SADEQ HEDAYAT

The life and literature of an Iranian writer

HOMA KATOUZIAN

I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

Published in 2002 by LB. Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

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In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin's Press

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First published in 1991 by LB. Tauris & Co Ltd Copyright © 1991 by Homa Katouzian

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any parr thereof, must nor be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publishers.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

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ISBN 1 86064413 9

Typeset in Sabon 10/12 by Columns Design and Production Services Ltd, Reading Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin

IN MEMORIAM

SHOKUH, MAS'UD AND MANUCHEHR

CONTENTS

Preface IX
1 Hedayat and Modern Persian Literature 1
2 Early Years 17
3 Hedayat in Europe 31
4 Life and Labour in the Golden Era 47
5 Iranian Culture and Romantic Nationalism 67
6 Iranian Culture and Critical Realism 91
7 The Blind Owl: A Critical Exposition 113
8 The Origins of the Blind Owl 135
9 Hopes and Despairs 160
10 Hajis and Workers 178
11 Satire and Depression 202
12 The Trial: The Message of Hedayat 229
13 The Execution: Hedayat's Suicide 243
14 The Legend and the Man 257
Index 298 ijii1iP

PREFACE

In the academic year 1975-6 when I was Iranian Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, John Gurney asked me for a private review of a recently published book on Sadeq Hedayat. Having heard my strong views on that piece of work, he urged me to launch a full-scale study of Hedayat and his works, especially in view of the absence of any comprehensive studies on the subject. I had read almost all of Hedayat's works at an early age, but it had never occurred to me that I would one day embark upon a systematic study of his life and works. I took up the challenge, and fifteen years have now gone by, during which a number of works on Hedayat have appeared in the English language which are immeasurably better than the book that provoked me into this venture. Meanwhile I have been busy with other works as well, although none has consumed as much time and effort.

Sayyed Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh was most generous and extremely helpful, giving me originals or photocopies of Hedayat's letters, other pertinent papers and documents, and his own firstedition copies of many of Hedayat's earlier works, in addition to the extensive correspondence and conversations which we had on the subject. The late Dr Taqi Razavi was also very helpful, giving me photocopies of Hedayat's letters to him and talking to me about the man whom he had known intimately throughout his life.

Amir Pichdad, Nasser Pakdaman and the late Gholamhosain Sa' edi also helped a great deal by putting rare and inaccessible material at my disposal.

In the course of the study I talked to many people, not all of

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Preface

Mojtaba Minovi, and Mohammad Moqaddam were especially useful. And so were my own memories of youthful conversations with Khalil Maleki, Jalal AI-e Ahmad and Mas'ud Farzad long before I began this projerr.

John Gurney continued his Socratic obstetrics by reading different drafts of the manuscript, and passing characteristically cogent comments for its improvement. Comments and criticisms in several seminars at St Antony's College, and the Oriental Institute, Oxford, were also helpful in bringing the product into its present shape. But the blame for all the shortcomings which inevitably remain is mine alone.

H.K.

Oxford, October 1990

- ....

1

HEDAYAT AND MODERN PERSIAN LITERATURE

EARL Y DEVELOPMENTS

Sadeq Hedayat was born in 1903 and died in 1951. In the first half of this century much happened in Persian literature and Sadeq Hedayat played no small part in this development. He was literally a child of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, a time when both prose and poetry were undergoing noticeable change in form as well as content.

In their objectives, methods and results revolutions are universal. They occupy not only the realms of politics, law and society, but also the domains of education, culture and letters. The form and content of literature - as a means of artistic, cultural and social communication - begin to be transformed as they can no longer serve those functions which have been in harmony with the traditional framework, its norms, mores and values. The English, French, Russian and Chinese revolutions all bear witness to this rule, and the Persian Constitutional Revolution was no exception to it.

