HEDAYAT, SADEQ i. LIFE AND WORK

Sadeq Hedayat (Figure 1) was the youngest child of Hedā-yatqoli Khan Eʿteżād-al-Molk, the notable literary historian, the dean of the Military Academy, and a descendant from Reżā-qoli Khan Hedāyat (q.v.). Many of his family members were ranking state and military officials, both in the 19th and 20th centuries (Kamshad, 1966, pp. 138-39).

FIGURE 1. Sadeq Hedayat.View full image in a new tab

Hedayat received his elementary education at ʿElmiya School and then attended Dār al-Fonun (q.v.), before an eye infection forced him to drop out. A year later he attended the French missionary school, St. Louis, in Tehran, where he learned French and became familiar with French literature Having obtained a state grant to pursue higher education, he left with nine other students for Europe upon graduation in 1925. He went to Ghent, Belgium, to study civil engineering (meʿmāri wa rāh-sāzi) and stayed there for eight months, before he was sent to Paris to study architecture, since his progress at school in Ghent was not satisfactory. (According to Hedayat, the salubriousness of the weather was the main cause; see his letter in Jamšidi, p. 112.) During his stay in Ghent, he wrote the essay “Marg” (“Death”), which was published in the periodical Irānšahr (4/11, 1926). He spent a year and a half in Paris (1928-29), two terms in Reims (1929), and a year in Besançon (1929-30). He had been sent abroad to study civil engineering with the obligation of working for the Ministry of Roads and Communications (Wezārat-e ṭoroq wa šawāreʿ); but he did not like the subject and eventually, in April 1929, obtained permission to study French literature in a teacher training context. During his four-year residence in France he was remarkably productive and wrote Fawāyed-e giāh-ḵᵛāri “The benefits of vegetarianism.” (Hedayat had turned vegetarian early in life after witnessing the brutal slaughter of a sacrificial camel, an event which also prompted him to write his first work, “Ensān o ḥaywān” (Men and Animals), a novice composition criticizing cruelty to animals (see ʿAlawi, p. 92), “Madlen,” “Zende be-gur” (Buried Alive), “Asir-e Farānsavi” (The French Captive), “Ḥāji Morād,” “Afsāna-ye āfarineš” (The Legend of Creation), and the historical drama Parvin doḵtar-e Sāsān (Parvin the Sasanian Girl; Kamshad, pp. 137-38, 142-43; Kubichkova, 1968, pp. 410 ff.). He did not, however, finish his studies and, aware that he could not pass the required tests, voluntarily gave up his scholarship and returned home in the summer of 1930 (see his letters in Ārianpur, 1995, pp. 334-35 and in Jamšidi, p. 112).

Back in Tehran, his family tried to persuade him to return to Europe and pursue his studies in a field of his choice, but he refused and was employed as a clerk at Bank Melli (The National Bank of Iran). He detested the job and described it as boring and very laborious. He became the central figure among a group of four young intellectuals, the so-called Rabʿa “Foursome,” which consisted of Mojtabā Minovi (scholar), Bozorg ʿAlawi (writer), and Masʿud Farzād (poet). The term Rabʿa (even though it does not exist in this sense in Arabic) was adapted at the suggestion of Farzād as a witty distinction from Sabʿa (short for odabā-ye sabʿa “the seven men of letters”), a term used by a well-known publisher to refer to a group of older, traditional literati of the time. There was also an outer circle of friends, including Moḥammad Moqaddam, Ḏabiḥ Behruz, ʿAbd-al-Ḥosayn Nušin, and Šin (Širāzpur) Partow, as well as a few others, such as Parviz Nātel Ḵānlari and Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Minbāšiān, who joined the group later (Minovi, pp. 357-60; ʿAlawi, pp. 167-68; Ārianpur, 1995, pp. 337-40; Jamšidi, pp. 69-81). Hedayat had a brush with the censors and drifted between clerical jobs at The Department of Commerce (Edāra-ye koll-e tejārat), The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Wezārat-e omur-e ḵāreja), and the government construction firm until 1936, when he went to Bombay at the invitation of his friend Partow, the Persian vice-consul in that city, to review the Persian script of a movie that was being shot there (Hedayat’s letter to Minovi, in Katirāʾi, pp. 124-29 and in Jamšidi, pp. 293-94; Anjoman-e Giti, pp. 93, 177, n. 2; Ārianpur, pp. 336-37). There he published his major work Buf-e kur (q.v.; The Blind Owl), produced in fifty handwritten, stenciled copies that he distributed among friends outside Persia. According to Mostafa Farzaneh, citing the author (Farzaneh, 1991, p.1), Hedayat had written Buf-e kur during his stay in Europe but had considered it impossible to have it published in Persia at that time. In Bombay Hedayat studied Middle Persian with the Parsi scholar Bahramgor Tahmuras Anklesaria (q.v.). After his return to Persia in 1937, he drifted between clerical jobs once again until his friend Captain Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Minbāšiān chose him to head the secretariat (raʾis-e daftar) of the newly instituted Office of Music (Edāra-ye musiqi-e kešvar), which was established under his direction by the order of Reza (Reżā) Shah in 1938 to change Persian music and to lay its foundation on the basis of the keys and guidelines of Western music. He was also a member of the editorial board of its journal, Majalla-ye musiqi, and one of its contributors (Majalla-ye musiqi 1/1, p. 4; Ḵānlari, 1991, p. 463; Ārianpur, 1995, pp. 339-40).

After the Allied invasion of Persia and abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the Office of Music and its journal were closed down; and Hedayat ended up as a translator at the Faculty of Fine Arts (q.v.), an insignificant position with little to do that he held for the rest of his life. He was also a member of the editorial board of Soḵan, an influential literary journal of the time published by his friend Parviz Nātel Ḵānlari. It was an unpaid but prestigious position that suited Hedayat’s literary and intellectual interests. A number of his works in the 1940s, including translations, essays, and stories, appeared first in this journal. The new freedom and indeed license resulting from the Shah’s abdication led to intense political, social, and literary activities, the modernist parts of which were centered around the newly organized leftist, but as yet not communist, Tudeh Party. Hedayat’s story, “Ḥāji Āqā,” in which an unscrupulous, greedy businessman, Ḥāji Abu Torāb, enriches himself at the expense of the ignorant poor, suited the party’s political outlook. Hedayat did not join the party but had many friends among the Tudeh intellectuals, including Bozorg ʿAlawi, ʿAbd-al-Ḥosayn Nušin, Ḵalil Maleki, and Eḥsān Ṭabari, as well as younger men such as Jalāl Āl-e Aḥmad. His sympathies were with the reformist faction (jebha-ye eṣlāḥṭalab) of the party, which eventually split from it in 1948. Several times he let them use his residence for their secret meetings, even though he personally resented politics and hardly participated in discussions. He also was active in VOKS, i.e., the Perso-Soviet Society of Cultural Relations (Anjoman-e rawābeṭ-e farhangi-e Irān o Etteḥād-e Jamāhir-e Šurawi) and published a number of his works in its organ Payām-e now (ʿAlawi, pp. 262-63, 282; Ḵānlari, 1990, pp. 352-53, 355; Ārianpur, 1995, pp. 342, 344-45; Farzaneh, 1988, II, pp. 174-75; Anjoman-e Giti, pp. 17-24; Maleki, pp. 45, 80, 290, 312, 318, 408-11; Pishdad). According to ʿAlawi (p. 263), Hedayat ignored the repeated requests of ʿAbbās Eskandari, a Tudeh activist and the chief editor of the newspaper Siāsat, the first organ of the party for a short time, to be an active contributor to the paper; but he later did make occasional contributions to Rahbar, the party’s new organ (Ḵaṭibi, p. 61). Some of his stories, including Āb-e zendagi (The Elixir of Life), were published by the newspaper Mardom, one of the three main papers published by the Tudeh Party (Kamshad, p. 204, Mir-ʿĀbedini, III, p. 1196).

The support of the Tudeh Party for the Soviet-inspired revolt in Azerbaijan in 1945, which led to intense conflicts within the party, and the collapse of the revolt a year later, greatly upset Hedayat. By the time the party critics, led by Ḵalil Maleki, split from it, Hedayat, who had once praised the movement as a progressive one (nahżat-e pišrow), became completely alienated from it and its platform (Hedayat, Haštād o do nāma, pp. 61-62, 72, 77, 83-85; idem, in Daftar-ehonar, pp. 613-15; ʿAlawi, p. 262). He had always been a severe and open critic of established Persian politics and cultural traditions, and his break with the Tudeh intellectuals, resulting in much personal antagonism and vilification from them (Hedayat, Haštād o do nāma, p. 105), made him a virtual émigré in his own land. His friends and close, old associates, Farzād and Minovi, had moved to England; he had already fallen out with Minovi; ʿAlawi and Nušin were in prison for their Tudeh affiliation; and another close friend, Reżā Jorjāni, had suddenly died. He apparently was not close to any members of his immediate family, who evidently were embarrassed by his lifestyle, his leftist connections, and the unreserved remarks that he used to make (Farzaneh, 1988, I, pp. 284-87). He had not produced any significant work for some time, which some have taken as a major cause of his increasing aloofness and despondency. His works were being published after having undergone censorship, but the royalties he received were meager. He felt that he was not being taken seriously, and the old literati apparently reciprocated the sneers and rancorous remarks that they had received from him in his satirical work Vaḡ-vaḡ sāhāb (Mr. Bow Wow) and in the occasional ridiculing remarks found in his other works (e.g., Ḡani refers to him contemptuously as ān pesare “that boy”). He had become disgusted with almost every aspect of contemporary Persian life, including music, cuisine, religious beliefs and customs, people, and political system, calling the country, among other things, a latrine (ḵalā), a stinking, abominable, filthy, stifling cemetery (qabrestān-e gandida-ye nekbatbār-e edbār wa ḵafa konnanda). He was not making enough money and had a hard time finding a reputable publisher for his books. He had a legal battle with a publisher, since one of his works, “Moḥallel"(The Legalizer), had been bootlegged under a new title (“Dard-e del-e Mirzā Yadollāh”); at the same time, he was being attacked in both papers and elsewhere (Hedayat, Haštād o donāma, pp. 53, 124-25, 131, 135-37, 142, 145, 180, 191-92, 194, 197, 228). He hoped that his old friend Šahid-Nurāʾi, a senior Persian diplomat in Paris, would be able to help him find a job there. The frustrations that he experienced made no small contribution to his depression in the late 1940s, which made him seek refuge in alcohol and drugs and eventually led to his suicide in 1951 (letters to Šahid-Nurāʾi and Jamalzadeh, in Daftar-e honar, pp. 613-15, 670, to Faridun Hoveydā, ibid., pp. 632-34; Ṣādeq Čubak, ibid., pp. 680, 684; Katirāʾi, ibid., p. 592; Hedayat, Haštād o do nāma, pp. 82, 99, 112-13, 119, 154, 157, 170, 193; Ḵānlari, 1990, pp. 353-56; Ḵaṭibi, p. 61; Farzaneh, 1988, I, pp. 272, 376-77, 382-83, II, pp. 57-58, 71-73, 192; see also his letter to Jamalzadeh, in Anjoman-e Giti, p. 73; Jamšidi, pp. 162-63, 169-71, 183 ff., 293-94, 296, 298, 300, 407, 427 ff., 457; Jamalzadeh, in his Dār-al-majānin, pp. 115 ff., depicted him as an asylum inmate lost in the imaginary world of his own creation; see also idem, in Jamšidi, p. 198, n. 1).

