Homa Katouzian

Visiting Iran Heritage Fellow, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford

The Wondrous World of Sadeq Hedayat

Hedayat’s Life and work exemplify, in literature, culture and society, the painful path through which his country has been treading for over a century to find a modern identity while remaining Iranian. Together with Jamalzadeh he founded modern Persian fiction but was the sole founder of modernist fiction in Iran. He was a scholar, citric as well as fiction writer.  His fictional works may be classified into critical realist, nationalist, satirical and psycho-fictional stories. His psycho-fiction, of which The Blind Owl is universally famous, is subjective and/or melancholy in substance and, in some cases, modernist in technique. His critical realist works, e.g. ‘Asking for Absolution’ are mostly detached but critical studies of the traditional urban petty bourgeoisie. His satire, e.g. Vagh Vagh Sahab, mocks, ridicules and scandalises various social establishments, while his nationalist fiction, e.g. Maziyar, represents the romantic nationalist sentiments of the time. He lived an unhappy life; and he died an unhappy death. It was perhaps the inevitable cost of the literature which he bequeathed to humanity.

Nasser Pakdaman

Professor, retired, University of Paris 7

Hedayat as a student in France

Sadeq Hedayat was a state student first in Belgium then in France between 1926 and 1930. His years of study as a young man in Paris, Rheins and Besançon played a major formative role in his intellectual and psychological development as is witnessed by his short stories, articles, and letters of the time. In 1928 he made his first suicide attempt in Paris. The paper examines his life and work in that period, using some contemporary material that has been recently discovered which throws new light on his activities and experiences during a period that made a considerable impact on his later career as a write and intellectual.

Djamchid Behnam

A scholar of modern Iran based in Paris, formerly Tehran University Professor of Sociology, and President, Frarabi University

Modernity in Hedayat’s Work

Hedayat was a leading modern Iranian intellectual. By modernity we mean the sum total of Western European developments, social, cultural, literary, etc., since the sixteenth century. Although the concepts of ‘modernism’ and ‘modernisation’ are related to it, they refer to different things from ‘modernity’ as such. Many of Hedayat’s contemporaries among Iranian intellectuals wrote directly or indirectly about the process and implications of modernisation in Iran. Hedayat’s concern was more with traditions which impeded the emergence of modernity, such as arbitrary rule, patriarchy, superstition, etc. Thus in his belief in a genuine concept of modernity, he was also a critic of both official and unofficial pseudo-modernism, i.e. the zest to emulate the West in a superficial and often inconsequential manner.

Mashallah Ajoudani

Director of the Library of Iranian Studies, London

The Impact of Iranian nationalism on Hedayat’s writing: abstract

Modernism was in Iran was accompanied with the rise of nationalism, introducing a new concept of nationhood, with a nation’s right to sovereignty as its most important component. The concept adapted by the literary community was one of historical nationalism, with its praise for Iran’s history and ancient culture, which had precedents in 19^th century European nationalism. Preoccupation with the past rather than looking forward to the future is one of the main features of such modernism. The paper discusses various approaches to Iranian nationalism in the period, and proceeds to examine their impact on Hedyat’s nationalist fiction, especially Parvin, Dokhtar-e Sassan (Parvin, the Sassanian Girl), and Maziyar, with some references to The Blind Owl.

Mohammad Tavakoli Targhi

Associate Professor of History, Illinois State University

Memory and Narrative Identity: Politics and ideology in Hedayat’s fiction

Hedayat was not a man of politics, not even a political activist. Yet both politics and ideology did affect some of his works, although somewhat differently at different times. His earlier nationalist fiction was influenced by the wave of the nationalist re-construction of Iranian identity which had increasingly affected the consciousness of intellectuals since the Constitutional Revolution. Later during the liberalisation of the 1940s the libertarian and democratic sentiments in Hedayat’s works became more pronounced. He became sympathetic towards the Tudeh party when it was still a popular front, not a communist party, and his stories and essays for a while reflected the new contact. But he turned against the party in 1946 in the wake of the revolt in Azerbaijan.

Christophe Balay

Professor of Persian literature, Institut des Langues et Civilization Orientale

Hedayat and the emergence of modern Persian fiction: from Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh to Sadeq Hedayat

From the very beginning of his literary career, Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh paid special attention to Persian popular Culture. His first collection of short stories Yeki bud va Yeki Nabud (1921) is preceded by a famous introduction in which he gives perhaps the first definition of Persian popular culture and suggests a modern approach to Persian prose writing. Hedayat published his first collection of short stories ten years later, and, in his own style, began a lifelong study of Persian folklore and popular culture both in his fiction and his scholarly studies.  This study compares the approaches of these two seminal Iranian writers in combining folklore studies with modern story writing, the principal question being the distinctions between traditional oral and written story-telling and modern fiction-writing.  Is it possible to detect a parallel with the dialectics of Tradition and Modernity?

Ali Asghar Halabi

Professor of Persian Literature in Islamic Azad University, Tehran

Hedayat’s satire

Satire is one of the various genres used in Hedayat’s fiction. It refers to verbal forms in speech or writing which employ mockery, ridicule or irony to make judgements more effectively than is possible by ordinary description. This is called verbal satire. It also refers to whole stories, plays, poems, films, even paintings that satirise aspects of individual, social or cultural behaviour. This is called dramatic satire. Sadeq Hedayat was a master of both verbal and dramatic satire. This is witnessed by some of his directly satirical works such as Vagh Vagh Sahab. It is also displayed in many of his novels and short stories such as Hajji Aqa, The Case of Anti-Christ’s Donkey, The Case of Under the Bush and so on.