Historically, Persian literature was dominated by poetry, which had served a greater variety of purposes than its European counterpart. Apart from lyrics, sonnets, epics and mythology, it encompassed mysticism, philosophy, religion, moralizing, panegyrics, history, fables and romances, elegy, satire, abuse, invective and obscenity. Yet, generally speaking, it excluded social and political analysis and criticism; when present, these elements were

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Sadeq Hedayat

occasionally - long meditations. There was no prose fiction, satire and drama of the kind which has been developing in Europe since the seventeenth century. Once again, critical comments on politics and society were absent except, covertly, in such relatively rare (but outstanding) examples as Baihaqi's Tarikb and Sa'di's Golestan.

When the Constitutional Revolution broke out, the traditional uses of prose and poetry were still predominant, although change had been creeping in for some time. Prose fiction, initially in the form of the historical novel - a genre for which a precursor could be found in Persian classics - began to emerge in such works as Mohammad Baqer Mirza's Shams ua Toghra. Other works, such as Abd aI-Rahim Talebof's Masalik al-Muhsinin (Ways of the Beneficent) and Zain al-Abedin Maragheh'i's Siyahatnameh-ye Ebrahim Baig (The Travelogue of Ebrahim Baig) were openly concerned with modern ideas and social issues. The revolutionary process led to the transformation of the functions and purpose, and - especially in the case of prose - the form of Persian literature. The proliferation of popular newspapers played a crucial role in determining the style and direction of these literary developments. The newspapers were read by the ordinary literate public, who in turns read them out to the illiterate in public places. The authors had little choice but to be simple in style, use common vocabulary, and write on social and political issues. On the other hand, younger writers and poets were themselves in the mood for such popular and progressive developments, responding at once to the growing influence of Europe and the vigour of the revolutionary movement. There was thus a coincidence of purpose on the part of readers and. writers.

The Constitutional Revolution lacked an ideology in the specific sense in which this term is used in politics, philosophy and sociology. Its aims - and short-lived achievements - were to end arbitrary rule and establish democratic government. The two objectives should not be confused. The Iranian state was based on estebdad, which means not just dictatorship but government by fiat. The revolution began with a demand for law (which normally exists even in a dictatorial system), and went on to demand de~ocracy.~h_ile neithe;. obje~tive constitu,tes an ideolo~~ in the

Hedayat and modern Persian literature

3

The strong anti-Russian sentiments of the Constitutionalists were not exactly the same as romantic nationalist ideas, if only because the Russian troops were physically present in Iran to defend the country's arbitrary state. Hence, nationalism was not the revolution's dominant ideology, and much of the revolutionary rhetoric and propaganda was in terms of religion, morality, law, political legitimacy and natural justice. Authentic nationalist concepts and ideas did exist, but they were covert as well as confined to a small elite. Yet it did not take long for them to capture the consciousness of the modern political and literary elite after the revolution.

ROMANTIC NATIONALISM AND THE LITERARY REVOLUTION

In 1919, Iraj Mirza, a highly gifted and unusually unromantic poet, wrote in a satirical verse: 'I shall bring about a literary revolution: I shall turn Persian into Arabic.' This was a direct comment, if not jibe, at the ongoing debate among the literati, mainly poets and critics, about the need for a 'literary revolution' (Enqelab-e Adabi), whose intellectual origins went back several decades. The literary revolution of this period became closely entangled with a romantic nationalist movement which swept across the land in the 1920s and was to continue - in various, sometimes conflicting, guises of both right- and left-wing politics - until the revolution of 1977-9.

All nationalism is romantic. It glorifies the past and sometimes the present beyond the scope of rational inquiry and appraisal. It proclaims hopes and aspirations well beyond the limits of existing socio-economic resources. It conceives of 'the nation' as an organic body, and underrates the importance of ethnic, linguistic and social divisions within it. It is aggressive and offensive towards other peoples and races. It is associated with authoritarian and dictatorial government. However, what justifies the appellation 'romantic' here is that the term 'nationalism' is often used to mean ideas and aspirations other than those described above. Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek,

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Sadeq Hedayat

specifically, mere anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism are not sufficient proof for nationalism, as every country is sure to defend its independence and territorial integrity. Are all men everywhere either nationalists or traitors to their own country? The world is not, and has never been, divided between nationalists and internationalists alone, despite the Nazi and Stalinist propaganda of the 19305 and 1940s which has confused the issues for so long.