Eventually Šahid-Nurāʾi managed to obtain for him a four-month leave of absence from the Faculty of Fine Arts on medical grounds. Hedayat sold his books and left for Paris at the end of 1950, hoping that he would find a job somewhere in Europe and stay there with the help of Persian friends. His hopes were quickly dashed. It was difficult to obtain a residency permit for France or to obtain a visa for Switzerland, where his friend Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh lived and worked; and the possibility of going to London, where Masʿud Farzād resided, failed to materialize. Šahid-Nurāʾi was terminally ill, and the efforts of the noted French scholar Henri Massé to secure a teaching job for him came to naught, apparently because Hedayat did not hold any academic degrees (Jamšidi, pp. 363-64). He even tried, unsuccessfully, to have his leave extended by obtaining certificates of medical treatment in Paris. By the time his medical leave ended in April 1951, he had no jobs or permits to enable him to stay in Europe, and the remainder of his money could only sustain him for a short period. Moreover, some of his acquaintances kept ignoring him after the assassination in Tehran of his brother-in-law, the prime minister Ḥāji-ʿAli Razmārā (Farzaneh, 1965, p. 536). He had been contemplating suicide seriously for some time, as his farewell remarks to his friends before leaving for Paris clearly indicate (Qāʾemiān, in Daftar-e honar, p. 610; Ḵānlari, 1990, p. 358; Ḵaṭibi, p. 62). The illness of his old friend Šahid-Nurāʾi and the violent death of his brother-in-law seem to have brought the final blow. Hedayat’s dead body was found in his tiny apartment in Paris on 9 April 1951, a couple of days before Šahid-Nurāʾi passed away. He had tried once before to kill himself by jumping into a river but had been rescued (accounts by Hedayat’s brother and niece in Jamšidi, pp. 49-56, 58, 173, 211, and by Taqi Rażawi, in Katouzian, 1991, pp. 35-38). This time he made sure that his suicide attempt would succeed; he had every ventilation outlet in his apartment carefully closed, having turned on the deadly gas (Farzaneh, 1988, I, pp. 420-21; Ḵānlari, 1990, p. 359; Ārianpur, 1975, p. 347; Anjoman-e Giti, pp. 46, 50, 94; Hoveydā, in Dafter-e honar, p. 634; Ṣādeq Čubak, ibid., pp. 681, 684, 686-87). He was buried a week later at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Hedayat was fairly tall, about 5 feet 10 inches, wore rimmed glasses, dressed rather conservatively, and walked erect. In the 1940s in Tehran, he would normally go in the evenings to a café (usually Café Ferdows or Café Nāderi), where a number of his coterie, which included Hasan Ghāemiān, Ṣādeq Čubak, sometimes Reza Jorjāni and Jamšid Meftāḥ, and occasionally ʿAbbās and Fereydun Hoveydā, if they were in Tehran, and some others would gather around him and spend the evening chatting and gossiping. He was the distinctive figure among them. Hedayat was fond of Western music. With Šahid-Nurāʾi, a professor at the Law School of the University of Tehran, and Jorjani, a man of quiet disposition interested in art and practicing photography, they had musical sessions, where they listened to recorded Western classical music. The group was joined by Ehsan Yarshater for a short period in 1947 before he left for England to pursue his studies. Hedayat “never married, and his life was hardly ever settled. An inner sense of futility and a nostalgic melancholy, normally veiled by his flights into flippancy and ribaldry” (E. Yarshater, 1973, II, p. 665), marked his outlook on life. Although sometimes aggressive in his satirical work, he was by nature shy and often avoided serious discussion, particularly about his work, except with very intimate friends. He had a very original vocabulary and set of expressions colored by irony or mockery, which later was imitated by some of his admirers. For example, in response to “How are you?” he would say: “We are (still) in the shackles of life” (dar qeyd-e hayāt-im), a literary-mystical idiom used with parodic intent. When he offered a copy of his work to a friend, he would normally dub it as maʿlumāt (scholarly data). He would often use in mock seriousness the “pure” Persian mihan (homeland) which was substituting, under the Persian Academy’s encouragement, for the Arabic waṭan. His despondency and the gloomy ambience of many of his stories have their roots, not so much in the prevailing conditions of his time, as in his own rather morbid nature (E. Yarshater, ibid.).

Hedayat’s literary output, including novels, short stories, drama, and satire, includes Parvin doḵtar-e Sāsān (1930), Afsāna-ye āfarineš (The Legend of Creation, 1930, pub. in Paris, 1946), Zende be-gur (Buried Alive, a collection of eight stories, Tehran, 1930), Anirān (Non-Iran, with ʿAlawi and Partow, a collection of three stories, Tehran, 1931), Māziār (with Minovi, Tehran, 1933), Se qaṭre ḵun (Three Drops of Blood, a collection of eleven stories, Tehran, 1933), ʿAlawiya Ḵānom (Madame ʿAlawiya, Tehran, 1933), Buf-e kur (Bombay, 1936), Sag-e velgard (Stray Dog, a collection of eight stories, Tehran, 1942, many of which had been written earlier), Ḥāji Āqā (first published in Payām-e novin, 1945), Velengāri (Mucking about, a collection of six stories, Tehran, 1944), “Fardā” (Tomorrow, 1946, republished in Hedayat, Majmuʿa-ye neveštahā, pp. 188-206), Āb-e zendagi (The Elixir of Life, first published in 1944 as a feuilleton in the paper Mardom), Tup-e morvāri (The Pearl Cannon, 1946, anonymous posthumous pub., Tehran, 1979), and ʿal-Beʿṯa al-eslāmiya elā al-belād al-afranjiya (Islamic Mission to European Cities, 1930, published posthumously, Paris, 1982).

His literary studies, including folklore, essays, travelogue, translations, and reviews, consist of Robaʿiyāt-e Ḥakim ʿOmar Ḵayyām (Ḵayyām’s Quatrains, 1924; a new edition of Ḵayyām’s quatrains with an introduction), Ensān o ḥaywān (Men and Animals, 1924), “Marg” (“Death,” published in Irānšahr 4/11, 1926, pp. 680-82), Fawāyed-e giāh-ḵᵛāri (The Benefits of Vegetarianism, Berlin, 1927; refuted vehemently by Mir-panja), La Magie en Perse (Paris, 1926), Eṣfahān neṣf-e jahān (Isfahan is Half of the World; a travelogue, Tehran, 1932), Awsāna (folk tales and popular beliefs, 1933), Neyrangestān (popular beliefs, rites, and superstitious practices, 1933), Gujasta Abālīš (tr. of the Mid. Pers. text, Gizistag Abālīš, Tehran, 1939; see ABĀLĪŠ), Kār-nāma-ye Ardašir-e Pābakān (tr. of the Mid. Pers. text, Kār-nāmag īArdašīr ī Pābagān, Tehran, 1942–43), Gozāreš-e gomān-šekan (tr. of Škand-gumānig wizār, a Mid. Pers. polemical text that describes Zoroastrian beliefs and criticizes other religions; Tehran, 1943), Zand-e Vahuman Yasn (tr. of Zand ī Wahman yasn, a Mid. Pers. apocalyptic text about the end of the world and the coming of the Savior, who will punish the wicked and restore the world to its original perfect state; Tehran, 1944); “Payām-e Kāfkā” (an introduction to Qāʾemiān’s tr. of Franz Kafka’s Penal Colony as Goruh-e maḥkumin, Tehran, 1948), Masḵ (tr. of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, pub. in Soḵan 1/1-8, 1943, pp. 59-64, 121-28, 187-92, 281-88, 349-56, 445-60; separate ed., along with his tr. of “Gerākus-e šekārči” and other stories of Kafka tr. by Qāʾemiān, Tehran, 1950), and numerous tales, short translations, and reviews posthumously gathered and published by Ḥasan Qāʾemiān in Majmuʿa-ye neveštahā-ye parākanda. His letters make up a substantial part of his literary corpus, many of which have been published in literary journals and other publications (e.g., Soḵan, April-May, 1955; see Katirāʾi; Golbon, pp. 42-47; Daftar-e honar). A collection of eighty-two letters written to Ḥasan Šahid-Nurāʾi was published in Paris in 2000.

Hedayat’s prose is plain, easy to read and understand, and devoid of literary embellishments. He uses common, popular and colloquial, idiomatic expressions and proverbs where appropriate and avoids bookish and pedantic words of Arabic origin. Occasionally (and in certain works frequently) Hedayat falters in his grammar and diction. This is evidently more frequent in his psycho-fictions than in other works, and most strikingly in Buf-e kur, which gives the impression that, giving vent to his surging emotions, he wrote some of his psycho-fictions in haste. In his use of literary devices, Hedayat displays an effortless skill in the choice of metaphor and imagery, which is at its best in Buf-e kur. Hedayat’s fiction may be categorized into four analytically distinct groups, with some inevitable crossover: romantic nationalist fiction, critical realist stories, satire, and psycho-fiction. The romantic nationalist fiction. The historical dramas, Parvin doḵtar-e Sāsān and Māziār (each one in three acts) and the short stories “Sāya-ye Moḡol” (“The Shadow of the Mongols,” published in the collection Anirān, Tehran, 1931, with the collaboration of ʿAlawi and Partow; repr. in Majmuʿa-yeneveštahā, pp. pp. 102-18) and “Āḵerin labḵand” (“The Last Smile,” publ. in the collection Sāya-rowšan, Tehran, 1933) are on the whole simple in sentiment and unsophisticated in technique. They reflect sentiments arising from the nationalist ideology and cult that swept over the Persian modernist elite after World War I. “Āḵerin labḵand” is the most mature work of this group. Hedayat’s explicit drama is rather crude, and he quickly abandoned the genre along with nationalist fiction. However, many of his critical realist short stories could easily be adapted for the stage. The satirical works. To varying degrees, satire, parody, and irony are used in the stories, though few could be accurately described as satirical fiction. They normally reflect aspects of the lives and traditional beliefs of the contemporary urban lower middle classes with ease and accuracy. But, contrary to views long held, they are neither about the poor and the downtrodden, nor do they display sympathy for their subjects. Indeed, among the author’s works, they contain the least explicit judgement. It is clear that the ways of the characters are alien to the author’s own class culture and social and intellectual outlook, but it is also clear that, to the people whose lives are thus fictionally dissected and exposed, life is very much worth living. Wretchedness and superstition is combined with sadness, joy, charitableness, hypocrisy, and, occasionally, criminal behavior. Characters are common, situations realistic, and language authentic. This was in the tradition set by Jamalzadeh, enhanced by Hedayat, and passed on to Ṣādeq Čubak and Jalāl Al-e Aḥmad in their earlier works. Hedayat’s satirical works are numerous and mostly excellent pieces, the best examples being short stories such as “ʿAlawiya Ḵānom,” a story critical in its purport of some Shiʿite popular practices, filled with popular idiomatic and colorful expressions, “Ṭalab-e āmorzeš"(“Seeking Absolution,” in the collection Se qaṭre ḵun), “Moḥallel"(“The Legalizer,” also in Se qaṭre ḵun), and “Mordaḵorhā"(“The Ghouls,” in the collection Zende be-gur). Hedayat’s satirical fiction is rich and often highly effective. It takes the form of short story, novel, short and long anecdotes. A contrasting satirical work is Vaḡ-vaḡ ṣāḥāb (with M. Farzād), which consists of a series of spoofs, called ḡaziyas, parodying writings about various aspects of life, new theories, publishing practices, etc., in mock poem-like pieces revealing his taste for grimacing humor and travesty; it stands in stark contrast to his serious works of fiction. Almost invariably, all of his satirical fictions make scornful ridicule of the three powerful establishments (with occasional overlapping): the literary, the religious, and less frequently the political. The author uses his knowledge of these establishments and their ways, his negative personal judgement of them, and his remarkable wit and sense of humor in producing fictions that are always funny and at times hilarious. They hit hard at their subjects usually with effective subtlety, though at times the outright denunciation and invective reveal the author’s depth of personal involvement in the fiction. The literary establishment is mocked and ridiculed effectively in the pages of Vaḡ-vaḡ ṣāḥāb, for example, in the chapter “Ḡażiya-ye eḵtelāṭ-numča"(“The Record of a Chitchat,” pp. 136-55), allowing for the inevitable elements of caricature, with reasonable accuracy. In the short story “Mihanparast” (“The Patriot,” in the collection Sag-e velgard), the names of real-life models of the leading literary and political figures may be deduced both from the story and from their fictional names. Such fiction is paralleled by some of the author’s reviews of the literary establishment’s works, which are full of merciless jibes such as his review of Farhang-e Farhangestān (“The Word-list of Farhangestān,” published in the collection Velengāri) and of a contemporary edition of Neẓāmi’s Ḵamsa (Quintet) by Ḥasan Waḥid-e-Dastgerdi; Hedayat’s review was published under the pseudonym ʿAli-Aṣḡar Soruš (according to Ḵānlari, Hedayat used Ḵānlari’s critical notes that Ḵānlari himself had given him for writing the article; Ḵānlari, 1991, pp. 464-65). The damage is at its worst when he lists the editor’s silly mistakes in his commentary. The best example of Hedayat’s religious mocking satirical fiction is al-Beʿṯa eslāmiya ela’l-belād al-afranjiya, although the subject comes up often enough in his satirical as well as critical realist fiction. It is a comic depiction of cultural underdevelopment of Islamic lands and an indictment of the motives of worldly religious leaders. It is composed of three reports written by the reporter of an Islamic periodical called al-Manjalāb (Cesspool), who accompanies four Muslim missionaries sent to Europe by a conference in Sāmerā in order to enlighten Christian Europe. Vicious references are spread throughout the book to a book written by the dean of the Faculty of Engineering, a militant Muslim, on Muslims’ purity rituals. All four men eventually end up in Paris, one of them running a bar, another serving at a gambling table in a casino, the third working as a pimp (dallāl-e moḥabbat), and the fourth getting employment as the doorman of Folies Bergères, the famous Parisian cabaret (Hedayat, 2001, pp. 56-59; Farzaneh, 1988, I, p. 259).

Ḥāji Āqā (q.v.) is the longest and most explicit of Hedayat’s satires on the traditional businessmen (bāzāris) establishment, describing its decline and moral bankruptcy. Despite superficial appearances, however, and the anti-bazaari propaganda prevalent at the time among the left-leaning elements, it is much less a satire on the ways of the people of the bazaar, the then hated “bourgeoisie,” and much more of a merciless attack on leading conservative politicians. In a couple of his other political satires Hedayat uses the technique of allegory, the best example being “Qażiya-ye ḵar-e Dajjāl” (The Case of Antichrist’s Donkey, published in the collection Velen-gāri), which is a damning satirical allegory on political events in the country between 1921 and 1941. Tup-e morvāri, his last satire, brings together all the three strands of political, literary, and religious themes with brilliant intensity, reflecting more than his earlier satires the author’s intense anger and alienation.

Psycho-fiction.

