Sadegh Hedayat Research Articles

Reflecting on the Human Condition Through Ahmad Mahmoud's Narratives: An Exploration of Social Sufferings

The domain of fictional literature is a pivotal and impactful realm within the literary landscape. Scholars note that the inception of the modern Iranian narrative began in 1930 with the works of Sadegh Hedayat, marking the evolution of storytelling into a fundamental literary genre that garnered significant prominence. Despite the extensive literature on Mahmoud, focused and explicit discourse on how his narratives mirror societal suffering has been lacking. This study aims to explore the depiction of societal anguish and hardships as portrayed by Mahmoud, offering a comprehensive and novel analysis. It scrutinizes the multifaceted sufferings of the "contemporary human" as depicted in Mahmoud's literature, dissecting themes such as social and political dilemmas, encompassing superstitions, the plight of women, poverty, addiction, imprisonment, exile, colonialism, and warfare. The findings reveal that misguided beliefs and a lack of faith contribute to the prevalence of superstitions, while the agonies of imprisonment and exile are depicted as perpetual. Mahmoud's works profoundly reflect and articulate the impacts of poverty and addiction. Although the tribulations of women are less highlighted, they are more profoundly explored in the context of maternal hardship. Moreover, colonialism and warfare are depicted in a comprehensive and detailed manner in Ahmad Mahmoud's narratives.

Влияние традиции Достоевского на С. Хедаята («Записки из подполья» и «Слепая сова»)

Sadegh Hedayat, who is known as one of the intellectuals of his era, was one of the first Iranian writers who used an expressionism style in his works. Sadegh Hedayat’s mental perspective and existentialist thoughts are clearly visible in his works. Since Sadegh Hedayat was familiar with foreign literature, especially the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he got influenced by him in some subjects. This study compares the two works “The Blind Owl” by Hedayat and “Notes from The Underground” by Dostoyevsky. Both works have a psychological feature – they both depicted their story’s protagonist similarly. Both Dostoevsky and Hedayat, with the help of the isolation and loneliness motifs (“Corner”, “Underground”), make the characters’ protest against the state of society comprehensible to the reader. But the main difference between the two works is the difference in the religious perspective of the two authors. Dostoyevsky’s main character suffers from unbelief, while Sadiq Hedayat’s hero is suffering by the misunderstanding of those around him and considers people who are bigots to be superstitious. Regardless of cultural and linguistic differences, as well as place and time of life, Dostoyevsky and Hedayat are equally concerned with belief issues and social vices. They lived in a suffocating social environment that made both writers protesting and unsatisfied. This dissatisfaction with the social situation is also reflected in the characteristics of the “Notes from The Underground” and “The Blind Owl” main characters.

Выражение символизма при помощи лексических средств выразительности на примере произведения Садека Хедаята «Слепая сова»

<p>This research paper analyzes the symbolism of images in the novel «The Blind Owl» and examines the lexical means of expression used by the author to achieve the goals of the fiction. The lexical means of expression in the work of Sadegh Hedayat «The Blind Owl» are represented by various Persian and Arabic words, word combinations and phrases that carry a certain imagery and symbolism. These word combinations, phrases and turns of phrase greatly enhance the emotional effect on the reader, making him empathize fully. The main means of expression containing symbolism are given with examples of their use in the text of the novel.</p>

The Poetics of Duality in the Works of Sadegh Hedayat

The article is devoted to the study of the semantic spectrum of duality in the works of S. Hedayat. The intertextual links between works of S. Hedayat, N. Gogol and F. Dostoevsky are considered.It is noted that F. Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Double” and the story of S. Hedayat “The Blind Owl” brings together the image of the protagonist – a man of the “underground” seeking to isolation from the hostile environment. The psychological complex of the underground acquires in the creative manner of S. Hedayat both behavioral and topological certainty, being realized in the image of the tomb room. The author considers the meanings of duality in the context of madness, going back to the story of N. Gogol “Notes of a madman”. The works of Russian classics are correlated in the article with the Iranian folklore heritage. It is noted that the imagery of “The Blind Owl” is organized in the logic of the twin myth. Zoroastrian model of the world order is manifested in the artistic interpretation of the Sizdah be dar holiday. In the two-part composition of the story the holiday formalizes the semantic constants of demonism and love. In the mythological context of the story “The Blind Owl” duality is realized as a confrontation of good and evil.Hedayat’s poetics of duality combines folklore and literary traditions, so that the phenomenon of the double is framed in an ontological scale. Hedayat’s poetic synthesis is understood as a pioneering work that defined the subsequent development of Iranian prose.