Firoozeh Kharazi

Lecturer in Persian, Princeton University

Satire in Hajji Aqa

Hedayat was a master of satire, both verbal and dramatic, and used it to good effect in various genres, including novels, short stories, and social and literary criticism. Hajji Aqa is the well-known novel which he published in the early 1940s, when the coming of the Allies to Iran and subsequent political changes in the country resulted in an openness consistent with its tradition of chaos following the fall of absolute and arbitrary rule. It contains a scathing attack on the former political regime, on religious obscurantism and on the contemporary modes of political behaviour. In the development of the fiction it also satirises such social and cultural institutions as polygamy.

Jahangir Hedayat

Hedayat Heritage, Tehran

Personal recollections and family remembrances

'There will be a short report on the events commemorating Sadeq Hedayat's centenary in Iran, which included conferences, exhibitions and publications of his works or about him and his works. This will be followed by personal recollections and family remembrances about aspects of his life and times at the three family homes in Kushk Avenue, Roosevelt Street and Soraya Street, and his participation in Nawruz ceremonies, family gatherings and so on.

Fereshteh Sari

Writer, Poet and Translator, Tehran

The Blind Owl and individuality

The individuality of The Blind Owl’s narrator is peculiar. It does not merely reflect an individualist attitude or even rebelliousness. It betrays a strong sense of social and psychological alienation, which is perhaps inevitably combined with a strongly self-righteous outlook towards others and towards existence. Despite universal belief, ‘The Rabble’ (‘rajjaleh-ha’) does not just allude to common thugs and/or anti-social elements in high society, but to virtually everyone who does not meet the high moral standards set by the narrator. The same individuality determines the narrator’s attitude towards other personages in the novel, notably his wife, ‘The Harlot’ (‘lakkateh’).

Nasrin Rahimieh

Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta

Sadeq Hedayat’s translations of Kafka

Among the European writers to whom Sadeq Hedayat was drawn was Franz Kafka.  This attraction to Kafka led Hedayat to translate his Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) into Persian, albeit through a French translation of the original German.  Building on the work which she has already done on the nature of Hedayat’s translation, his inadvertent distortions of the German text, and his essay on Kafka, this paper  explores the roots of Hedayat’s fascination with the German writer.  The analysis aims at shedding more light on Hedayat’s image of Kafka and the significance of this image for the Persian writer’s own literary imagination. 

Shadab Vajdi

Lecturer in Persian Literature, London University

Hedayat as a scholar

Hedayat is known by most of his readers as the author of The Blind Owl and other fictional works. But he was also a notable scholar and literary critic. He studied the ancient Iranian Pahlavi language and translated some Pahlavi texts into modern Persian, including Gojasteh Abalish, Zand-e Vohuman Yasn and Karnameh-ye Ardashir-e Babakan. He was also a pioneer in the study of Persian folklore, notably in the books Owsaneh and Nairangistan, and wrote a commentary on the great classical poem Vis va Ramin.

Michael Beard

Chester Fritz Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies, University of North Dakota

Influence as Debt: Western influence in The Blind Owl

The term ‘literary influence’ has been a sensitive one for generations. (If we are members of the culture undergoing influence, does the process undermine our identity?  If we are from the influencing culture has our identity transgressed natural boundaries?  Are readers from both cultures exempt from this anxiety or more subject to it?)  Sadeq Hedayat's masterpiece, his novella The Blind Owl, is an appropriate text for examining this question: it is a major work of world fiction, itself influential in translated forms, often perceived as an expression of peculiarly Iranian ideas.  In it there is a series of allusions to western works - phrases from Poe which are so close as to constitute a kind of pastiche, close paraphrases of passages from Rilke, and a more generalized network of links with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams - a close reading of which will allow us to work out tentative redefinitions.

Bahram Meghdadi

Professor of English, University of Tehran

Hedayat’s The Blind Owl and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

The most original mark of distinction of the Blind Owl is that it is the first Persian novel using modernist techniques of fiction writing. It has been rightly noted that in his use of modernist techniques Hedayat is largely influenced by the French symbolists and surrealists of early 20^th century. On the other hand, certain interesting affinities may be detected between The Blind Owl and The Sound and the Fury, although Hedayat was certainly unaware of the latter novel when he wrote his own.

Marta Simidchieva

Member of Faculty at the Division of Humanities, York University, Toronto

The Blind Owl and the Persian Calssics: Rudaki, Manuchehri, Khayyam, and the Darker Side of The Blind Owl

One of the distinctive features of  The Blind Owl (pub. 1937) is its kinship with European Modernist prose of the early twentieth century—a body of literature which bears witness to the fascination of innovative writers from that period with psychoanalysis. The paper proposes that the author of The Blind Owl does not merely ‘borrow’ from his Western counterparts ready-made motifs and allusions pertaining to sexual angst and the unconscious.  It suggests, instead, that Hedayat attempts a radical ‘recasting’ of  Persian tradition itself, channelling recurrent conventional images and themes of the classical legacy into the paradigms of psychological affliction, shared by modernist writings from the first half of the twentieth century. 

Sirous Shamisa

Professor of Persian literature, Allameh Tabataba’i University

The Blind Owl and Archetypes

There have been a number of psychoanalytical interpretations of The Blind Owl. These are normally conducted along Freudian lines with the central concept of Oedipal complex. Yet Jungian analytical psychology may be equally successfully applied to interpretations of this novel, the key concepts here being the Jungian animus and anima, and the shadow. Thus some key figures in the novel may be likened to central archetypes in the Jungian schema.

Houra Yavari

Senior Research Scholar, Department of Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures, and Online Publishing Coordinator, Centre for Iranian Studies Columbia University

Hedayat and Us: Split Selves in the Making: Abstract