Hedayat would have had a lasting and prominent position in the annals of Persian literature on account of what has been so far examined. What has given him his unique place, however, is his psycho-fiction, of which Buf-e kur is the best expression. This work and “Se qaṭre ḵun” are modernist in style, using techniques of French symbolism and surrealism in literature, of surrealism in modern European art, and of expressionism in the contemporary European films, including the deliberate confusion of time and space, which had distant precedents in Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy and Rabelais’ Gargantua and other works. But most of the other stories such as “Zende be-gur” (Buried Alive), “ʿArusak-e pošt-eparda” (Mannequin behind the Curtain, pub. in Sāya-rowšan (Chiaroscuro), “Bonbast” (Dead End), Tarik-ḵāna (Dark Room), and “Sag-e velgard” (Stray Dog) use realistic techniques in presenting psycho-fictional stories.

The term psycho-fiction used here is not in the same sense that is usually conveyed by the well-worn con-cept of the psychological novel. Rather, it reflects the essentially subjective nature of the stories, which brings together the psychological, the ontological, and the meta-physical in an indivisible whole. These stories are macabre, sometimes, as in Buf-e kur, reflecting the primeval chaos, and end in destruction: a cat or a dog dies; a man or a woman commits suicide, is killed, or otherwise disappears from existence. But there is much more to them than a simple plot of abject failure. There is a crushing, unbearable sense of fear without any apparent reason; there is a determinism of the hardest, least tractable and most fatal variety; there is sin without absolution, guilt without transgression, and punishment without crime; there is fall with no hope of redemption; there is vehement condemnation of the mighty of the earth and the heavens.

Men can be no higher than the rabble (rajjāla), and the very few who are not fail to rise up to high elevations. Even the man who tries to kill his nafs (self), to mortify his flesh or to destroy his ego, ends up killing himself, by annihilating his soul. Women are either lakkāta (harlots) or angel-like apparitions who/which wilt and disintegrate upon appearance, as in the case of the ethereal (aṯiri) woman in Buf-e kur and the statue in “ʿArusak-e pošt-e parda.” There are hints at incest and/or incestuous desires. There is the alienation of the anti-hero from women, whom he does not know at all and has never loved in any successful contact of the flesh; whom he despises for what he believes they are, and longs to love and cherish for what he thinks they ought to be. Most men and women are treacherous, hypocritical, disloyal, superficial, profit-seeking, slavish, undignified, and ignorant.

Yet the effect is by no means entirely negative. There may not be any hope through the pages of these fascinating, absorbing, and gripping stories, but there is an ideal which reconstructs itself through the very process of destruction. Death may be offered as the answer, but it is offered in a plea for unrealized love, warmth, friendship, faithfulness, honor, authenticity, integrity, decency, knowledge, art, beauty—for whatever man has eagerly and hopefully striven for and never quite realized. The large and seemingly unbridgeable gap between appearance and reality, between the real and the reasonable, between what there is and what there ought to be, between man and God, wears out the man and leads him to death as the only honest way out. Yet it is precisely that gap which he wishes to close, and that honesty that leaves him no choice.

The plot of Buf-e kur, for its psycho-fictional content, is an advanced synthesis of Hedayat’s earlier psycho-fictional stories, but especially of “Se qaṭre ḵun,” “Zende be-gur,” “ʿArusak-e pošt-e parda,” and “Mard-i ke nafs-aš-rā košt"(“The Man Who Mortified His Self”; pub. in Se qaṭre ḵun); this synthesis, once again in parts, finds expression in later works such as “Sag-e velgard,” “Tārik-ḵāna,” “Bonbast,” and “Fardā” (“Tomorrow,” first published in the monthly journal Payām-e novin, 1946).

Buf-e kur is a novel in two parts. Part one is the contemporary story of the narrator and the angel-like apparition, who wilts and dies upon appearance and is cut up by the narrator and buried with the aid of the old hunchback, the narrator’s fallen self. This, in part two, turns out to be an idealized summary re-experience of the story of the narrator and the whore—the angel’s fallen self—in the “ancient past,” which ends up by the narrator, disguised as the wretched old man, killing her by pushing the same kitchen knife “somewhere in her body,” either, if the copulation has been complete, in order to destroy the sacred origin that he has thus violated, or else as a phallic instrument to make up for his failure. He returns to the “contemporary” world to find the old hunchback running away with the antique jar from Rey, the symbol of continuity, and feeling the weight of a dead corpse on his chest. The man fails to become perfect; the woman fails to become an angel. There is no perfect love of the flesh; and there is no hope of sublime elevation.

Much speculation has been made on the possible sources and affinities of Buf-e kur. Some excellent literature have identifiable sources and precedents, including Ferdowsi’s Šāh-nāma, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Racine’s Le Cid, and Goethe’s Faust. Franz Kafka, Jean Paul Sartre, Gérard de Nerval, Edgar Allan Poe, Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, and even Buddhist traditions have been named as sources for Buf-e kur (see bibliography). The Buddhist hypothesis does not stand the test. Buf-e kur was written in 1936, two years before Sartre’s first work, La nausée. Hedayat came to know Kafka and his works long after that. There may be affinities with them, as with Nerval, Poe, and many others, but none of them can be described as a source. Buf-e kur is a modernist novel. It is neither uniquely Eastern nor Western. It is a contribution to world literature based on both Persian and European culture and techniques.

As a man born into a cultivated clan, a modern as well as modernist intellectual, with deep roots in the traditional Persian life, a gifted writer steeped in European culture of his time, and with a psyche which demanded high moral and intellectual standards, Hedayat was bound to carry, as he did, an enormous burden which very few individuals could suffer with equanimity, especially as he bore the effects of the clash of the old and the new, the Persian and the European. Hedayat lived an unhappy life and died a tragic death. It was perhaps the inevitable cost of the literature that he bequeathed to humanity.

HEDAYAT, SADEQ ii. THEMES, PLOTS, AND TECHNIQUE IN HEDAYAT'S FICTION

In 1930 Sadeq Hedayat published his first short stories in a collection called Zende be-gur (Buried Alive). A year later, he published a story called “Sāye-ye moḡol” (The Shadow of the Mongols) in a volume called Anirān (Non-Iran), along with two other xenophobic, nationalistic narratives by Bozorg ʿAlawi and Širāzpur Partow. In 1932, Hedayat published Se qaṭra ḵun (Three Drops of Blood), his second collection of short stories. In 1933 he published a collection of satirical and humorous sketches called Vaḡ vaḡ ṣāḥāb (Mr. Bow Wow), written in collaboration with Masʿud Farzād; a separately published narrative called ʿAlawiya ḵānom (Madame Alaviyeh; q.v.); and Sāya rowšan (Chiaroscuro), his third collection of short stories.

Most of the short stories that Sadeq Hedayat wrote between the late 1920s and the mid-1930s are generally culture-specific, full of local color, and depict some aspects of Iranian life during the same period. Their Iranian settings are geographically varied. The people in the stories are young men of education, traditional bazaar characters, Armenians, villagers, gypsies, prostitutes, an upper middle class family, an office worker, a traditional lower class family, and a traditional dervish character.

Three stories, “Zende be-gur,” “Ayena-ye šekasta” (The Broken Mirror), and “ʿArusak-e pošt-e parda” (“The Man-nequin behind the Curtain”), have non-Iranian settings, at least in part, and feature a young, educated Iranian male protagonist unable or unwilling to participate in a normal romantic relationship with a girl who is attracted to or loves him. The three protagonists are shy loners, who reject the girls in question, two of whom meet tragic ends. In “The Broken Mirror” the blond and beautiful Odette, whom Jamšid has left, apparently commits suicide. In “The Mannequin behind the Curtain” Mehrdād, having fallen in love in Le Havre with a mannequin that he takes back with him to Tehran, rejects Deraḵšande, his fiancée from childhood. Deraḵšande tries to win Mehrdād back, but in a drunken stupor Mehrdād kills Deraḵšande, who has dressed herself like the mannequin and startles Mehrdād by standing in the mannequin’s place and then responding to Mehrdād’s touch.

"Gerdāb” (Whirlpool) is another narrative about an educated young Iranian male protagonist whose behavior destroys the love around him. Homāyun’s best friend Bahrām has committed suicide and leaves a note bequeathing his property to Homāyun’s daughter Homā. The inexplicability of Bahrām’s suicide and the note and a presumed resemblance between Bahrām and Homā lead Homāyun to suspect that Bahrām was Homā’s real father. Homā and her mother Badri leave Homāyun. Several weeks later Homāyun finds the rest of Bahrām’s suicide note that reveals that Bahrām took his own life because of his love for Badri. Homāyun decides to go to say goodbye to Homā, but she has died from pneumonia that she caught after running away from school one day.

Yet another story with an educated male protagonist is “Se qaṭre ḵun,” which deserves discussion in tandem with “Zende be-gur,” as both stories feature first person narration that is problematic because the narrator in each case may be deranged. Both stories exhibit a distinctive tension in Hedayat’s fiction. In “Buried Alive” the narrator who craves death is a writer or has at least written down all of the material that comprises the story. In “Three Drops of Blood” the narrator has been begging asylum authorities for pen and paper for a time, al-though he admits that since being given writing materials he finds he has little to write. In both stories, the act of writing implies the will to communicate with others and implies the existence of meaning, either in the words written, the events and actions recounted, or the lives described, which is to say the lives of the writer and readers. This creative impulse has special significance, because it balances a pervasive desire to die, which permeates much of Hedayat’s writing and which is the antithesis of creation.

Protagonists in “Buried Alive” and “Three Drops of Blood” are caught between their consciousness of the meaninglessness and futility of life and their impulse to impart meaning or imply that meaning exists through creative communication, through writing. At the same time, the nightmarish horror of lives of suffering perceived as lived for no purpose is heightened by the very imagination of characters who can dream of an ideal order with which to contrast the hellish, senseless state of their own lives.

This applies not only to stories with urbane, educated characters but also to stories depicting traditional, lower class lives. “Ābji ḵānom” (The Spinster), “Dāwud-e guž-pošt” (Dāvud the Hunchback), “Lāla” (Laleh), and “Dāš Akol” (Dash Akol) portray traditional social environments and characters who face rejection in part because of physical limitations. In “The Spinster,” an ugly, unloved older sister is driven to suicide by the marriage of her beautiful and loved younger sister. In “Davud the Hunchback,” the deformed title character, who like some other Hedayat characters, wishes that he had never been born, can find affection reciprocated only by a dog, who dies before Davud realizes that the dog may like him. In “Dash Akol,” the title character is unable to reveal his love for Marjān, his ward, and after her marriage, in despair, allows himself to be killed by his archenemy Kākā Rostam.

In “Ḥāji Morād” (Haji Morad), suspicion and jealousy play a role, as in “The Whirlpool,” but the characters are traditional bazaar people.

Despicable characters people “Ṭalab-e āmorzeš” (Seek-ing Absolution) and “‘Alawiya kanom” (Alawiyeh Khanom or The Pilgrimage), stories which portray negative sides of humanity in a context which ridicules alleged hypocrisy in Islam. “Zani ke mardaš-rā gom kard” (The Woman Who Lost Her Man) has a non-tragic ending like “Seeking Absolution” and “The Pilgrimage,” although readers can suppose that Zarrinkolāh’s new man will eventually treat her as her husband Golbebu and her mother did earlier.

Story after story depicts alienation, rejection, antipathy toward others, unhappiness, defeat, death, a deformed society, individuals deformed by fate, dysfunctional romantic and sexual relationships, and meaninglessness of life.

In 1936, Hedayat wrote a story called “Mihanparast” (The Patriot) in Bombay, which he could not publish until after the abdication of Reza Shah in August 1941 because of its anti-monarchical and anti-establishment satirical content. That story appeared in that year with seven others in Hedayat’s fourth collection of short stories, Sag-e velgard (Stray Dog). Other Hedayat stories from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s were compiled after his death in a volume called Nevestahā-ye parakanda-ye Sadeq Hedayat (Scattered Writings of Sadeq Hedayat).

In early 1937, in Bombay, Hedayat prepared a handwritten master of the first of three longer narratives, Buf-e kur (The Blind Owl; q.v.) on mimeograph stencils and ran off forty to fifty copies (Katirā’i, Ketab-e Ṣādeq Hedāyat, 1971). This modest publication venture marks, in the view of most critics, the formal beginning of significant novel writing in the Persian language. In 1945, Hedayat published a satirical social protest narrative called Ḥāji Āqā (Haji Agha; q.v.). He wrote a quasi-historical, allegorical narrative satire called Tup-e morvāri (The Pearl Cannon) in 1947.

At their publication, many of Hedayat’s fictions constituted unprecedented, influential events in Persian fiction. In the context of Iranian story writing in the 1930s and before, Hedayat’s fictions exhibited the following, then distinctive, features. First, he eschewed conventional, carefully wrought, often flowery and pedantic, literary Persian prose style for a straightforward, informal literary register or, better put, a middle register between formal and casual, a register appropriate for his first-person narrators and for his omniscient third-person observer-narrators. Second, he wove folklore and folk expressions into his texts in a functional way, unlike their use as entertaining decorative elements in earlier Persian fictions. Third, he routinely had his characters speak in a colloquial register, spelling some of what they said in spo-ken forms, giving readers used to seeing the statements of story characters in literary forms an unprecedented impression of realistic speech. Fourth, Hedayat chose concrete, specific diction and imagery which led to an impression of realistic, individuated situations, rather than the stylized, idealized, generic descriptions in earlier writing, which had given readers the sense that they were dealing with types rather than individuals. Fifth, Hedayat depicted non-romantic, non-heroic protagonists and non-romantic, non-idealized situations. Sixth, Hedayat’s stories, which lead readers to experience particular environments, atmosphere, and senses of how the author sees life, routinely conclude without didactic import, an almost unprecedented approach in serious Persian literature. In all of these regards, Hedayat’s distinctive storytelling both advanced the medium in Persian literature and served as an indigenous model for later Persian short-story writers and novelists.