The role of Personal Deixis in the short story "Dash Acol" by sadegh Hedayat

The role of Personal Deixis in the short story "Dash Acol" by sadegh Hedayat

From self to double shadow in Sadegh Hedayat’s "Blind owl"

From self to double shadow in Sadegh Hedayat’s "Blind owl"

Hedayat’s rebellious child: multicultural rewriting of The Blind Owl in Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects

ABSTRACT Divided along several ethnic, linguistic and religious lines, Iran is a multicultural country and the question of its national identity has been a matter of dispute since the beginning of the last century. Part of this dispute has been going on in literary works by national and diasporic authors. In this paper, Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects has been read in terms of its contribution to the questions of nationalism and national identity famously addressed in Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. It seems that Khakpour has modelled her debut novel on Hedayat’s magnum opus as an effective way to join the debate. Focusing on Khakpour’s narrative, this study demonstrates how the novel presents a multicultural narrative of national identity in response to what is sometimes considered as Hedayat’s ethnocentric nationalism in The Blind Owl.

Omid Azadibougar. World Literature and Hedayat’s Poetics of Modernity

This book stems from the author’s exploration of the encounter between Iran and modernity. This preoccupation takes shape here through the examination of Sadegh Hedayat’s texts in their variety and complexity. Azadibougar analyses Hedayat’s poetics of modernity and his response to his own peripheral condition in world literature. The book takes a strong stance against the tragic-romantic approach and the focus on Hedayat’s life of many scholarly texts that studied this influential author. It ...

LEXICAL COHESION IN SADEGH HEDAYAT’S LETTERS: THE EFFECT OF BIPOLAR MOOD DISORDER

This paper makes an attempt to investigate the effect of bipolar mood disorder on the basis of using the lexical cohesion elements (that is, repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and collocation) in a case study approach based on the fact that approximately one percent of people suffer from this kind of affective disorder. Specifically, a large number of artists are afflicted by the very disorder presumably due to their creativity. The private letters of Sadegh Hedayat, mostly known as an Iranian eminent writer suffering from bipolar mood disorder, to Shahid Nourai, one of his friends, are selected as the material of the study. The addressee is kept fixed noticeably to remove the effective linguistic features. Sadegh Hedayat’s letters have been studied regarding mentioned linguistic elements in terms of two major bipolar mood disorder episodes (that is to say, hypomanic and depressive). In the study, all the letters related to hypomanic and depressive episodes are investigated using the elements of lexical cohesion. Furthermore, all the words on the basis of the elements with respect to various ties, i.e. immediate, mediate, and remote, are counted and the averages are evaluated using SPSS with the aim of finding any noteworthy result to discover whether specific psychological mood affects the use of certain lexical cohesion elements or not. Moreover, it explores whether there is any significant difference between bipolar mood disorder and schizophrenia on the basis of previous studies. The statistical analysis shows a highly significant difference concerning antonymy and hyponymy between hypomania and depression. No significant difference is found with respect to repetition, synonymy, and collocation. In addition, the results suggest that the text analyzed in the research is cohesive as regards bipolar mood disorder in contrast to those studies conducted related to schizophrenia.

Lexical Cohesion in Sadegh Hedayat's Letters: The Effect of Bipolar Mood Disorder

