieze, issue 86, October 2004, which examines Iranian censorship in general;[11]
An article by Robert Tait in The Guardian, 17 November 2006;[12]
In 1987,
Raul Ruiz made the feature film La Chouette aveugle in France: a loose adaption of Hedayat's novel The Blind Owl. Its formal innovations led critics and filmmakers to declare the film 'French cinema's most beautiful jewel of the past decade.'[14]
In 2005, Iranian film director
Khosrow Sinai has made a docudrama about Hedayat entitled Goftogu ba saye = Talking with a shadow. Its main theme is the influence of Western movies such as Der Golem, Nosferatu, and Dracula on Hedayat.
In 2009, Mohsen Shahrnazdar and Sam Kalantari made a documentary film about Sadegh Hedayat named From No. 37.
^"From Persia to Tehr Angeles: A Contemporary Guide to Understanding and Appreciating Ancient Persian Culture", p. 126, by Kamran Sharareh
^Sollars, Michael; Jennings, Arbolina Llamas. (2008). The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel 1900 to the Present. Facts On File. p. 347. ISBN
ISBN978-1438108360
^Dohni, Niloufar (April 13, 2013).
"A Man Out Of Place". Majalla. Archived from
the original on June 27, 2020. Retrieved June 24, 2020.
An audio slideshow (with English subtitles) by Shokā Sahrāi, with Mr Jahāngir Hedayat (son of General Isā Hedayat, Sadegh Hedayat's brother) speaking. (6 min 28 sec).
Contemporary Persian and Classical Persian are the same language, but writers since 1900 are classified as contemporary. At one time, Persian was a common cultural language of much of the non-Arabic Islamic world. Today it is the official language of
Iran,
Tajikistan and one of the two official languages of
Afghanistan.