At the same time, the years since Sadeq Hedayat’s death in 1951 have provided readers with new vantage points from which to appreciate his writing, including his narrative techniques, both in its own terms and in the context of fiction-writing in general. As M. A. Homayun Katuzian shows in Sadeq Hedayat: The Man and His Literature (1991), Hedayat turns out not to have lived an extraordinary, heroic, mysterious, or even a conventionally productive life, but rather the life of a writer who produced extraordinary fictions. Readers no longer need to read those fictions as special or daring statements of social criticism of the Reza Shah Pahlavi era (1925-41). Readers no longer need to think of Hedayat’s fiction as a novel or technically distinctive phenomenon in Persian literature, even though they qualified as such at the time of their publication, because of the subsequent flowering and maturation of the Persian short story from the mid-1940s onward and the coming of age of the Persian novel from the late 1950s onward.

Writings on Hedayat, from Al-e Ahmad’s "Hedayat-e buf-e kur” (“The Hedayat of The Blind Owl” 1951) to Michael Beard’s Hedayat’s Blind Owl as a Western Novel (1990), shows readers that Hedayat did not pen his famous fictions as a solitary creator, but rather a man of the literary world of his day, whose major work exhibits significant inspiration and echoes of other literary works. Marta Simidchieva, in “The Nightingale and Buf-e Kur” (1994) and “The River That Runs Through It” (1995), portrays Hedayat as a person grounded in and attached to his cultural past, inspiration from which he transmuted into modern images and relationships. E. Yarshater in his introduction to Sadeq Hedayat: An Anthology emphasizes the essentially Persian character of Hedayat’s outlook and worldview despite his immersion in Western fiction and adoption of its techniques. Perhaps the most significant aspect of revisionist criticism of Hedayat’s fiction has to do with technique in fiction. As Sirus Ṭāhbāz, writing in 1997, puts it: “With the exception of The Blind Owl, which is a peerless work, many of his short stories are wholly lacking in artistic value from today’s viewpoint” (Darbāra-ye zendegi wa honar-e Sadeq Hedayat [On the Life and Art of Ṣādeq Hedāyat], p. 110). To be sure, Hedayat’s fiction neither exhibited sophisticated techniques in comparison with European and American fiction of the day nor stands today as fiction which critical readers appreciate for technique. At the same time, however, two factors in the continuing appeal of Hedayat’s best fiction, the amalgam of modernism and lyricism, do relate to technique or bring specific techniques into play.

Hedayat’s fiction participates in the fatalistic, philosophically sad, and pessimistic end of a twentieth-century spectrum of writing which critics call “modern” or “modernist,” a development in literature which involved a discontinuity between a traditional past and a “modern” present, between a literary past devoted to answers and a modernist present often confining itself to questions. Iranian and foreign critics routinely label Hedayat’s work “modern” and “modernist” and see him as the founding father of “modernist Persian fiction” paralleling a similar role played by Nima Yushij in Persian lyric verse (E. Yarshater, “Modern Persian Idiom,” 1984).

Critics mean at least two things by labeling Hedayat’s fiction as modernist. First, they use the term “modern” with respect to Persian literary works to contrast them with “traditional” or “traditionalist” Persian literature. From its beginnings in the 10th century to the early 20th century, Persian literature exhibited conventional modes, forms, topics, diction, sensibilities, and styles, which changed in the first quarter of the twentieth century with the appearance of nationalistic verse, the use of colloquial Persian registers in literary writing, a new romantic sensibility in early verse by Nima Yushij, and realistic social criticism in early stories by Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh. When Hedayat started publishing his stories in 1930, sophisticated readers recognized that he was as modern as could be, in contrast to Persian literary traditions and practice. His very use of the short story and novella forms was modern, there being no tradition for those species of narrative in Persian literature.

Second, critics also apply the term “modernist” to Hedayat’s writing in referencing several discrete movements, views, and styles in literature around the world, either deriving from specific realities and reactions in Europe during the first three decades of the twentieth century or relating to analogous events and circumstances elsewhere. For example, if the facts of World War I shook the confidence of European intellectuals and artists in their previously held beliefs in human progress and Euro-pean civilization and led some of them to modernist positions, in a country such as Iran the facts of Western dominance shook the confidence of Iranian intellectuals in their previously held belief in the special validity of Iranian civilization, leading them to a sort of modernist philosophical stance.

According to the critics, definable topics influence or characterize the formal or literary attributes of modernism. First, authors, narrators, and speakers no longer serve as representatives or voices of or models for readers, as did Ferdowsi, Sa’di, Hafez, and the like, but rather present themselves as separated from their readers in world view and as a sort of avant-garde vis-à-vis them. Second, authors, narrators, and speakers routinely question traditional world views that posit God at the center of things and human souls as having the prospect of unending spiritual salvation. Third, authors abandon the idea of an aesthetic order and choose forms, structures, and styles reflective of their individual, untraditional views about things. Presumably, many Iranian writers have felt that their new situations and views in a modern world oblige them to choose new forms, images, and diction to communicate new experiences. Fourth, modernist writing often exhibits sorts of perversity, which is to say that modernist writers use surprise, shock, terror, and affront as motifs, presumably because they experience such in a world no longer rational, predictable, or harmonious. Fifth, a whole new sense of the hero or protagonist imbues modernist fictions, in which protagonists are no longer heroic and struggles no longer epic, presumably because writers think that people in the real world are no longer that way. Sixth, nihilism finds a place at the heart of much modernist literature (Irving Howe, The Idea of the Modern, 1967).

Clearly, Hedayat’s fictions belong to any category of writing with such characteristics. His narrators (and the author behind them) communicate an avant-garde stance, separate from and unappreciated by society. They do not turn to God or religion in dealing with their problems. The aesthetic behind much of his fiction appears on the surface to have few connections with the Iranian literary past. Perversity, a new sort of un-heroic protagonist, and nihilism clearly figure in characterization, plot, and theme of some of his fiction.

As for connections between literary modernism and technique in Hedayat’s fiction, Buf-e kur offers the clearest illustration (see Buf-e kur for a plot summary). Here Hedayat presents his story in surrealist, symbolist, and even magic realist modes, which undermine for readers any potential autobiographical and sociological import. Buf-e kur seems to lack a linear plot, a movement of conflict over time from a beginning to an end. An idiosyncratic and emotionally or psychologically troubled first-person narrator tells the story of his life, which leaves readers wondering about the boundaries between fact and fiction or a dream world and real world. When the narrator of Buf-e kur tells readers how much the vision of the ethereal girl affected him, he does not say that that she revealed the prospect of bliss or splendor to him, but rather the splendor of his ill fortune. In all of these respects, Hedayat made instinctive or deliberate choices in telling his story the way he did. In each of these regards, the impulse behind his story-telling technique appears to relate to a single, simple principle: the nature of the specific experience he sought to communicate to readers, rather than concern about conventional storytelling practice or conventional reader expectations.

Its words play a primary role in the effects of Buf-e kur on readers. The language of the text is perhaps more important than actions depicted therein. Over the years, reader reaction to Buf-e kur has had a lot to do with the book’s language. The narrator’s hybrid middle register of Persian and use of colloquial spelling and forms in dialogue further flesh out his personality for the reader. In technical terms, such facts relate to the technique of the interior monologue, which Hedayat used in his early stories “Buried Alive” and “Three Drops of Blood” and in one of his last fictions, the short story “Tomorrow” (1946), which features two monologists.

Hedayat adds to the interior monologue technique in Buf-e kur the monologist’s characteristic communication of lyrical passages and evocative descriptive moments. The famous opening passage of the book exhibits imagery and phraseology and sentence patterns that create a nostalgic sense of alienation typical of modernist lyric expression. That passage sets a lyric tone for the book. Then there is the much quoted passage beginning with “šab pāvarčin pāvarčin miraft …” (The night was tiptoeing away), which is just one of a score of passages in the book lyrically depicting dawn, dusk, darkness, and weather.

Such passages throughout Buf-e kur, its reflection of borrowings from and affinities with specific lyric poems and lyrical elements in other narratives, as well as those features of the book which make difficult its appreciation as narrative of any typical kind, suggest that it belongs to the category of lyrical fiction, a sort of submersion of narrative in imagery and portraiture, a mode which may naturally lead to an effective rendering of the mind and which may open up ranges of metaphoric suggestiveness unachievable by purely narrative means. A primarily narrative movement would have involved new events or increasing intensity in that movement, whereas Hedayat’s technique spotlights significance on already narrated events and turns narrative actions into scenes which readers experience as moments or states or tableaux.

The notion of lyrical fiction can lead Hedayat’s readers down various paths relevant to appreciation of technique in his fiction. One technique in Buf-e kur has to do with parallel structure, pairing of synonyms, and other kinds of pairing which create a specific effect on readers. In the space of the three or four opening sentences in Buf-e kur, fifteen or sixteen instances of pairing of synonyms and phrases occur, which bring rhythm to the narrator’s monologue. Such instances of pairing, parallel structure, and incremental repetition occur upwards of a thousand times in the text.

Paralleling and incremental repetition of motifs (for instance the figure of “the old man” which appears in the guise of the narrator’s father, his uncle, the odds and ends men, and the hearse driver) is one of the most effective techniques that Hedayat uses to create in the reader a sense of puzzlement and of mystery never quite dissolved or dissipated. The book has two stories. The narrator has a shadow and a hamzād “double.” The narrator’s father and uncle are twins whose identity has been confused. The narrator says he loves two women. One of them says he loves and hates; the other remains idealized and out of reach. As a title image, the owl has taken the place of a nightingale in a modern anti-love version of love lyrics. The hearse driver in the first story becomes the odds-and-ends man in the second. The number “two” appears everywhere in the book, as in two flies, two coins, two months, two drops of blood. Repetition and echoing occur in mirrors and other images.

The writer-narrator thus communicates to readers his experience of a peculiar “duality,” a perhaps horrifying perception of life for a person who would like to be a complete or integrated individual, for a person caught between a desire to create and a wish for an end to things, for a person caught between the past and present of his own culture, for a person who sees contradictions within and without at every turn. By means of parallelism, dualism, doubling, and repetition in phraseology, sentence patterns, images, and story elements, readers come to experience the narrator’s state. In aesthetic terms, this verbal patterning and patterning of imagery makes for a poetic transaction, in which the author achieves lyrical unity and singleness of effect despite a lack of narrative and thematic unity or clarity. In Hedayat’s text, auto-biographical elements, a speaker’s individuated voice representing the speaker’s individuated views, and the speaker’s engagement of issues of Persianness in a modern world play a part. Hedayat’s sensitivity to or burdening by Persian history directly engages contemporary European texts and views, and Persian folklore, and ultimately does not reveal an unequivocal message. The result is a Hedayatesque atmosphere and a poetic stance which readers may interpret as depiction of life as having a fork in the road, each path leading to a dead end, with even the reality of the road being in question.

The Iran of Hedayat’s fiction is full of contradictions, ambiguities, ambivalences, dilemmas, dysfunction in communication, and dead-ends. But his Buf-e kur does not lead readers to a statement of a theme that captures the essence of the fiction. Perhaps here is where the modernist writer of fiction and the lyric poet coalesce. If the writer and his narrator have found life puzzling, troubling, or meaningless, his representation of that state of mind and experience through a lyrical narrative which puzzles readers or makes them feel how it feels not to make sense of things seems appropriate and signals a sort of threatening literary appeal which brings readers back again and again to the text.

HEDAYAT, SADEQ iii. HEDĀYAT AND FOLKLORE STUDIES

In addition to his outstanding stature regarding modern Persian literature in general, Hedayat is acknowledged as a major contributor in twentieth-century Iran to the growing awareness devoted to the collection and study of various aspects of everyday culture, particularly verbal art. Since the related academic disciplines were only just emerging, he is variously acclaimed as “founder of modern Iranian anthropology” (Shahshahani, 1986, p. 68) or “architect of Iranian folkloristics” (Fazeli, p. 62). Several Iranians before him—such as Mirzā Ḥabib Eṣfahāni, Mirzā Āqā-Ḵān Kermāni, ʿAli-Akbar Dehḵodā, or Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh—had already been aware of the importance of expressions of Iranian popular culture (Katirāʾi, 1978, p. 131), while yet others—such as Moḥammad-ʿAli Foruḡi Ḏokāʾ-al-Molk, Ebrāhim Serāj, Loṭf-ʿAli Ṣuratgar, and Ḡolām-Reżā Rašid Yāsemi—had already embarked on the collection and documentation of Iranian folklore (Farsiu and Vakiliān, pp. 23-26). But it was Hedayat’s fame as a well-known writer in combination with the unprecedentedly systematic methodology of his publications that made him the founder of the movement to collect and study folklore in Iran (Katirāʾi, 1978, p. 131) and a pioneer (Massé, I, p. 14) among Iranians “to study folklore and outline the methods of scholarship” (Radhayrapetian, p. 94).