The First World War brought Iran unmitigated ruin and unprecedented chaos. At one stage there were even two governments in the country, one 'neutral' and the other pro-German. Hatred for Russia and suspicion of Britain (dating back to the Iranian Thermidor of 1911) had resulted in strong, and almost universal, pro-German sentiments. For example, Adib Peshawari (a traditional Persian poet of Indian origins who resided in Tehran) wrote qasidehs (classical odes) for Wilhelm II and the German war machine which would have put to shame some of those written by Onsori and Farrokhi Sistani nine centuries before in praise of Sultan Mahmud and his conquests in India. Sayyed Hasan Taqizadeh and his literary circle published the famous newspaper Kaveh in Berlin, with the blessing and financial support of the German government. 1 Kaveh did not campaign for nationalism in the romantic sense mentioned above, but planted seeds a layer below the newspaper's anti-Allied, patriotic and modernist surface. In Iran itself, nationalism was being nurtured in both politics and literature. Experienced poets such as Aref, Lahuti and Farrokhi Yazdi were in the forefront, but younger talents (among them Mohammad Reza Eshqi) were not too far behind.

When the last guns of the First World War were silenced, the guns of Iranian nationalism were loaded. Although the 1921 coup which led eventually to the creation of the Pahlavi dynasty had foreign blessing and support, the domestic ground had been prepared over many years for a fundamental shake-up in favour of nationalism and modernism. That is why the coup was initially hailed by modern intellectuals and the educated middle classes as a great triumph. The declarations issued by Sayyed Zia and Reza Khan were tough and revolutionary in tone, and their nationalist bornbastics were without precedent in the history of Iranian

Hedayat and modern Persian literature

5

growing number of such writers later fell out with the new regime, deciding that Reza Khan was not a true nationalist, but they were only responding to the rise of dictatorship, a phenomenon quite consistent with the ideology of 'true' nationalism. Even after Reza Shah's rise to arbitrary power there remained a dose correspondence between the basic values of official and intellectual nationalism, despite the opposition of many intellectuals (including Hedayat) to the new state for its suppression of basic rights and freedoms in the country.

Modernism was nationalism's twin sister. It was not only the nationalists who wished to modernize the country, just as it was not merely they who were concerned about the country's integrity and independence. But, whereas old Constitutionalists and democrats thought that this should be done with due caution and suitable adaptation, the nationalist modernists were for uprooting the old ways without delay, and replacing them by Europeanist ideas, institutions and techniques. (In their fashion, socialists and communists shared the same attitude, but, at the time, they were a small minority with few roots in society.) Modernism came to mean turning Iran into France and Germany overnight, just as it was to mean (two decades later) turning it into Soviet Russia.

The intellectual roots of both nationalism and modernism in society and literature went back to the second half of the nineteenth century, although such ideas were confined to a small elite on the margins of society for some decades. Fath-Ali Akhundof (posthumously known as Akhundzadeh) is the best representative of the nationalist modernists of the earlier period. Born in 1812 to an Azerbaijani family, his father was a mullah or akhund who tried to bring him up in his own profession. Fath-Ali later learned Russian, emigrated to Tiflis,entered the service of the Russian Empire, and ended up as a colonel in the Russian army. He became a prolific poet, writer and playwright (mainly in Azerbaijani Turkic), and died in 1878 in Tiflis.3 Akhundof was clearly a progressive man of his time but one who, like some of his intellectual descendants in Iran, Turkey and elsewhere, combined an uncritical attitude towards what he knew of European social and cultural developments with a wholly rejectionist view of postIslamic Iranian culture and civilization. He is one of the initiators

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Sadeq Hedayat

long-term historical development along European lines has been solely or mainly due to the Arab conquest and the influence of Islam.