This paper makes an attempt to investigate the effect of bipolar mood disorder on the basis of using the lexical cohesion elements (that is, repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and collocation) in a case study approach based on the fact that approximately one percent of people suffer from this kind of affective disorder. Specifically, a large number of artists are afflicted by the very disorder presumably due to their creativity. The private letters of Sadegh Hedayat, mostly known as an Iranian eminent writer suffering from bipolar mood disorder, to Shahid Nourai, one of his friends, are selected as the material of the study. The addressee is kept fixed noticeably to remove the effective linguistic features. Sadegh Hedayat’s letters have been studied regarding mentioned linguistic elements in terms of two major bipolar mood disorder episodes (that is to say, hypomanic and depressive). In the study, all the letters related to hypomanic and depressive episodes are investigated using the elements of lexical cohesion. Furthermore, all the words on the basis of the elements with respect to various ties, i.e. immediate, mediate, and remote, are counted and the averages are evaluated using SPSS with the aim of finding any noteworthy result to discover whether specific psychological mood affects the use of certain lexical cohesion elements or not. Moreover, it explores whether there is any significant difference between bipolar mood disorder and schizophrenia on the basis of previous studies. The statistical analysis shows a highly significant difference concerning antonymy and hyponymy between hypomania and depression. No significant difference is found with respect to repetition, synonymy, and collocation. In addition, the results suggest that the text analyzed in the research is cohesive as regards bipolar mood disorder in contrast to those studies conducted related to schizophrenia.

An Intertextual Study of Pygmalion Myth: George Bernard Shaw Interprets an Ovidean Tale about Transforming

Abstract: Pygmalion, a play which is written by George Bernard Shaw is mainly about the story of a poor girl named Eliza Doolittle who is transforming into an upper-class member by the help of two professors, named Higgins and Pickering. The primary purpose of this paper is to analyze the theme of transformation in the play by focusing on the subjects of identity and self-identity, the importance of appearance, language and communication issues. The story has a mythological background and got known by Ovid’s poem, “Metamorphoses.” The mythological story is reflected in many poems, drama plays and short stories written by authors globally. Intertextual references to the myth in Rumi’s Dīvān-e Sams-e Tabrīzī, Nader Naderpour’s poetry “Bot-Taraash,” and Gholām-Hossein Sā'edi’s play, “Pygmalion.” Some short stories with references to the myth such as; “The Birth-Mark,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sadegh Hedayat’s “The Doll Behind the Curtain” are other texts that their similarities with Ovid’s poem are analyzed in this study.

A Comparative Study of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl in the Light of the German Theory of Novella

Using the novella as the European literary genre has divided the Iranian literary scholars due mostly to its unknown features. Lack of research in this area has caused many writers either to abandon this literary term or to opt for alternatives such as “novelette”,” long story”, “long short story” or “short story”. This article aims to introduce the theory and characteristics of the novella as a unique literary genre, based on German literature. Despite the Italian root of the novella, it reflects its Germanic roots as it was flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries Germany. In addition, the paper explores the concept of “long story” in Iranian literature as the synonym of the term novella. The Blind Owl clearly exhibits these characteristics of the genre, especially the dramatic structure and representing a new aspect of human trait. The analysis of The Blind Owl leads to a deeper understanding of one of the most important and well-formed European literary genres and a new look at Sadegh Hedayat’s ideology as a professional author in addition to familiarizing scholars with this genre.

Linguistic Complexity of Mixed Episode in Sadegh Hedayat's Letters: The Effect of Bipolar Mood Disorder

This paper investigates the syntactic complexity of mixed episode in Sadegh Hedayat, supposedly suffering from Bipolar Disorder. The first study studies depressive and hypomanic states in the episode. The results illustrate that Hedayat shows the highest complexity in the hypomanic state, whereas he has a significant simplicity in syntax in depressive state. The results are analyzed by studying three types of sentences (i.e., simple, paratactic and hypotactic) and embedded clauses. Moreover, in the second study, the complexities of the hypomanic episode and the hypomanic state in mixed episode are compared.

“Art is a Sincere Martyrdom”: Circumventing Censorship by Encryption in the Work of Alireza Espahbod

This paper focuses on various aspects of Alireza Espahbod’s style of painting that encrypt his work. The period considered is from the just after the Iranian revolution until the artist’s death in 2007: in these years censorship had become severe, resulting in banning prohibition on his work being exhibited. Apart from the striking symbols that recur throughout his work, it is noticeable that he favors certain visual metaphors for encryption of humanitarian and satirical meanings. The discussion also focuses on the ways in which sequences of his individual paintings create narratives, like scenes in a play or a film. Unlike some preceding modernists, Espahbod is firmly rooted in his Iranian cultural milieu, and is in a line of artists who have used surrealism, beginning with Sadegh Hedayat in the modern literary world. He also follows a much older tradition that goes back to classical poetry and miniature art, in which image and word coalesce and are interchangeable, and where literature and visual art reflect one another. He uses these older techniques to comment allusively on the dramatic events and conditions of his own time. It is argued that his work amounts to more than that of an artist who merely fought against censorship, as his art rises above it and responds to it with a positive message for his audience.