From the days of his youth, Hedayat is said to have cultivated a particular interest in the traditional beliefs and verbal expression of the “common people.” Besides his mother, credit for having served as Hedayat’s informant goes to the household maid “Omm-e Leyli,” who had been born from a black, that is, slave, mother (Katirāʾi, 1969, p. vi). Later, Hedayat collected information about the folklore of different towns or regions when people from other cities came to visit his family, or through correspondence with friends and acquaintances about their town or region (Katirāʾi, 1978, p. 132; Fazeli, p. 68). In a particularly interesting testimony, Moḥammad Parvin Gonābādi relates that, in fulfilling a request from Hedayat which had originally been directed at Moḥammad-Żiā Haštrudi, he had supplied information on popular customs and beliefs collected from an old woman in the province of Khorasan who, besides possessing great narrative skills, was well-versed in popular medicine (Katirāʾi, 1978, p. 137, note 13).

Hedayat’s activities in the field of Iranian folklore can be assessed from various angles. In terms of categories, he contributed to the three fields of collection, methodological and theoretical discussion, and usage of folk language in literature (Fazeli, p. 65). In terms of chronology, his folklorist contributions can be assigned to three periods (Dālvand, pp. 178-92): (1) in his early work until 1936, when he left for India, Hedayat was heavily influenced by contemporary Iranian nationalist sentiments, including a “passionate Aryanist and strongly anti-Semitic” inclination (Fazeli, p. 63); (2) between 1936 and 1941, he devoted his main efforts to studies, publishing only a few essays; (3) after 1941, he completed his mature work.

Besides his own publications, Hedayat is credited with collecting proverbs and folktales that were used and/or published by others. According to Mojtabā Minovi, Hedayat supplied Dehḵodā with a monograph of 200 pages in which he had collected some 2,000 proverbs (Katirāʾi, 1978, p. 132-33; Radhayrapetian, p. 100); since Dehḵodā never mentioned Hedayat’s contribution, it is unclear to what extent he made use of it in his seminal compilation Amṯāl o ḥekam. Similarly, the nature of Hedayat’s collaboration with the radio storyteller and broadcaster Fażl-Allāh Ṣobḥi has been a matter of debate. Ḥasan Qāʾemiān (quoted in Etteḥād, pp. 212-15) goes to great length to accuse Ṣobḥi of exploiting the material collected by Hedayat during his time at the Majalla-ye musiqi (1938-41) without ever so much as acknowledging Hedayat’s contribution; meanwhile, Maḥmud Omidsālār has supplied abundant proof that this accusation is unfounded, since Ṣobḥi acknowledges his indebtedness to Hedayat at various instances in his publications. Hedayat’s two monograph publications Owsāna and Neyrangestān both belong to the first period of his folklore studies, when he was mainly concerned with collecting folklore data and publishing outlines so as to instigate public and scholarly attention for the task of preserving and studying Iranian folklore.

Owsāna, initially a booklet of just 36 pages, was first published in Tehran in 1931. Towards the end of the preface, Hedayat states that he saw Owsāna as the first installment of a comprehensive treatment of Persian folklore that in a second installment would proceed to discuss Persian beliefs and customs (which he published in his book Neyrangestān two years later). The book’s title is a dialect version of the modern Persian noun afsāna, meaning legend and myth as well as tale. It opens with Hedayat’s strong introductory statement, lamenting the disappearance of Iranian folklore in the process of modernity, thus reflecting “the dual attitude of intellectuals … towards the modernist social and political trends of the early Reza Shah period, … drawing attention to the costs in cultural terms” (Katouzian, p. 85).

Moreover, Hedayat regrets the widespread disrespect for traditional culture that, rather than calling for documentation and research, would regard folklore as a dispensable remnant of bygone times that “ought to be forgotten.” Whereas he considers the works of many a traditional poet outdated since they do not respond to modern literary taste, he regards popular poetry as the verbal expression of the common people (tuda-ye ʿavām) and of timeless value. In contrast to ethical writings in prose that he considers dull, popular poetry would convey basic philosophy and ethics in an attractive form that would particularly appeal to children. Songs composed for special occasions tend to go out of currency once the related event has been forgotten, but popular songs have been around since times immemorial, some of them probably constituting relics from the pre-Islamic period. Implicitly adhering to an evolutionary theory, he regards poetry as humanity’s primordial expression, whereas prose would only become predominant the more the development of society demanded exact expression to formulate the results of intellectual and scientific progress. Against the backdrop of these assumptions, Hedayat goes to some length to demonstrate the perceived continuity between Avestan verse and contemporary popular poetry. The documentary section of Owsāna presents numerous specimens of nursery rhymes, songs of nursemaids and mothers, games, riddles, and folksongs, albeit without any detailed documentation or further analysis.

Partially translated into French in Henri Massé’s Croyances et coutumes persanes (II, pp. 492-99) and praised as a “pioneering effort in folklore studies in Iran” (Radhayrapetian, p. 98), Owsāna has been heavily criticized as a “rather haphazard collection of folk songs and traditional children’s tales” (Katouzian, p. 85) that lacks “distinctive classifying criteria,” such as “information about fieldwork, informants, or regions in which the songs are popular” (Radhayrapetian, p. 97; see also Fazeli, pp. 65-66). Informed as this critique may be, it disregards the fact that Hedayat never received an academic training and that he developed a more scholarly attitude only at a later date.

Hedayat’s second folklorist publication, Neyrangestān, was first published in 1933 but was banned immediately upon publication; it became widely known only as of the second edition published in 1955. The publication was most probably delayed because of passages the censors found to be offensive to public morality. According to Mojtabā Minovi, a case in point were the verses addressed by unmarried young women to the “Brass-top Minaret” (menār-e sar-berenji; Hedayat, 1955, p. 158) in Isfahan, in which the minaret is likened to the “handle” (dasta) of a “man ready for action” (Katouzian, p. 86, and p. 281, n. 42).

Neyrangestān takes its title from the Middle Persian name of the old Zoroastrian manual of ritual (ed. Kotwal and Kreyenbroek), which was commonly characterized as a collection of superstitious rites and beliefs (Fazeli, p. 67). As the “first serious book in Persian on Iranian folklore” (Elwell-Sutton, p. 250; Radhayrapetian, p. 97; Fazeli, p. 68), the work, besides an extensive introduction, contains a fairly unsystematic conglomerate of data on popular beliefs and customs arranged in a total of 22 chapters, whose content ranges from marriage and pregnancy through sleep and death to ancient festivals and specific elements of popular tales.

At the very beginning of the introduction, Hedayat takes a strong nationalistic stance in characterizing Iran as a “caravansary,” where numerous “foreign” people—Chaldeans, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Turks, Arabs, and Mongols—had left traces of their beliefs. He acknowledges in principle the importance of “superstition” as an indispensable constituent of the human condition, quoting the (anonymous) dictum that “man is a superstitious animal.” He then proceeds to quote an extensive passage from the German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel’s (1834-1919) Die Welträthsel (1895-99) to the effect that human superstition is the logical offspring of the behavior of their animal ancestors. Hedayat’s evolutionist perspective is further underlined by quotations from the British anthropologist Edward Tylor’s (1832-1917) Primitive Culture (London, 1871); both works are quoted from their French translations. The bulk of the following exhortations are devoted to the fact that Hedayat applies a clear-cut “Cultural Dualism Theory” (Fazeli, p. 214) to contemporary superstition in dividing it into good and useful elements deriving from ancient Iranian tradition, on the one side, and bad as well as harmful foreign elements that are detrimental to contemporary society, on the other. Positing ancient Iranian religion against those of the “foreign” cultures, he takes a particular stance against the “bloodthirsty god of the Semites” and repeatedly accuses the “foreign” cultures of having contaminated and degraded Iranian tradition. Even so, he acknowledges the fact that cultural progress leads to the gradual annihilation of superstition, opining that nothing can be more harmful to misguided superstition than its publication and the resulting public discussion.

As for his sources, Hedayat claims to refer solely to oral sources, leaving aside such popular booklets as those on the interpretation of dreams. He explicitly acknowledges the help of a number of friends and colleagues, above all Mojtabā Minovi, who generously supplied him with his notes. Even so, he appears to have used Pahlavi and Avestan sources, literary texts such as Āqā Jamāl Ḵvānsāri’s seventeenth-century treatise Kolṯum nane, travel accounts, and religious books (Fazeli, p. 68).

Neyrangestān has been praised as “the first systematic study of folklore in Iran,” in which “an Iranian scholar used modern anthropological theories, methods and sources to examine a cultural issue, directly influenced by European anthropology” (Fazeli, p. 68). The work’s systematic research report, the application of a theoretical framework, research questions, literature review, and argument for the significance of the research are considered particularly noteworthy (ibid.). In terms of scholarly rigor, Neyrangestān is still found deficient (Katouzian, p. 86). In particular, the author is criticized for not supplying “the requisite information about time, place, informants, interviewees, sources and techniques used in his research” (Fazeli, pp. 65-66), thus leaving it up to the readers to assess the context and reliability of the quoted information.

From a modern perspective, the range of European scholarly sources Hedayat used is fairly limited; moreover, one wonders whether he was well advised to quote at length from the work of Haeckel, a scholar whose uncompromising evolutionary racism contributed to the rise of Nazism in Germany and paved the way for eugenics. But then again, Hedayat’s use of the work only reflects the Zeitgeist of the era.

Some critics see the introduction to Neyrangestān as a clear statement of Hedayat’s political ideology, revealing him to be “a zealous nationalist and an anti-Islamist” (Fazeli, p. 63), even a “xenophobic” (Shahshahani, 1986, p. 68) who regarded the religion of Islam as “an alien faith imposed upon Iran by an inferior civilization” (Radhayrapetian, p. 96). In slightly more balanced terms, Hedayat is characterized as being “obsessed with what he believed to be the baneful influence” of the foreign conquests and invasions of Iran (Elwell-Sutton, p. 250). Despite the methodological shortcomings of Neyrangestān (which he probably did not conceive as such), Massé used some of the material presented in Hedayat’s “remarkable” work in his Croyances et coutumes persanes (see I, p. 14).

At the beginning of the second phase of his folkloristic work, Hedayat traveled to Bombay, where he apparently was further influenced by the writings of the “nationalist Constitutionalist” (Fazeli, p. 63) Mirzā Āqā-Ḵān Kermāni and other similar views (Katirāʾi, 1978, p. 140, note 21). After his return to Iran in 1937, he worked at the newly instituted Office of Music (Edāra-ye musiqi-e kešvar) and served as a member of the editorial board of its journal, Majalla-ye musiqi. It is here that he issued a public call for cooperation (Radhayrapetian, p. 100) as a result of which he received a substantial number of folktales, some of which he passed on to Ṣobḥi. Hedayat’s folkloristic publications during this period are modest, and include only two theoretical essays comprising documentary sections, and two folktales.

The twelve-page essay “Tarānahā-ye ʿāmiāna-ye fārsi” (Persian popular songs; Majalla-ye musiqi, 1/7, 1939, pp. 17-28) is essentially a sequel to Owsāna. Hedayat starts by reiterating his assessment of popular songs as basic expressions of humanity, since they respond to the two elementary needs of poetry and music. Witnessing the obvious similarity between the popular songs of cultures wide apart convinces him that they must derive from an extremely ancient period in which the cultures that were later separated were still in close contact. Since the transmission of the essential values preserved in folksongs is threatened by the onslaught of modernity, he regards it as a national duty (Fazeli, p. 71) to preserve them by documenting them from the oral tradition of the “common people” and villagers. Hedayat further stresses the primacy of oral tradition for all genres of folklore and unambiguously advocates an appreciation of the “natural attraction” (girandegi-e ṭabiʿi) of popular poetry, which, even though lacking artistic polish, is certainly enjoyed by the common people as much as artistic creations are by the educated. In general terms, he qualifies folklore as the “soul of a nation,” its “inner voice” that can only be studied seriously by having recourse to the “book of nature” (ketāb-e ṭabiʿat), that is, living tradition. In the latter half of his essay, an “excellent piece of research” (Fazeli, p. 70), Hedayat discusses a number of popular Persian songs in a comparative perspective, discussing them in relation to similar songs from other nations.

Short as the essay is, it has been assessed as a “studious and mature piece of research” (Katouzian, p. 87). The greater detail in presenting his ideas certainly reflects Hedayat’s “development as a folklorist and researcher” (Radhayrapetian, p. 99). While Hedayat still follows the argument of “nineteenth-century European nationalist evolutionary discourse” (Fazeli, p. 70), the comparative perspective he develops documents a more nuanced (and less nationalist) approach.

