Sadeq Hedayat’s Three Drops of Blood and The Blind Owl and Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District

Abstract

After more than seven decades since its publication, Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl still remains a mystery to critical analysis. The appearance of Mustafa Farzane’s Rencontres avec Sadeqh Hedayat provides us with threads to finding answers to some of the ambiguities surrounding the Persian novella. According to Farzaneh, Hedayat advised him to read the story of Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo Uezda by the Russian writer Nicholas Leskov to find clues to the love aspects of The Blind Owl. This article is an attempt to determine the bearing Farzane’s testimony may have on the study of Hedayat’s novella and another shorter work of his entitled Three Drops of Blood. By referring to Shakespeare’s Macbeth that the Russian novel’s title is an allusion to, the study reveals that there are a number of interesting relations, from imagery to the theme of existences as penal colony, a Schopenhauerian notion, shared by these texts.