Akhundof's influence in Iran has been largely due to two critical essays, one on society and politics, the other on literature. The first consists of three letters by a fictitious Indian prince, Kamal alDowleh, to an equally fictitious Iranian prince, jalal al-Dowleh. In the first letter Kamal al-Dowleh wonders whatever happened to Iran's ancient glory. That glory was itself like a candle in comparison with the sun which now shines in Europe and America. But the present situation in Iran looks like total darkness beside the light of Western civilization. In ancient Persia:

The people, living under the protection of [the ancient kingemperor's] rule enjoyed celestial blessings, and lived in comfort and dignity. There was neither poverty nor begging. The people were free in their own country and respected in foreign lands."

There follows a highly romantic and romanticized account of pre-Islamic Iranian government and society which has little or no correspondence to real history. This was a world in which no one was killed without the shah's permission anywhere in the country, the shah's advisers were all wise and well-intentioned people, and the shah ate at the same table with his subjects.

Whither that glory, that power, that happiness. Naked and hungry Arabs have made you wretched for a thousand, two hundred and eighty years. The land is in ruins, the people are ignorant, unaware of world civilisation [the French word is used in the original text], and deprived of the blessing of freedom, and the shah is a despote [sic]. The injustice of the despote, and the fanaticism of the ulama have resulted in the country's weakness ..... Where have the Arabs themselves gone? At the moment there are no people in the world who are less human and more wretched than the Arabs. Why then did Islam not lead to their unhappiness?5

Hedayat and modern Persian literature

7

better than other religions, and that he regards 'all religion as legendary nonsense'. But he still emphasizes that 'Arabs have been responsible for this wretchedness in Iran'.

For Akhundof, there has been no real Persian,' nor Muslim, poetry other than Ferdowsi's epic, only poets who believe that 'the versification of a few senseless words in a given metre, with rhymes at the end of the verse' makes poetry. But this is not all. Book-binding in Iran is terrible, whereas in Europe books are so well-bound that they last for centuries, And he immediately goes on to add that Europeans are no longer happy with carriageways alone, and have now constructed railways everywhere."

Akhundof is aware of the arbitrary nature of government in Iran, where despots one day flog their own ministers and the next restore them to high office/ in the second letter he points out the need for government according to law.8 On the other hand, he is so comprehensive and indiscriminate in his zest for rejecting everything Iranian, and accepting everything European, that the strength of these observations is undermined.

Akhundof's other critical essay exclusively concerns the art of literary criticism. The essay is literally entitled qertika (or critique), and in it Akhundof rightly complains about the Persian tradition of writing eulogies for works of art rather than appraising them in the modern European way. On the other hand, his own approach can hardly be described as criticism in the modern style and spirit. Using the poet Sorush Esfahani as his whipping boy, he effectively tears the latter's recently published Divan into shreds with mockery and dismissiveness. In the process, much that is valuable in traditional Persian poetry suffers the same fate. This became the dominant form of criticism among the moderns and the radicals for much of the present century, when (often on political grounds alone) the piece of work was either placed beyond serious criticism (all Hedayat's works suffered this fate) or denigrated as worthless rubbish.

Akhundof had several followers and imitators before the Constitutional Revolution, among them Mirza Aqa Khan Kerrnani who is, it should be said, somewhat less extreme than his master. It was after the revolution, however, that such ideas began to make

• • it".,... I ~ ~,._ I ., I

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Sadeq Hedayat

overwhelmed by impatient extremist demands for the overnight transformation of Iran and the whole of its culture into a European society." As part of this process a curious debate broke out on how to bring about a 'literary revolution', though one had been in progress for at least a couple of decades. What was really at stake was whether or not it was necessary to make a clean break with the past and start anew. Here the influence of Akhundof and his followers may be clearly detected.

