Sadegh Hedayat

Career

Hedayat subsequently devoted his whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore. The works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, and Guy de Maupassant intrigued him the most. During his short literary life span, Hedayat published a substantial number of short stories and novelettes, two historical dramas, a play, a travelogue, and a collection of satirical parodies and sketches. His writings also include numerous literary criticisms, studies in Persian folklore, and many translations from Middle Persian and French. He is credited with having brought the Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing.

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".

Vegetarianism

Hedayat was a vegetarian from his youth. From interviews with Hedayat’s brother Mahmud and schoolmates, historians agree that Hedayat was dedicated to the fate of animals and animal welfare from a young age. Hedayat’s education at St. Louis, a Catholic school in Tehran, introduced the young scholar to European philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), whose works influenced his ideas on the relationship between humans and animals.

Hedayat used the Persian word nabātī-khwār (Persian: نَبَاتِی‌خْوَار, romanized: nabātī-xwār, lit. 'plant-eater') to describe a person who is vegetarian. According to Hedayat, this means not eating meat, but allows for animal products like milk and eggs. For a person who uses an entirely vegan diet, he uses the term nabātī-khwārī-yi muṭlaq (Persian: نَبَاتِی‌خْوَارِیِ مُطْلَق, romanized: nabātī-xwārī-yi muṭlaq). Hedayat's view of vegetarianism was not only about diet; it also included sobriety and limiting processed foods.

Works on animal welfare

At the age of 21, Hedayat authored Man and Animal (1924), an essay that he later developed into the treatise The Benefits of Vegetarianism whilst in Berlin in 1927. In this essay, he describes the publications of the Société Végétarienne de France and the superiority of a vegetarian diet.

In The Benefits of Vegetarianism, Hedayat says:

If humankind must reach one day the pinnacle of progress and perfection, it will be in a natural environment with vegetable food, since eating meat and an artificial civilization will corrupt and draw humankind into the abyss of annihilation; unless a promising and blooming generation who live by the rules of nature will come in its place, humankind will be extinguished in shame

In addition to non-fiction essays, Hedayat also wrote short stories on the topic of animal welfare, written from the point of view of animals. His first short story, The speech of a donkey at the time of its death, follows a donkey narrator who describes the animal abuse he endured. The Stray Dog, a more famous work, follows the tragic life of a street dog. His magnum opus novel, The Blind Owl, portrays a butcher in a negative light.

Vegetarianism and animal rights were not a common topic to write about in Iran in the early twentieth century. Hedayat referenced numerous European scholars who wrote on vegetarianism in his works, such as Jules Lefèvre (1863–1944).

Death and legacy

In 1951, overwhelmed by despair, Hedayat left Tehrān and traveled to Paris, where he rented an apartment. A few days before his death, Hedayat tore up all of his unpublished work. On 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.

Censorship

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

• "City Report: Tehran" in Frieze, issue 86, October 2004, which examines Iranian censorship in general;
• An article by Robert Tait in The Guardian, 17 November 2006;

Quotations

The Blind Owl

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

— The Blind Owl, Opening line

Films about Hedayat

• 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.

Further references

• Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: Life and legend of an Iranian writer,^{[link removed]} I.B. Tauris, 2000. ISBN 1-86064-413-9
• Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature, Ibex Publishers, 1996. ISBN 0-936347-72-4
• 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.