HEDAYAT, SADEQ

born Feb. 17, 1903, Tehran died April 4, 1951, Paris also spelled Sadeq-e Hedayat Iranian author. Born into a prominent aristocratic family, Hedayat was educated first in Tehran and then studied dentistry and engineering in France and Belgium. After coming into contact with the leading intellectual figures of Europe, Hedayat abandoned his studies for literature. He was immensely drawn to the works of the 19th-century U.S. fiction writer Edgar Allen Poe, the French writer Maupassant, as well as the contemporary writer Franz Kafka and the 19th-century Russian masters Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. He translated many works of Kafka, including The Penal Colony, for which he wrote a revealing introduction called "Payam-e Kafka" ("Kafka's Message"). Returning to Iran in 1930 after four years, he published his first book of short stories, Zendeh be gur (1930; "Buried Alive"), and Se qatreh- khun (1932; "Three Drops of Blood"). He also began to write plays, and in 1930 his first, Parvin dokhtar-e Sasan ("Parvin Daughter of Sasan"), appeared. Hedayat was the central figure in Tehran intellectual circles and belonged to the literary group known as the Four. He began to develop his interests in Iranian folklore and published Osaneh (1931), a collection of popular songs, and Neyrangestan (1932). In these, Hedayat greatly enriched Persian prose and influenced younger writers through his use of folk expressions. He also wrote articles and translated the works of leading European authors, Chekov and the French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre among them. He began to study history, beginning with the Sasanian period (224-651) and the Pahlavi, or Middle Persian, language, and he used this study in later fiction. In 1936-37 he went to Bombay to live in the Parsee Zoroastrian community there, in order to further his knowledge of the ancient Iranian religion. One of his most famous novels, Buf-A Kur (1937; The Blind Owl, 1957), is a deeply pessimistic, Kafkaesque novel. A deeply melancholy man, he lived with a vision of the absurdity of human existence. In 1951, overwhelmed by despair, he left Tehran and went to Paris, where he took his own life.