Sadegh Hedayat

Sadegh Hedayat (Persian: صادق هدایت‎ Persian pronunciation: [ˈsɑːdɛq ɛ hɛdɑːˈjæt] listen ; February 17, 1903 in Tehran – April 9, 1951 in Paris) was an Iranian writer, translator and intellectual. Best known for his novel The Blind Owl, he was one of the earliest Iranian writers to adopt literary modernism in their career.

Sadegh Hedayat
The last photograph he posted from Paris to his relatives in Tehran. (1951)
Born(1903-02-17)17 February 1903
Tehran, Iran
Died9 April 1951(1951-04-09) (aged 48)
Paris, France
Resting placePère Lachaise Cemetery
NationalityIranian
Alma materDar ul-Funun
St. Louis School
University of Tehran
Known forWriter of prose fiction and short stories
Notable work
The Blind Owl (Boof-e koor)
Buried Alive (Zendeh beh goor)
The Stray Dog (Sag-e velgard)
Three Drops of Blood (Seh ghatreh khoon)

Early life
Young Sadegh Hedayat

Hedayat was born to a northern Iranian aristocratic family in Tehran (his great-grandfather Reza-Qoli Khan Hedayat Tabarestani was himself a well respected writer and worked in the government, as did other relatives) and 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. 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.

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 Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing. There is no doubt that Hedayat was the most modern of all modern writers in Iran. Yet, for Hedayat, modernity was not just a question of scientific rationality or a pure imitation of European values.

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 the clergy, 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.

Hedayat's corpse in Paris, following his 9 April 1951 suicide

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 Parsi Zoroastrian community of India. He was taught by Bahramgore Tahmuras Anklesaria (also spelled as Behramgore Tehmurasp Anklesaria), a renowned scholar and philologist.[1][2] Nadeem Akhtar's Hedayat in India[3] 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".[4]

Death and legacy

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 April 9, 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."[5][6]

The English poet John Heath-Stubbs published an elegy, "A Cassida for Sadegh Hedayat", in A Charm Against the Toothache in 1954.

Censorship
Tomb of Sadegh Hedayat, Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

In November 2006, republication of Hedayat's work in uncensored form was banned in Iran, as part of a sweeping purge. However, surveillance of book-stalls is limited and it is apparently still possible to purchase the originals second-hand. The official website is also still online. The issue of censorship is discussed in:

Works
  • Fiction
    • 1930 Buried Alive (Zende be gūr) A collection of 9 short stories.
    • 1931 Mongol Shadow (Sāye-ye Moqol)
    • 1932 Three Drops of Blood (Se qatre khūn). A collection of 11 short stories.
    • 1933 Chiaroscuro (Sāye-ye roushan) A collection of 7 short stories.
    • 1934 Mister Bow Wow (Vagh Vagh Sahāb)
    • 1936 Sampingé (in French)
    • 1936 Lunatique (in French)
    • 1936 The Blind Owl (Boof-e koor)
    • 1942 The Stray Dog (Sag-e velgard). A collection of 8 short stories.
    • 1943 Lady Alaviyeh (Alaviye Khānum)
    • 1944 Velengārī (Tittle-tattle)
    • 1944 The Elixir of Life (Āb-e Zendegi)
    • 1945 The Pilgrim (Hājī āqā)
    • 1946 Tomorrow (Fardā)
    • 1947 The Morvari Cannon (Tūp-e Morvari)
  • Drama (1930–1946)
    • Parvin dokhtar-e Sāsān (Parvin, Sassan's Daughter)
    • Māzīyār
    • Afsāne-ye āfarīnesh (The Fable of Creation)
  • Travelogues
    • Esfahān nesf-e jahān (Isfahan: Half of the World)
    • Rū-ye jādde-ye namnāk (On the Wet Road), unpublished, written in 1935.
  • Studies, Criticism and Miscellanea
    • Rubāyyāt-e Hakim Omar-e Khayyam (Khayyam's Quatrains) 1923
    • Ensān va heyvān (Man and Animal) 1924
    • Marg (Death) 1927
    • Favāyed-e Giyāhkhāri (The Advantages of Vegetarianism) 1927
    • Hekāyat-e bā natije (The Story with a Moral) 1932
    • Taranehā-ye Khayyām (The Songs of Khayyam) 1934
    • Chāykovski (Tchaikovsky) 1940
    • Dar pirāmun-e Loqat-e Fārs-e Asadi (About Asadi's Persian Dictionary) 1940
    • Shive-ye novin dar tahqiq-e adabi (A New Method of Literary Research) 1940
    • Dāstan-e Nāz (The Story of Naz) 1941
    • Shivehā-ye novin dar she'r-e Pārsi (New Trends in Persian Poetry) 1941
    • A review of the film Molla Nasrud'Din 1944
    • A literary criticism on the Persian translation of Gogol's The Government Inspector 1944
    • Chand nokte dar bāre-ye Vis va Rāmin (Some Notes on Vis and Ramin) 1945
    • Payām-e Kāfkā (The Message of Kafka) 1948
    • Al-be`thatu-Islamiya ellal-belad'l Afranjiya (An Islamic Mission in the European Lands), undated.
  • Translations

Films about Hedayat
Sadegh Hedayat and Roozbeh, son of Sadegh Choubak
  • 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.'[10]
  • Hedayat's last day and night was adapted into the short film, The Sacred and the Absurd, directed by Ghasem Ebrahimian, which was featured in the Tribeca Film Festival in 2004.
  • 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.

See also

Sources
  • Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature ISBN 0-936347-72-4
  • Acquaintance with Sadegh Hedayat, by M. F. Farzaneh, Publisher: Markaz, Tehran, 2008.
  • Sadeq Hedayat, the foremost short story writer of Iran
  • The Sacred and the Absurd, a film about Hedayat's death

Further references

References
  1. Azadibougar, Omid (2020-02-01). World Literature and Hedayat's Poetics of Modernity. Springer Nature. ISBN 978-981-15-1691-7.
  2. Beard, Michael (2014-07-14). Hedayat's Blind Owl as a Western Novel. Princeton University Press. p. 34. ISBN 978-1-4008-6132-3.
  3. electricpulp.com. "HEDAYAT, SADEQ v. Hedayat in India – Encyclopaedia Iranica". www.iranicaonline.org. Retrieved 2015-09-03.
  4. "From Persia to Tehr Angeles: A Contemporary Guide to Understanding and Appreciating Ancient Persian Culture", p. 126, by Kamran Sharareh
  5. Dohni, Niloufar (April 13, 2013). "A Man Out Of Place". Majalla. Archived from the original on June 27, 2020. Retrieved June 24, 2020.
  6. Kuiper, Kathleen (ed.). "Sadeq Hedayat: Iranian author". Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on July 19, 2015. Retrieved June 27, 2020.
  7. "Frieze Magazine | Archive | Tehran". Frieze.com. Archived from the original on 2013-10-01. Retrieved 2013-09-26.
  8. Robert Tait in Tehran (2006-11-17). "Bestsellers banned in new Iranian censorship purge | World news". The Guardian. Retrieved 2013-09-26.
  9. "Iran: Book Censorship The Rule, Not The Exception". Rferl.org. 2007-11-26. Retrieved 2013-09-26.
  10. "Excerpted from Trafic no. 18 (Spring 1996) Translation Rouge 2004".
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