Садек Хедаят: Жизнь и творчество иранского писателя

Iranian writer (1903–1951)

Sadegh Hedayat (صادق هدایت ; 17 February 1903 – 9 April 1951) was an Iranian writer and translator. Best known for his novel The Blind Owl, he was one of the earliest Iranian writers to adopt literary modernism in their career.

Hedayat was born to a northern Iranian aristocratic family in Tehran. His great grandfather Reza Qoli Khan Hedayat Tabarestani was a well respected writer and worked in the government, as did other relatives. Hedayat's sister married Haj Ali Razmara who was an army general and among the prime ministers of Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Another one of his sisters was the wife of Abdollah Hedayat who was also an army general. Hedayat was educated at Collège Saint Louis (French catholic school) and Dar ol Fonoon (1914–1916). In 1925, he was among a select few students who traveled to Europe to continue their studies. There, he initially went on to study engineering in Belgium, which he abandoned after a year to study architecture in France. There he gave up architecture in turn to pursue dentistry. In this period he became acquainted with Thérèse, a Parisian with whom he had a love affair. In 1927 Hedayat attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Marne but was rescued by a fishing boat. After four years in France, he finally surrendered his scholarship and returned home in the summer of 1930 without receiving a degree. In Iran, he held various jobs for short periods.

Hedayat subsequently devoted his whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore. The works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, and Guy de Maupassant intrigued him the most. During his short literary life span, Hedayat published a substantial number of short stories and novelettes, two historical dramas, a play, a travelogue, and a collection of satirical parodies and sketches. His writings also include numerous literary criticisms, studies in Persian folklore, and many translations from Middle Persian and French. He is credited with having brought the Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing. Hedayat traveled and stayed in India from 1936 until late 1937 (the mansion he stayed in during his visit to Bombay was identified in 2014). Hedayet spent time in Bombay learning the Pahlavi (Middle Persian) language from the Parsi Zoroastrian community of India. He was taught by Bahramgore Tahmuras Anklesaria (also spelled as Behramgore Tehmurasp Anklesaria), a renowned scholar and philologist. Nadeem Akhtar's Hedayat in India provides details of Hedayat's sojourn in India. In Bombay Hedayat completed and published his most enduring work, The Blind Owl, which he had started writing, in Paris, as early as 1930. The book was praised by Henry Miller, André Breton, and others, and Kamran Sharareh has called it "one of the most important literary works in the Persian language".

Hedayat was a vegetarian from his youth and authored the treatise The Benefits of Vegetarianism whilst in Berlin in 1927.

In 1951, overwhelmed by despair, Hedayat left Tehrān and traveled to Paris, where he rented an apartment. A few days before his death, Hedayat tore up all of his unpublished work. On 9 April 1951, he plugged all the doors and windows of his rented apartment with cotton, then turned on the gas valve, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Two days later, his body was found by police, with a note left behind for his friends and companions that read, "I left and broke your heart. That is all." He is widely remembered as "a major symbol of Iranian nationalism." The English poet John Heath Stubbs published an elegy, "A Cassida for Sadegh Hedayat", in A Charm Against the Toothache in 1954.

In life there are certain sores that, like a canker, gnaw at the soul in solitude and diminish it. (opening line)

In 1987, Raul Ruiz made the feature film La Chouette aveugle in France: a loose adaption of Hedayat's novel The Blind Owl. Its formal innovations led critics and filmmakers to declare the film 'French cinema's most beautiful jewel of the past decade.' Hedayat's last day and the night was adapted into the short film, The Sacred and the Absurd, directed by Ghasem Ebrahimian, which was featured in the Tribeca Film Festival in 2004. In 2005, Iranian film director Khosrow Sinai has made a docudrama about Hedayat entitled Goftogu ba saye = Talking with a shadow. Its main theme is the influence of Western movies such as Der Golem, Nosferatu, and Dracula on Hedayat. In 2009, Mohsen Shahrnazdar and Sam Kalantari made a documentary film about Sadegh Hedayat named From No. 37.

Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: Life and legend of an Iranian writer, I. B. Tauris, 2000. Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature, Ibex Publishers, 1996. Michael C. Hillmann, Hedayat's "The Blind Owl" Forty Years After, Middle East Monograph No. 4, Univ of Texas Press, 1978. Iraj Bashiri, Hedayat's Ivory Tower: Structural Analysis of The Blind Owl, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1975. Iraj Bashiri, The Fiction of Sadeq Hedayat, 1984. Sayers, Carol, The Blind Owl and Other Hedayat Stories, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1984. What is left for me from Sadegh Hedayat? Excerpt from "Sadegh Hadayat: Dar Tare Ankaboot" (In the Spider's Web), by M. F. Farzaneh, 2005. Hedayat's last night out in Paris Excerpt from M. F. Farzaneh's "Ashenayee ba Sadegh Hedayat" (Knowning Sadegh Hedayat), 2004.