Hedayat’s progress as a folklorist is further witnessed in his short essay “Matalhā-ye fārsi” (Persian Tales; Majalla-ye musiqi 1/8, 1939, pp. 25-30), a two-page introduction to Persian folktales followed by the text of two folktales. According to Hedayat, Persian folktales are so lively, varied, and pertinent as images of permanent values that they constitute an ideal means of teaching ethics to children. Besides Persian Tales (London, 1919), published by David L. R. Lorimer in cooperation with his wife Emily M. O. Lorimer (1881-1949), Hedayat knows the work of Arthur Christensen (Contes persans en langue populaire, Copenhagen, 1918) and Henri Massé (“Contes en persan populaire,” Journal Asiatique 206, 1925, pp. 1-157), even though he fails to specify that both researchers specifically documented the narratives of a single individual Iranian storyteller (Marzolph, 2012, pp. 5-6). He duly acknowledges the fact that folktale studies were inaugurated by the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and stresses the fact that folktales have given rise to the work of great writers such as Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen and to what he sees as an extraordinarily beautiful artistic creation, Walt Disney’s animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Essentially, Hedayat even regards folktales as the main source for modern literary production. As he had previously mentioned in relation to folksongs, he reiterates the fact that the authors of folktales remain unknown and that the texts have been passed down through oral tradition. His short introduction culminates in the plea that folktales should not only be collected from old and illiterate people, but must be documented word by word without any alterations and that, in order to assess the “original version” (matn-e aṣli) “several variants of the same narrative should be recorded” (Radhayrapetian, p. 101). The two texts he appends to his theoretical considerations are versions of the widely known Persian folktales Āqā Muša (Marzolph, 1984, pp. 257-59, tale-type 2032) and Šangul o Mangul (ibid., pp. 49-50, tale-type 123), unfortunately without any further discussion.

Hedayat’s most mature contribution to the study of Persian folklore is his long essay “Folklor yā farhang-e tuda” (Folklore, or culture of the people), originally published in four installments in the journal Soḵan (2/3-6 Esfand 1323-Ḵordād1324 Š./1944-45; repr., Majmuʿa-ye Neveštahā-ye parākanda-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1965, pp. 448-83). The essay’s second installment is his “Ṭarḥ-e kolli barā-ye kāvoš-e folklor-e yek manṭaqa” (A general sketch for the study of the folklore of a region), which is sometimes, albeit erroneously, regarded as a separate piece (Fazeli, p. 72; Nadjmabadi, p. 128). The genesis of this important essay is related in an interesting anecdote (quoted by Homāyuni, p. 92). According to this testimony, Parviz Nātel Ḵānlari had asked Hedayat to revise an essay Ḵānlari had been writing on general aspects of folklore; since Hedayat appears to have had difficulties producing an adequate revision, Ḵānlari gave him some books, borrowed from the library of the Faculty of Letters and Humanities of the University of Tehran, that subsequently enabled Hedayat to complete his task. This anecdote is highly revealing, since it points to the clue for an adequate assessment of Hedayat’s essay.

In fact the essay is a revised version of the initial chapters of the Manuel de folklore (Paris, 1936) compiled by French ethnographer and folklorist Émile Nourry (1870-1937), who published his works under the pen name Pierre Saintyves. Following Saintyves’ presentation step by step, Hedayat’s main achievement lies in the fact that he ingeniously adapted the model text’s general statements, and particularly those relating to European cultures, to the Persian context—a fact that is most obvious in the subsections of the “Ṭarḥ.” Even though Hedayat mentions Saintyves (as Saint Yves) prominently at the beginning of his essay, the true extent of his indebtedness remains to be studied. Although the essay is a landmark regarding the introduction of folkloristic methods to Iran, Hedayat’s achievement in compiling “a handbook on what to look for in a comprehensive anthropological fieldwork” (Katouzian, p. 217) must be seen in a proper perspective by a careful assessment of its relationship to the Manuel de folklore. Without going into much detail here, already a minor slip of attention right at the essay’s beginning calls for attention. Here, Hedayat qualifies the term “Folk-lore” as having been coined by Ambroise Morton in 1885. Saintyves (Manuel, p. 21), on the contrary, clearly states that “Ambroise Morton” was the pseudonym of British antiquarian William John Thoms who died in 1885, and that the term was coined by him in a letter to the journal Athenaeum in 1846.

The essay starts with a thorough introduction discussing “the definition, scope, history and significance of folkloristics in general and with some reference to Iran” (Fazeli, p. 72) and proceeds with the “General sketch for the study of regional folklore.” This sketch divides folklore into the three main sections of (1) material life (zendegi-e mādi), (2) spiritual life (zendegi-e maʿnavi), and (3) social life (zendegi-e ejtemāʿi). Sections (1) and (2) are further detailed in two levels of subdivisions in which Hedayat has taken great care to adapt the facts listed by Saintyves to the Persian context. For instance, Saintyves’ subdivision (1.1.2) “Food and alimentation” is now (as subdivision 1.1.3) supplied with many details of Persian food culture and table manners. While Hedayat at times changes the sequence of the subdivisions, introduces new subdivisions, and adds numerous details, he even renders Saintyves’ short “Appendix” on items and topics related to sexuality with great faithfulness. Following the “General sketch,” a number of relatively short, specified considerations deal with topics related to ethnographical fieldwork. The essay ends with instructions on how to apply the system of transcription/transliteration of words and terms in non-standard Persian as devised by Ḵānlari and Roger Lescot (Radhyarapetian, p. 102; Etteḥād, p. 231).

Even though Hedayat’s indebtedness to Saintyves needs to be taken into account for a more balanced assessment of his work, his essay without any doubt supplies the “first comprehensive methodological guidelines for the discipline in Iran” (Fazeli, p. 65) and is “of great importance to Iranian folkloristics” (Radhayrapetian, p. 101). A major achievement in Hedayat’s mature attitude is to be seen in the fact that, following Saintyves (as we need to remind ourselves), he has abandoned his initial dualist, nationalist, and racist approach to Persian folklore, now emphasizing “the importance of being objective and impartial as a folklorist” (Fazeli, p. 73) and strongly advocating the fact that “collecting … is not the end of research. Folklorists must analyze the functions of folklore and contextualize it within its socio-political fabric” (ibid., p. 74).

The impact of Hedayat’s adapted translation of Saintyves’ essay was considerable. While the first Iranian to put the “Ṭarḥ” into practice was Ṣādeq Homāyuni in his Farhang-e mardom-e Sarvestān (Tehran, 1970), the systematic categorization of Persian popular culture it introduced also served as a basis for the classification applied to the folklorist data amassed in Ganjina-ye farhang-e mardom (Treasury of popular culture), edited and published by Abu’l-Qāsem Enjavi, which includes ten volumes on tales and local customs (see Enjavi, 1992, pp. 193-253). To the present day, numerous ethnographic assessments of local or regional culture in Iran have taken the outlines of Hedayat’s work as their starting point.

A final field to be discussed in connection with Hedayat’s folkoristic activities is the usage of folklore and folk language in literature. Modern scholarship agrees that Persian folklore had a strong influence on Hedayat’s literary production (Katirāʾi, 1978, pp. 135-6; Ḥasan-zāda Mir-ʿAli and Aḥmadi Lafuraki). Even though Hedayat was second “in the use of ordinary folk and colloquial language in literary work” (Fazeli, p. 65) after Jamalzadeh, his “ear for the turns of the ordinary speech was far superior” (Elwell-Sutton, p. 251).

Hedayat, in particular, is credited with employing the language and customs of the “common people”—such as colloquial expressions, popular beliefs, and folk narrative—in his writing “not only as an established but a natural mode of literary expression” (Radhayrapetian, p. 93). To name but a few examples, the collection of satirical sketches, Vaq Vaq Sāhāb (Mister Bow-wow), is told “in the style of the itinerant storytellers and narrators of popular verse epics” (Elwell-Sutton, p. 251); his most famous novella, Buf-e kur, is a “veritable mine of folkloric and mythical motif” (ibid.); and his pamphlet Āb-e zendegi (The water of life) is cast “in the form of a fairy tale and based on a traditional legend” (ibid.).

After Hedayat’s early death, a collection of his short writings was edited (with a list of handwritten notes intended for a second edition of some of his work) by Ḥasan Qāʾemiān in Neveštahā-ye parākanda. The Farhang-e ʿāmiāna-ye mardom-e Irān, edited by Hedayat’s nephew Jahāngir, not only reprints a collection of his folklorist writings but also for the first time reproduces a fair number of folktales with whose collection Hedayat is credited.

In order to do justice to Hedayat’s folkloristic writings from a modern perspective, we need to consider first and foremost that Hedayat never received a scholarly education. His admirable talent as a writer included a remarkable interest in Persian popular culture as a primary source, but his related academic reading appears at best eclectic. Judging from the (rare) footnotes to his publications, he mostly read French publications and therefore had a limited (and somewhat biased) access to the scholarship of his day. In a similar vein, it is true that he “never applied the methodological rules” (Fazeli, p. 65) that he had advocated himself; but then again we need to consider the gradual development of a young man from a stout nationalist adherent to contemporary Aryanist theories to a more judicious follower of the leading European folklorist theories of the day. Hedayat developed a more or less methodological approach only after his initial publications (Katirāʾi, 1978, p. 135). In many ways, his well-intended folklorist publications are as eclectic as his readings, and only gradually does he appear to have developed a critical stance of his own, by adding a distinctly Persian perspective to the works that he studied. Even so, Hedayat’s impact on subsequent Iranian scholarship can hardly be overestimated (Āryanpur, pp. 364-71, 461, 466; Enjavi Širāzi, 2002, pp. 481-94; Nadjmabadi, pp. 115-37).

Besides Enjavi, who is said to have been a close friend of his, others in the first generation of Iranian folklorists such as Ḥosayn Kuhi Kermāni, Amir-Qoli Amini, and Abu’l-Qāsem Faqiri were all much influenced by his work. Without Hedayat and the attention he created “to establish the credibility of folklore as a scientific field of study, equal to other established fields of inquiry” (Radhayrapetian, p. 103) while acknowledging the creative power of folklore as an important constituent of Iranian culture (Homāyuni, 1973, p. 85), the field of Persian folkloristics would certainly be very different today.

HEDAYAT, SADEQ iv. TRANSLATIONS OF PAHLAVI TEXTS

Sadeq Hedayat traveled to India in 1936 and stayed for less than two years while hoping to reside there permanently. In Bombay he began studying Middle Persian and some Pāzand with the Parsi scholar Bahramgor Tahmuras Anklesaria. Hedayat’s impression of this Parsi scholar is generally positive, considering him to be much more knowledgeable than some of his European colleagues (Bahārlu, p. 716). Hedayat attended Anklesaria’s classes for two or three days a week (Bahārlu, in Hedayat, 1993, p. 708). Meanwhile, Anklesaria asked Hedayat to aid him in transcribing some Middle Persian texts into New Persian and to prepare a Middle Persian dictionary (Bahārlu, in Hedayat, 1993, p. 713; letter written by Hedayat to Minovi). This collaboration resulted in the translation of several Middle Persian texts into Persian. It should be noted, however, that most of these texts had already been translated by Anklesaria into English. They include Gizistag Abālīš (see ABĀLĪŠ), an account of a debate between a Zandig and the leader of the Zoroastrian community Ādurfarnrbag ī Farroxzādān; Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, the longest surviving geographical text in Middle Persian; the apocalyptic text Ayādgār ī jāmāspig ; Škand gumānīg-wīzār, a polemic against the doctrines and tenets of the Dahris, Manichaeism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; Kār-nāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān, a historical romance describing the career and life of the founder of the Sasanian dynasty; Zand ī Wahman Yasn, another apocalyptic text; and Abar Madan ī Wahrām ī Warzāwand, on the coming of the Zoroastrian Savior at the end of time.

Hedayat was the first Persian to translate these Middle Persian texts into New Persian. The quality of the translations is good for its time, and he also suggested some new readings. He consulted all the previous monographs on each Middle Persian text and critiqued them as well. For example, in his translation of the Šahrestānihā ī Erānšahr (passage 25), he rightly questions the translation of Markwart, who equated the war ī tāzigān with the Persian Gulf. His footnotes to the Giziastag Abāliš are important, sometimes surpassing those made by Chacha. However, all of his translations are based on previous works of B. T. Ankelsaria on Abr Madan ī Wahrām ī Warzāwand, Kārnāmag ī Ardašir ī Pābagān, Zand ī Wahman Yasn; H. Chacha on Gizistag Abāliš; J. Markwart on Šahrestānihā ī Erānšahr; G. Messina on Ayādgār ī Zarērān; and E. W. West on Škand gumānig-wizār.

Hedayat also wrote an article on the Middle Persian script (“Ḵaṭṭ-e Pahlavi wa alefbāye ṣawti,” Soḵan 2/8-9, 1945) and another one on the Sasanian art (“Honar-e Sāsāni dar ḡorfa-ye medālhā,” Soḵan 3/5, 1946), as well as a French article entitled “La magie en Perse,” Le Voile d’Isis, no. 79, January 1926 (Majmuʾe-ye neveštehā-ye parākanda-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat, 1344; Amir Kabir Publishers, 2nd ed.) In an obituary of Anklesaria (Soḵan 2/5, 1945), Ebrāhim Pur Dāwud lauded Hedayat for his translations of Middle Persian, which made the texts accessible to Persian readers.It is clear that these Middle Persian texts were written by the Zoroastrian community for the most part in the early Islamic period, a fact which had a deep impact on Hedayat’s views on the Arabs and Islam in general. His preoccupation with these texts exacerbated the nationalist sentiments which are apparent in some of his novels. It is also possible to see parallel elements between the Zoroastrian apocalyptic vision of the end of the world and Hedayat’s end.