The modernist critics knew their subject well, so they decided to go for Sa'di, the hitherto untouchable and invincible hero of classical Persian literature. The debate got off the ground in relatively moderate tones but soon reached the proportions and methods anticipated in Akhundof's qertika. It ended in personal attacks and vilification of one of Iran's greatest poets and writers. [0 Sa'di's reputation among modernist critics has not yet fully recovered from this onslaught, continued by later political radicals and literary moderns. It is against this background that the following sentiments, expressed decades later by the young Ahmad Shamlu, make some historical sense:

The subject of classical [Persian] poetry Did not concern living

In the arid elevations of his imagination

the poet spoke to none other than wine and the beloved .... 11

Closer examination shows that the 'literary revolution' referred to poetry alone, and that, despite so many changes, this was still based on the classical structure, metres and rhymes. European poetry was not like that: metres were open and numerous, rhymes less perfect and less frequent, metaphors more distant and abstract, formal logic and rationality unnecessary. Therefore, one question implicit in the search for 'the literary revolution' was how to write European poetry in the Persian language. Inevitably, at the time, the search proved in vain, partly because European poetry itself had been insufficiently assimilated. It fell to a young and unknown recluse, Nima Yushij, to tread this path alone in the 1920s and 1930s, and to found the modernist school of Persian poetry (which is now dominant) in the 1940s and 19505.

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Hedayat and modern Persian literature

9

position of prose that 'the literary revolution' was concerned with poetry alone. Yet prose had begun to break new ground a few decades earlier, and by the 1920s it had progressed much further than poetry. The great prize of Persian literature in the 1920s was the emergence of a mature modern prose fiction. The fact that fiction of this kind had no precedent in classical Persian literature was an important reason for its undiluted success: it did not change or replace any existing tradition; it created a new and socially relevant channel for literary expression; it hurt no artistic prejudice, nor did it threaten any vested interest. No wonder that the devoted classical scholar Qazvini wrote from Paris to the short-story writer Jamalzadeh in Berlin that if the latter abandoned writing - as he had threatened to do, in response to fanatical denunciations from the pulpit of his book in Tehran - it would be tantamount to treason.

Jamalzadeh's Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud (Once Upon a Time) was published in 1921. As a youth he had been steeped in the democratic traditions of the Constitutional Revolution, and was not unduly impressed by the romantic nationalism of the later period. His collection of short stories, written in simple, idiomatic (but not folkloric) Persian, combined his peculiar talent for storytelling with social and political criticism, wrapped in a humorous and, occasionally, satirical garb. In the short story 'Farsi Shekar Ast' (Persian is Sweet), he pokes fun both at the artificial Arabicisms of the mullah and the Franco-Persian babblings of the Europeanist. The story brilliantly exposes the contradictions of a society in the process of natural and unplanned transition, where the common man is at a loss to know how to communicate with either the mullah or the pseudo-modernist intellectual in ordinary Persian. There is also the narrator, the type who, in this century, lost the game to Europeanist and traditionalist alike: he is modern, but his grasp of European culture does not restrict a realistic understanding of his own society and genuine sympathy for its people.

Jamalzadeh himself was not in the nationalist and modernist mould. But once modern forms had been delivered, nationalist and modernist ideas and arguments began to put them to good use. The nationalist and modernist vision of the period was in line

I' I - r""' r . 1 I

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Sadeq Hedayat

Europeanization of Iranian society. The only additional element was hostility to Turks and Turkish speakers. Hedayat grew up and became a writer and intellectual in this social and intellectual atmosphere, and his nationalist fiction (which will be discussed in Chapter 5) bears its hallmark. By the time he was thirty, not one of his literary friends and acquaintances had escaped the shaping influences of modernism and nationalism. The 1930s, on the other hand was a decade when official nationalism of the early Pahlavi