Systems and accidents in 20th century magical realist literature: Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and Sadegh Hedayat's "The blind owl" as critiques of modern nation-making experiments

This article compares two major 20th century magical realist novels - Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl – as critiques of modern nation-making practices, in Nehruvian post-independence India and Iran under Reza Shah Pahlavi. The analysis centers the interplay of accidents and systems, in political constructions and contestations of modern self, history and knowledge. The works are assessed in terms of two aesthetic paradigms of modernity: Baudelaire’s vision of modernity as traumatic deracination involving new creative possibilities and freedom, and Cocteau’s vision of modernity as an Infernal Machine where a pre-recorded universe annihilates creative freedom. The political significance of these aesthetics are evaluated against the two distinctive nationalist narratives which the authors set out to contest in their respective novels. Both novels offer important critiques of violence. Yet both reveal a Proustian aesthetic of nostalgia, rejecting organized political action in the public sphere to celebrate imaginative introversion.

Intertextuality in Novel: An Escape from Patriarchal Soliloquy

Hypertextuality is one of the intertextual relationships introduced by Gerard Genette. According to him, hypertextuality includes all the relationships which the hypertext has with the previous text, i.e. the hypotext. However, he does not consider the relationship between these two texts to be in such a way that the hypertext is the interpretation of the hypotext. On the other hand, other theorizers including Bakhtin, regard the conversation between texts a way to escape a one-voiced and dominant discourse. From this viewpoint, the intertextual relationships of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, with Shahrnoush Parsipour’s The Blue Mind and Abbas Maroufi’s The Body of Farhad are in such a way that The Blind Owl can be regarded as a hypotext for the other 2 novels but these two novels interpret the text differently. The present study aims to examine the intertextual relationships between these 3 novels and explore how a multiple-voiced conversation is formed between them.

Unlikely Works of Iranian Origin

6 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 IN THE PAST DECADE, especially, much has been written about Iranian memoirs and particularly the nonfiction of Iranian females of the diaspora. Within that, many Iranian American fiction writers (such as myself) have also earned some recognition . But I chose to look at some work that might have escaped the eye of those scanning for Iran. From old and obscure Iranian classics to new work by writers of Iranian ancestry who don’t identify with Iran or Iranian subject matters, this list features some off-the-beaten-track masterpieces for those interested in seeing just how eclectic Iran and the Iranian psyche can be. Vita Sackville-West Passenger to Teheran Hogarth Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran is a 1926 travelogue based on her travels from London to Persia to visit her diplomat husband. Egypt, India, and Iraq are featured as well. The humor is especially notable in this outsider memoir. Ottessa Moshfegh Eileen Penguin Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen (2015) is a period noir dressed in modern minimal experimental prose. Moshfegh’s claustrophobic, often repulsive novel of self-hatred, female friendship, and New England suburban isolation —no Iran here—is beautifully bleak but with some wild turns. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Brief Encounters with the Enemy The Dial Press Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s Brief Encounters with the Enemy (2013) is a story collection narrated by young men in wartime but focuses on civic life. Short on specifics—and his own Iranian heritage—his realism seems classic and timeless in a way rarely found these days. Shahriar Mandanipour Censoring an Iranian Love Story Sara Khalili, tr. Alfred A. Knopf Neustadt Prize nominee Shahriar Mandanipour is an icon in Iran, but Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2010) was his first foray into English translation. A dark comic novel as much about life in contemporary Iran as it is about storytelling. Sadegh Hedayat The Blind Owl D. P. Costello, tr. Grove Press Sadegh Hedayat’s 1957 cult classic The Blind Owl is horror at its finest—Kafka and Poe haunt this cyclical fever dream about art, madness, love, and death. The novel has been one of the most widely translated of all modern Iranian classics, which is interesting considering its reputation for causing suicides in Iran. what to read now Unlikely Works of Iranian Origin by Porochista Khakpour Notebook Porochista Khakpour is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Sick (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels The Last Illusion (2014) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007). Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, Spin, Elle, and many others. She is Writer in Residence at Bard College. ...