HEDAYAT, SADEQ vi. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works: Majmuʿa-ye neveštahā-ye parākanda, comp. Ḥasan Qāʾemiān, Tehran, 1965; Nāmahā-ye Ṣādeq He-dāyat, compiled by Moḥammad Bahārlu, 2nd ed., Tehran, 1995; Haštād o do nāma be Ḥasan Šahid-Nurāʾi, with commentaries by Nāṣer Pākdāman, Paris, 2000; (under the pseudonym ʿAli-Aṣḡar Soruš) “Šivahā-ye novin dar taḥqiq-e adabi (jeld-e haftom az Ḵamsa-ye Neẓāmi),” Majalla-ye musiqi 2/11-12, pp. 21-30, repub. in Majmuʿa-ye neveštahā-yeparākanda, pp. 404-9; Naqd-i bar Buf-e kur bāmatn-e kāmel-e Zende be-gur wa Buf-e kur, Paris, 1991 (Hedayat’s handwritten texts reproduced); Afsāna-ye āfarineš ba hamrāhi-e al-Beʿṯa al-eslāmiya elā belad al-Afranjiya, Tup-e morvāri, and Ḥāji Āqā, n.p., 2001. Ketāb-e mostaṭāb-e vaḡ-vaḡ ṣāḥāb, Tehran, 2002.

Hedayat’s translations from Pahlavi: Gizistag Abālīš, as Gojasta Abālīš, Tehran, 1939; Šahrestānīhā ī Ērān-šahr, as “Šahrestānhā-yeIrān-šahr,” Mehr 7/1-3, 1941; Ayādgār ī jāmāspig, as “Yādgār-e Jāmāsp,” Soḵan 1/3-5, 1941; Manuščihr’s Škand gumānīg-wīzār, as Gozāreš-e gomānšekan, Tehran, 1943; Kār-nāmag ī Ardaxšīř ī Pābagān, as Kār-nāma-ye Ardašir Pāpakān, Tehran, 1942–43; Zand ī Wahman yasn as Zand-e Vahuman Yasn, Tehran, 1944; Abar Madan ī Wahrām ī Warzā-wand as “Āmadan-e Šāh Bahrām Varjāvand,” Soḵan 2/7, 1945. See also Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Majmuʿa-ye neveštahā-ye parākanda-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat, 2nd ed., Tehran, 1965 (contains his French articles and some of his translations).

Idem, Majmuʿa-i az āṯār-e Ṣādeq Hedāyat, ed. Moḥammad Bahārlū, Tehran, 1993.

Translations: ābji Ḵānom, tr. Siavosh Danesh as “Spinster,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 137-44; Āfaringān, tr., Gisèle Kapuscinski and Mahin Hambly, as “The Benediction (Afringan)” in E. Yarshater, ed. pp. 75-92; Afsāna-ye āfarineš: ḵayma-šab bāzi dar se parda, tr. Manfred Lorenz as Die Legende von der Schöpfung, Berlin, 1960; tr., M. R. Ghanoonparvar as The Myth of Creation: A Puppet Show in Three acts, Costa Mesa, Calif., 1998.

ʿAlawiya Ḵānom, tr., Eckhardt Fichtner and Werner Sundermann as Die Prophetentochter, Berlin, 1960; tr. Gisèle Kapuscinski and Mahin Hambly as “The Pilgrimage,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 1-39; tr. M. F. Farzaneh and Joël Gayraud as “Madame Alawia,” in M. F. Farzaneh, tr., 1997, pp. 15-81.

ʿArusak-epošt-e parda, tr., Ahmad Karimi Hakkak as “The Doll behind the Curtain,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 127-36.

Āʾina-ye šekasta, tr., Derayeh Derakhshesh as “Le miroir brisé,” in idem, tr., pp. 131-42; tr., Gisèle Kapuscinski as “The Broken Mirror,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 213-17.

ʿAl-Beʿṯa al-eslāmiya elā al-belād al-afranjiya, tr.,M. F. Farzaneh as La mission, in idem, tr., pp. 109-68.

Bonbast, tr., Price C. Mead as “Dead End,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 103-18; tr., Henry D. G. Law (see below); Bonbast and Fardā, tr., Vincent Monteil as Deux nouvelles (L’impasse, Demain), Tehran, 1952 (includes Pers. text); tr., Henry D. G. Law (see below). Buf-e kur, tr., Roger Lescot as La chouette aveugle, Paris, 1953; tr., D. P. Costello as TheBlind Owl, New York, 1957; tr., Heschmat Moayyad and O. Kegel as Die blind Eule, Hamburg, 1960; tr., Mariella Mammalella as La civettacieca: Romanzo, Milan, 1960; tr., Bo Utas as Den BlindaUgglan, Lund, 1967; tr., Ebrāhim Dasuqi as al-Buma al-ʿamyāʾ, Cairo, 1976; tr., Gerd Henninger with the collaboration of Bozorg ʿAlawi as Die blind Eule, Berlin, 1981; tr., Mary K. St. John in The Blind Owl and OtherHedayat Stories, Minneapolis, 1984; tr., Bahman Nirumand as Die blinde Eule, Frankfurt am Main, 1990; tr., Zobayda Aškanāni as al-Buma al-aʿmyāʾ, Kuwait, 1995; tr., Behcet Necatigil as Kör baykuş, Istanbul, 2001.

Dāš Ākol, tr., Richard Arnt and Mansur Ekhtiar as “Dash Akol” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 41-52.

Dāwud-e gužpošt, tr., H. S. G. Darke as “Davud the Hunchback,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 173-78; Dāwud-egužpošt and Bonbast, tr., Henry D. G. Law as “Davud the Hunchback” and “Cul de sac,” Lifeand Letters 63, no. 148, December 1949, pp. 255-70.

Fardā, tr., Lucien Ray as “Tomorrow,” New Left Review 24, 1964, pp. 91-99.

Gerdāb, tr., Brian Spooner as “The Whirlpool,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 63-74; tr., Derayeh Derakhshesh as “L’abime,” in idem, tr., pp. 79-107.

Ḥāji Āqā, tr., Werner Sunderman as Hâdschi Ãghâ, ed., Bozorg Alavi, Berlin, 1963; tr., G. M. Wickens as Hâji Aghâ: Portrait of an Iranian Confidence Man, University of Texas at Austin, Middle Eastern Monograph 6, Austin, Texas, 1979; tr, ʿAbdulqadiri Debbaxi as Haci Axa Çirok, Baghdad, 1986 (Kurdish); tr Nodir Olimkhonov and Tulqin Alimov as Hozhi Ogho, Tashkand, 1988; tr., Gilbert Lazard as Hâdji Ãghâ, Paris, 1996.

Ḥāji Morād, tr., H. S. G. Darke as “Hajji Morad,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 207-12.

Lāla, tr., Brian Spooner as “Laleh,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 179-86.

Mard-i ke nafs-aš-rā košt, tr., Jerome W. Clinton as “The Man who Killed His Passions,” Literary Review 18/1, 1974, pp. 38-52.

Moḥallel, tr., Gilbert Lazard as “L’intermédiaire,” in idem, tr., 1988, pp. 169-82.

Sag-e velgard, tr., Brian Spooner as “The Stray Dog,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 119-26; tr., Mehmet Kanar as Aylak köpek: öykü, Istanbul, 2000.

Sang-e ṣabur, tr., M. and N. Batmanglij as The Patient Stone: A Persian Folktale, Washington, D.C., 1986; Sang-e ṣabur and Bonbast, tr., Stephen L. McFarland, Guity Nashat Becker, and Marilyn Waldman, as “The Patient Stone” and “Dead End,” in Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature: Literature East and West 20, 1980, pp. 44-60.

Sāya-ye moḡol, tr., Donald S. Shojaʿi as “The Mongol’s Shadow,” Chicago Review 20/4, 1969, pp. 95-104.

Se qaṭra ḵun, tr., F. Razavi in Trois goutes de sang, et six autre nouvelles, Tehran, 1959; tr., Thomas R. Ricks as “Three Drops of Blood,” Ir. Stud. 3, 1970, pp. 104-14; tr., Brian Spooner as “Three Drops of Blood,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 93-102; tr., Resi Gheissarieh and Mario Garresi as Tre gocce di sangue, Milan, 1979; tr., Gilbert Lazard in idem, tr., 1988, pp. 19-33.

Ṣuratakhā, tr., Derayeh Derakhshesh as “Les masques,” in idem, tr., pp. 109-29.

Ṭalab-e āmorzeš, tr., Minoo S. Southgate as “Seeking Absolution,” Ir. Stud. 9, 1976, pp. 49-59; tr., Brian Spooner as “The Search for Mercy,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 53-62; tr., Gilbert Lazard as “La qûet d’absolution,” in idem, tr., 1988, pp. 87-102.

Tarānahā-ye Ḵayyām, tr., M. F. Farazneh and Jean Malaplate as Le chants d’ Omar Khayam, Paris, 1993.

Tārik-ḵāna, tr., Derayeh Derakhshesh as “La Chambre noire,” in idem, tr., pp. 25-47.

Zan-i ke mard-aš-rā gom kard, tr., Ilda Ricasoli as “La donna che aveva perduto suo marito,” Le più belle novelleditutti i paesi 1960, Milan, 1960, pp. 249-69; tr., Marilyn Waldman and Guity Nash’at as “The Woman Who Lost Her Man,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 187-206; tr., Gilbert Lazart as “Le femme qui avait perdu son mari,” in idem, tr., 1988, pp. 102-31.

Zenda ba-gur, tr., Brian Spooner as “Buried Alive,” in E. Yarshater, ed., pp. 145-62; tr., Derayeh Derakhshesh as Enterré vivant, Paris, 1986.

Works in French: “La Magie en Perse,” partial tr., as “Jādugari dar Iran,” in Jahān-e now 2/1, 1947; “Sampingue,” pub. with Pers. version “Sāmpinga,” in his Parvin Doktar-e Sāsān, pp. 124-42; “Lunatique,” pub. with Pers. version “Havasbāz,” in his Parvin Doktar-e Sāsān, pp. 143-80, all published in his Majmuʿa-ye neveštahā-ye parākanda, Tehran, 1965, pp. 552-640.

Translation anthologies: Trigime, persiane, Prishtine, 1966 (in Albanian); Ibrannoye proizvedeniya, Moscow, 1969; Ṣādeq’s Omnibus: A Collection of ShortStories, Tehran, 1972 (five stories); Qeṣaṣ men al-adab al-fārsi al-moʿāṣer, tr., Ebrāhim Dasuqi, Cairo, 1975; Ṣādeq Hedāyat: An Anthology,ed., Ehsan Yarshater, Boulder, Col., 1979 (seventeen stories); tr., Carol L. Sayers, The Blind Owl and Other Hedayat Stories, ed., Russell P. Christensen, Minneapolis, 1984; tr., Derayeh Derakh-shesh L’abîme et autres récits, Paris, 1987; tr., Gilbert Lazard, Trois gouttes de sang, Paris, 1988; tr., M. F. Farzaneh, Madame Alavieh et autre récits, Paris, 1997; tr., Dorothea Krawsky with the cooperation of Farideh Mohammadian, Die reise zum Imam: Kruzgeschichten und Satiren, Berlin, 1997.

General References: Bozorg ʿAlawi, Ḵāṭerāt-e Bozorg ʿAlawi, Sweden, 1997 (interviews by Ḥamid Aḥmadi).

ʿIsā Arbābi, Čahār sarv-e afsāna: pažuheš-i dar āṯār wa zendagi-e Moḥammad ʿAli Jamalzadeh, Sadeq Hedayat, Simin Dānešvar wa Moḥammad Afḡāni, Tehran, 1999.

Reżā Barāheni, Qeṣṣa-nevisi, Tehran, 1983.

Dafter-e honar 3/6, Eatontown, New Jersey, September 1996 (entire issue devoted to Hedayat).

ʿAli Deh-bāši, ed., Yād-e Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 2001.

Ṣadr-al-Din Elāhi, “Az ḵāṭerāt-e adabi-e Doktor Parviz Nātel Ḵānlari dar bāra-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat,” Irān-šenāsi/Iranshenasi 5/2, 1993, pp. 255-68.

Abu’l-Qāsem Enjavi Širāzi, “Ešārāt wa iżāḥāt,” Kelk 23-24, 1992, pp. 44-47.

Masʿud Farzād, “Dar bāra-ye Hedāyat, Rabʿa wa Vaḡ-vaḡ sāhāb,” in Ketāb-e mostaṭāb-evaḡ-vaḡ ṣāhāb, Čašmandāz, Tehran, 2002. pp. 227-39.

M. F. Farzaneh, “Āḵerin ruzhā-ye Hedāyat,” Soḵan 15, 1965, pp. 465, 535-37; repr. in Katirāʾi, 1969, pp. 278-82. Idem, Āšnāʾi bā Ṣādeq Hedāyat, 2 vols., Paris, 1988.

Idem, Rencontres avec Sadegh Hedayat: le parcour d’un initiation, Paris, 1993 (tr., of the former).

Michael Fischer, “Towards a Third World Poetics: Seeing through Short Stories and Films in Iranian Cultural Arena,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in theSociology of Culture Past and Present 5, 1984, pp. 171-241.