,

era, the sour fruit of the hopes and aspirations of modern educated Iranians, got into full swing. In the 1920s and before, many if not most modern intellectuals had hoped for the restoration of Iran's dignity as an independent state helped by a rapid Europeanization of culture and society. Pragmatic intellectuals in politics, the civil service and the press were more or less aware that such aspirations could not be fulfilled within the liberal constitutionalist framework of the post-revolutionary era. But few had envisaged a situation whereby a crude official nationalism would be combined with an iron dictatorship (which in the 1930s deteriorated further into arbitrary rule) and the effective loss of all the social and political achievements of the Constitutional Revolution. That is why, although the basic nationalist and modernist sentiments of men like Hedayat remained intact, they turned increasingly hostile towards official nationalism, with its vulgarity in the arts and illiberalism in politics. Clearly, Germanstyle nationalism could not be squared with French-style ideals of culture and democracy, and whereas official nationalism was increasingly taking the former route, many younger intellectuals were more firmly committed to the latter. Given all this, it is not surprising that Hedayat's last nationalist fiction, the historical play Maziyar, was written in 1933. Instead, he turned his nationalist sentiments towards scholarly studies of ancient Iranian texts (see Chapter 6).

SOCIAL CRITICISM

Nationalism has not supplied the only important motif for Iranian literature in the early twentieth century. Apart from his contribu-

• • • • , •• • i" ~ _ , 1 ,

Hedayat and modern Persian literature

11

already engaged in a certain amount of social criticism, for example in his novel Majma' -e Divanegan (The Gathering of the Mad, 1924). But it was Morteza Moshfeq-e Kazerni who shocked the reading elite and political public by publishing his voluminous novel Tebran-e Makhowf (The Terrible Tehran) in 1922. In it, he produced a romanticized, though not unrealistic, critique of the social ills resulting from the attitude and behaviour of high society, and introduced the theme of prostitution, which had increasingly become an affront to the sensibilities and social aspirations of modern middle-class Iranians.V It caught on, and was used by others, especially Mohammad Hejazi, Mohammad Mas'ud and ]ahangir ]alili.

Hejazi, the most prolific fiction writer of this century, was at the peak of his popularity, especially among the upper and modern middle classes, under Reza Shah. As a writer, Hejazi is strictly neither nationalist nor social critic, although elements of both exist in many of his works. His most distinctive characteristic is consistent upper-class moralizing (though the morality is secular and modern) with Iranian mysticism occasionally in the background. The novel Homa (1927) is little besides a journey through pure, unmitigated, literary idealism. The voluminous novel Ziba (1931), a much more successful work and probably the best fiction he ever wrote, is in certain respects more convincing. There are traces of realism and social criticism in his portrayal of administrative corruption which he might have owed to his own experience as a senior civil servant.

Mohammad Mas'ud's 'social criticism' is of a very peculiar cut.

His Tafrihat-e Sbab (Night Diversions, 1932) is an open statement of amorality, bitterness and envy. Social criticism here is of a sort for which nihilism would be too glorified a term, the writer's obvious talent notwithstanding. The sequel, Dar Talash-e Mo'ash (Making a Living, 1932), and Ashraf-e Makhluqat (The Noblest of Creatures, 1934) are, from a social as well as literary viewpoint, in much the same mould.

By contrast, ]ahangir ]alili's Man Ham Geryeh Kardeh-am (I Too Have Cried, 1933) represents a type of social criticism which is close to Moshfeq-e Kazerni's, and very different both from Mas'ud's 'nihilistic' amorality and Hedayar's socio-cultural objec-

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Sadeq Hedayat

now familiar theme of the evils of prostitution favoured by the writers of an earlier period. jalili's novel Az Daitar-e Khaterat (From the Notebook of Memoirs, 1935) contains a higher degree of realism and a more sophisticated approach to social criticism. Had he not died young, he might have made an important writer in the years to come.