Unlikely Works of Iranian Origin

6 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 IN THE PAST DECADE, especially, much has been written about Iranian memoirs and particularly the nonfiction of Iranian females of the diaspora. Within that, many Iranian American fiction writers (such as myself) have also earned some recognition . But I chose to look at some work that might have escaped the eye of those scanning for Iran. From old and obscure Iranian classics to new work by writers of Iranian ancestry who don’t identify with Iran or Iranian subject matters, this list features some off-the-beaten-track masterpieces for those interested in seeing just how eclectic Iran and the Iranian psyche can be. Vita Sackville-West Passenger to Teheran Hogarth Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran is a 1926 travelogue based on her travels from London to Persia to visit her diplomat husband. Egypt, India, and Iraq are featured as well. The humor is especially notable in this outsider memoir. Ottessa Moshfegh Eileen Penguin Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen (2015) is a period noir dressed in modern minimal experimental prose. Moshfegh’s claustrophobic, often repulsive novel of self-hatred, female friendship, and New England suburban isolation —no Iran here—is beautifully bleak but with some wild turns. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Brief Encounters with the Enemy The Dial Press Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s Brief Encounters with the Enemy (2013) is a story collection narrated by young men in wartime but focuses on civic life. Short on specifics—and his own Iranian heritage—his realism seems classic and timeless in a way rarely found these days. Shahriar Mandanipour Censoring an Iranian Love Story Sara Khalili, tr. Alfred A. Knopf Neustadt Prize nominee Shahriar Mandanipour is an icon in Iran, but Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2010) was his first foray into English translation. A dark comic novel as much about life in contemporary Iran as it is about storytelling. Sadegh Hedayat The Blind Owl D. P. Costello, tr. Grove Press Sadegh Hedayat’s 1957 cult classic The Blind Owl is horror at its finest—Kafka and Poe haunt this cyclical fever dream about art, madness, love, and death. The novel has been one of the most widely translated of all modern Iranian classics, which is interesting considering its reputation for causing suicides in Iran. what to read now Unlikely Works of Iranian Origin by Porochista Khakpour Notebook Porochista Khakpour is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Sick (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels The Last Illusion (2014) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007). Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, Spin, Elle, and many others. She is Writer in Residence at Bard College. ...

A Nilufar by any other Name: The Implications of Reading Sadegh Hedayat in Translation

This article demonstrates that Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl (Buf-e Kur), arguably the most important work of modern Iranian literature but also seen as ‘a Western novel’, makes it conspicuous how our understanding of ‘global’ texts is conditioned by translation, critical reception, and the material aspects of publication. More precisely, the article examines how Western and non-Western critical approaches to this novel combine to produce illuminating, but also problematic, polysemies. It shows how specific lexical choices in Roger Lescot's French and D. P. Costello's English translations transform the work's meaning, and considers, more broadly, the critical, definitional, and theoretical questions about the politics of hermeneutics and translation which these choices imply. Its wider subject is the reading, translating, and teaching of non-Western literature.

Crosbian Nihilistic Reading of Samuel Becket's Endgame and Sadegh Hedayat's Three Drops of Blood

Nihilism as a philosophical concept is an inner feature, related to the mind of the man. This study aims at showing the futility of life that causes hopelessness in man’s life through surveying the two selected works from world literature: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Sadegh Hedayat’s Three Drops of Blood. The works signify the internal problems, tensions, and valueless feelings of man toward living in the world. This article shows that the two works under analysis, despite their being the products of noticeably different times, places, languages, and cultures, similarly deal with the concept of nihilism as a -if not thedominant subject matter. It also proves that each of the two works tends to support its nihilism through a certain set of nihilistic arguments or themes, these sets remarkably overlap at some places, which further strengthens the two works thematic affinity, this time in terms of their attitudes towards their nihilism. Key words: Nihilism; Absurd; Literary works