Qāsem Ḡani, Yādašthā-ye Doktor Qāsem Ḡani, ed., Cyrus Ghani, 12 vols., London, 1980-82.

Moḥammad Golbon, Ketāb-šenāsi-eṢādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1977.

Michael Hillmann, “The Iranian Artist’s almost Inevitable Nightmare,” in idem, Iranian Culture: A Persianist View, Lanham, Md., 1992.

Irān-nāma/Iran Nameh, 10/3, 1992 (entire issue devoted to Hedayat).

Youssef Ishaghpour, Le tombeau de Sadegh Hedayat, Paris, 1991; tr., Bāqer Parhām as “Bar mazār-e Ṣādeq He-dāyat,” Irān-nāma/Iran Nameh 10/3, 1992, pp. 419-72; publ. seperately, Tehran, 1994.

Moḥammad ʿAli Jamāl-zādeh, Dār-al-majānin, Tehran, 1941, 2nd. ed., Tehran, 1954.

Hasan Javadi, Satire in Persian Literature, Rutherfore, New Jersey, 1988.

Anvar Ḵāmaʾi, Čahār čehra: ḵāṭerāt wa tafakkorāt dar bāra-ye Nimā Yušij, Ṣādeq Hedāyat, ʿAbd-al-Ḥosayn Nušin wa Ḏabiḥ Behruz, Tehran, 1989.

Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian ProseLiterature, Cambridge, 1966, pp. 135-208.

Parviz Nātel Ḵānlari, “Naṯr-e fārsi dar dawra-ye aḵir,” in Naḵostin kongera-ye nevisandagān-e Irān, Tehran, 1968, pp. 128-75.

Idem, “Az ḵāṭerāt-e Doktor Parviz Nātel Ḵānlari dar bāra-ye Ṣādeq Hedayat,” in idem, Haftād soḵan III: az guša wa kenār-e adabiyāt-e fārsi, Tehran, 1990, pp. 339-82; repr. in Manṣur Rastgār Fasāʾi, Parviz Nātel Ḵānlari, Tehran, 2000, pp. 419-43.

Idem, “Yārān-e kohan,” in Qāfela sālār-e soḵan, Tehran, 1991, pp. 461-68.

Faridun Kār, Panj šoʿla-ye jāvid, Tehran, 1954.

Parviz Ḵaṭibi, Ḵāṭerāt-i az honarmandān, Tehran, 2001, pp. 59-62.

Maḥmud Katirāʾi, ed., Ketāb-e Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1970.

Ḵalil Maleki, Ḵāṭerāt-esiāsi-e Ḵalil Maleki, n.p., 1989.

Mojtabā Minovi, “Yādbud-e Hedāyat,” in idem, Naqd-e ḥāll, Tehran, 1988, pp. 457-63.

Ḥasan Mir-ʿĀbedini, Ṣad sāl dāstān-nevisi-eIrān, 3 vols. in 2, Tehran, 1998.

Jamāl Mir-Ṣādeqi, ʿAnāṣer-e dāstān, Tehran, 1985.

Idem, Adabiyāt-e dāstāni: qeṣṣa, dāstān-e kutāh, romān, bā negāh-i be dāstān-nevisi-e moʿāṣer-e Iran, Tehran, 1987, esp. pp. 604-13.

Maymanat Mir-Ṣādeqi (Ḏu’l-qadr), Romānhā-ye moʿāṣer-e fārsi, Tehran, 2000.

Āḏar Nafisi, “Romān wa Romān-nevisi dar Iran,” in Rāmin Jahānbeyglu, ed., Iran o modernite, Tehran, 2000, pp. 211-38.

Iraj Pārsi-nežād, Rowšangarān-e irāni wa naqd-e adabi, Tehran, 2001, pp. 274-339.

Ḥasan Qāʾemiān, ed., Yād-bud-nāma-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1957.

Idem, tr., Naẓariyāt-e nevisandegān-e bozorg-e ḵāreji dar bāra-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat wa āṯār-e u, Tehran, 1964.

Thomas M. Ricks, ed., Critical Perspectives on Modern Per-sian Literature, Washington, D.C., 1984.

Jan Rypka, “Mes souvenirs de Sâdegh Hedâyat,” in Mélanges d’ori-entalisme offerts à Henri Massé, Tehran, 1963, pp. 353-57; tr., as “Yādbudhā-ye man az Ṣādeq Hedāyat,” Soḵan 15, 1965, pp. 460-65.

Ḥasan Ṭāhbāz, Yādbud-nāma-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat ba monāsabat-e haštādomin sāl-e tawallod-e u/Gedenkschrift für Sadeq Hedayat zu seinem 80. Geburstag, Cologne, 1983.

Maḥmud Ṭoluʿi, Nābeḡa yā divāna: nāgoftahādar bāra-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1999.

Critical studies. Moḥammad-ʿAli Afrāšta, “Ṣādeq Hedāyat, pedar-bozorg-e nevisandagān-e Iran,” Čelan-gar, 2, 1 Ordibehešt, 1331/21 April 1552.

Māšāʾ-Allāh Ājudāni, “Hedayat wa nāsionālism,” Irān-nāma/Iran Nameh 10/3, 1992, pp. 473-505.

JalālAl-e Aḥmad, “Hedāyat-e Buf-e kur,” Elm o zendagi, 1/1, January 1952, pp. 65-78; repr. in idem, Did o bāzdid wa haft maqāla, Tehran, 1955, pp. 149-71; tr., Ali A. Eftekhary as “The Hedayat of the Blind Owl,” in Michael Hillmann, ed., pp. 27-42.

Leonardo P. Alishan, “The Ménageà trois of The Blind Owl,” in Hillmann, ed., pp. 168-85.

Anjoman-e Giti, ʿAqāyed wa afkār dar bāra-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1954.

Yaḥyā Ārianpur, Tāriḵ-e adab-e fārsi-e moʿāṣer III: az Nimā tā ruzgār-e mā, Tehran, 1995, pp. 333-429.

Idem, Zendagi wa āṯār-e Hedāyat, Tehran, 2001.

Ḥasan ʿAṭāʾi Rād, Mard-e aṯiri: sayr-i dar zendagāni wa marg-e ṢādeqHedāyat, Tehran, 2001.

Moḥammad Bahārlu, ed., ʿEšq o margdar āṯār-e Hedāyat, Tehran, 2000.

Iraj Bashiri, Hedayat’s IvoryTower: Structural Analysis of The Blind Owl, Minneapolis, 1974.

Idem, The Fiction of Sadeq Hedayat, Lexington, KY, 1984.

Michael Beard, “Character and Psychology in Hedayat’s The Blind Owl,” Edebiyat 1, 1976, pp. 207-18.

Idem, “The Hierarchy of the Arts in The Blind Owl,” Ir. Stud. 15, 1982, pp. 53-67.

Idem, “Sādeq Hedāyat, Composite Landscape: Western Exposure,” in Ehsan Yarshater, ed., Persian Literature, Albany, 1988. pp. 324-35.

Idem, The Blind Owl as a Western Novel, Princeton, New Jersey, 1990.

Leonard Bogle, “The Khayyam Influence in TheBlind Owl,” in Hillmann, ed., pp. 87-98; tr., Farzin Yazdānfar as “Taʾṯir-e falsafa-ye Ḵayyām bar Buf-e kur,” Omid 3, 1988, pp. 52-65.

Maryam D. Borumand, Hedayatdar buta-ye naqd wa naẓar, Tehran, 1998.

Idem, Neveštahā-ye farāmuššoda-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran 1997.

Carter Bryant, “Hedāyat’s Psychoanalysis of a Nation,” in Michael Hillmann, ed., pp. 153-67.

Rino Cortiana, “Riscontri di Nerval in Ṣādeq Hedāyat,” Annali della Facoltà di lingue e letterature Straniere di Ca’ Fiscari, Serie Orientale 1, 1970, pp. 123-30.

David Champagne, “Hindu Imagery in The Blind Owl,” in Michael Hillmann, ed., pp. 108-17.

Elton Daniel, “History as a Theme of the Blind Owl,” in Michael Hillmann, ed., pp. 77-86.

Parviz Dāriuš, “Adā-ye dayn ba Ṣādeq Hedāyat,” Keyhān-e māh, September, 1952, pp. 3-32.

Idem, Yād-ebidār: yād-i az Ṣādeq Hedāyat wa naqd-e āṯār-aš, Tehran, 1999.

ʿAbd-al-ʿAli Dast-ḡayb, “Ṣādeq Hedāyat,” Payām-e novin 3/7, 1961, pp. 1-22.

Idem, Naqd-e āṯār-e Hedāyat, Tehran, 1978.

ʿEnāyat-Allāh Dastḡayb, “Buf-ekur, aṯar-i az Hedāyat yā Irving,” Dafter-e honar, 3/6, September 1996, pp. 653-54.

Moḥammad Dehqāni, Pišgāmān-e naqd-e adabi dar Iran, Tehran 2001.

Zardošt Eʿtemādzāda, Ravān-e az ham gosiḵta: Buf-e kur, Tehran, 1995.

Maḥmud Falaki, “Tār-e ḵiāli-e Ṣādeq Hedāyat: barrasi-e sāḵtāri-e Se qaṭra ḵun,” Sanješ, no. 4, 1999, pp. 37-44.

Moṣṭafa Farzāneh, “Naqd-i bar Buf-e kur,” in Hedayat, 1991, pp. 1-31.

Richard Lancelot G. Flower, Die Entwicklung von Sadeq Hedäyat in seinen literarischen Werken unter Berücksichtigung des Inhaltlichen und Formalen, Berlin, 1969.

Idem, Sadeq-e Hedayat, 1903-1951: Ein literaturische Analyse, Berlin, 1977.

Moḥammad-Taqi Ḡiāṯi, Taʾwil-e Buf-e kur: qeṣṣa-ye zendagi, Tehran, 1998.

Hušang Golširi, “Barrasi-e ejtemāʿi-e Buf-e kur, Malakut, wa Sang-e ṣabur,” Jong-e Eṣfahān, no. 5, 1967, pp. 187-229.

Parvin Gonā-bādi, “Dar bāra-ye Ṣādeq Hedāyat,” in idem, Gozina-ye maqālahā, Tehran, 1977, pp. 493-515.

Ḥasan Ḥanāʾi, Ṣādeq Hedāyat dar zendān-e zendagi, Tehran, 1964.

Michael C. Hillmann, ed., Hedayat’s ’The Blind Owl’: Forty Years After, University of Texas At Austin, Middle East Monographs 4, Austin, Texas, 1978.

Idem, “Hedayat’s The Blind Owl: An Autobiographical Nightmare,” Irān-šenāsi/Iransenasi 1/1, 1989, pp. 1-21.

Ṣādeq Homāyuni, Mard-i ke bā sāya-aš ḥarf mizad, Tehran, 1975.

Esmāʿil Jamšidi, Ḵod-koši-e Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1994.

Abu’l-Qāsem Jannati ʿAṭāʾi, Zendagi wa āṯār-e Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1978.

Šāpur Jawrkaš, Zendagi, ʿešq wa marg az didgāh-e Ṣādeq Hedāyat, Tehran, 1998.

Janette S. Johnson, “TheBlind Owl, Nerval, Kafka, Poe and the Surrealists: Affinities,” in Michael Hillmann, ed., pp. 125-41.

Hassan Kamshad, “Hysterical Self-Analysis,” in Michael Hillmann, ed., Hedāyat’s ’The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After, Austin, Texas, 1978, pp. 14-26.

Simin Karimi, “Zabān wa sabk dar āṯār-e Ṣādeq He-dāyat,” Irān-nāma/Iran Nameh 10/3, 1992, pp. 505-24.

Maḥmud Katirāʾi, “Ṣādeq Hedāyat dar folklor-e Iran,” in Ḥabib Yaḡmāʾi and Iraj Afšār, ed., Nāma-yeminovi, Tehran, 1971, pp. 355-68.

Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer, London and New York, 1991; tr., Firuza Mohājer as Ṣādeq Hedāyat: az afsāna tā wāqeʿiyat, Tehran, 1993.

Idem, Ṣādeq Hedāyat wa marg-e nevisanda, Tehran, 1993 (a monograph and five articles).

Idem, Buf-e kur-e Hedāyat, Tehran, 1994 (a critical monograph).

Idem, Ṭanẓ wa ṭanẓina-ye Hedāyat, Stockholm, 2003.

Olim Khodzhimuradov, Poetika Sadeka Khedaiata, Dushnbe, 1991.

D. S. Komissarov, “O zhizni i Sadeka Khedayata” (The life and work of Sadeq Hedayat), Sovetskoe vostokovedenie 6, 1956, pp. 56-70.

Idem, Sadek Khedayat: Zhizni i tvorchestvo (Sadeq Hedayat: life and work), Moscow, 1967.

Idem, Sâdek Khedâyat Zhizn’ poesiesmerti, Moscow, 2001.

Eberhard Krüger, Zum Verhältnis von autor und Werk bei dem modernpersischen Erzähler Sâdeq Hedâyat, Freiburg in Breisgau, 1977.

Vera Kubichkova, “Un éclair de sourire sur un visage tragique,” in Felix Tauer, Vera Kubichkova, and Ivan Hrbek, eds., Charisteria Orientalia praecipue ad Persiam pertinentia, Prague, 1956, pp. 142-48.

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