Despite his popular reputation as a social. critic (perhaps on account of his later conversion to communism), the novelist Bozorg Alavi was much more concerned with personal and psychological problems. A writer of much greater standing than Hejazi, Mas'ud or Jalili, he displays a strong Europeanism in two respects. One is his well-known application of Freudian psychoanalysis, familiar from some expressionist films of the time. This varies from one story to another, and the short story 'Sarbaz-e So rbi' (Tin Soldier) is the most successful in this respect. The other, rather neglected strand in his work - seen most clearly in the short story 'Arus-e Hezar Darnad' (Bride of Every Groom) - is the unrealistically European setting of some of his works. The cultural atmosphere, social values and modes of behaviour make Berlin a more appropriate location for the story than Tehran: the story ends with a mad dance between a man and a woman in a nightclub, in a country where women were still obliged to wear the veil whenever they went out to shop. In some of his works of the 1940s and 1950s (when he had already converted to communism) there is sometimes more explicit social criticism, but even that is subtle and muted. The exception that proves the rule is the short story 'Gileh Mard' (Man from Gilan, 1952), an outstanding piece of political fiction which escapes the vulgarities of Zhdanovist social realism.

Hedayat was considerably more successful as realist and social critic than as nationalist and romantic. An outstanding feature of his socio-cultural criticism is its almost complete objectivity as regards the lives of ordinary people which he depicts and describes. Jamalzadeh had used a similar approach in his 1921 collection, but it was almost twenty years before he wrote fiction again, resuming work in the same style. Hedayat thus established an approach that was almost unique in the 1930s, where there is no moral overtone or undertone, no romantic glorification of the

13

Hedayat and modern Persian literature

they turn out to be no less amoral and villainous than the more fortunate, and are better pleased with their lives than the middleclass social critics who shed tears for their miseries and misfortunes.

They are underprivileged and ignorant, but that does not turn them into saints, nor does it make their lives unworthy of living. This is Hedayat's greatest single achievement in the realm of literary social criticism, and one which has resulted in a number of excellent, though often undervalued, short stories (see further Chapter 6).

Yet Hedayat is much more famous for another group of his works, of which The Blind Owl (1936) is the masterpiece, and which have wrongly been described as works of social criticism by many a reader and critic. Hedayat would have been adjudged a great writer on the basis of his works of critical realism alone. But the much broader dimensions of this other category, and his profound personal involvement in the ontological and psychological issues which they raise, have inevitably identified him with this group of his works. It is here, rather than in his critiques of real life in society, that the writer is personally involved, and does his shouting. For in such works, though the cultural context is unavoidably Iranian, the author is dealing with problems, issues and inner experiences which know no boundaries in time or space.

THE 19405

The shift of emphasis in the 19408 from romantic nationalism to social criticism in Persian literature, much like its counterpart in politics, was determined by the force of outside intervention. It seems a safe conjecture that, had the country been occupied by the Axis in place of the Allies, romantic nationalism, which in the late 1930s had strengthened its hold on both state and society, would have come into its own. Many of those who filled the ranks of the Tudeh party would have packed the local Nazi meeting halls, perhaps with greater enthusiasm, and many of its intellectuals, writers, poets and journalists would have supplied the apposite literature. Nur al-Din Kiyanuri, who joined the Tudeh party at

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Sadeq Hedayat

judgement neither on the men, nor on the nation to which they belong, if only because the pattern is familiar from other times and places. On the contrary, it is to draw attention to the basic domestic issues beneath the radical change in politics and literature after the arrival of the Allies, which could have fitted either of those ideological cloaks with equal ease. These were antiimperialist sentiments, Aryarust national self-consciousness, the old sense of shame about underdevelopment, and the zest for social involvement and participation, the urge to be subject rather than object, which was the general perception of 'freedom'. And they would have been no less satisfied by a Nazi revolution. As it happened, it was the Allies who came.

The upshot of the argument is that there was not much change in the basic elements of romantic nationalism and social criticism in the 1940s as compared with the preceding period. But there was a radical change in appearances, that is in how ideas were expressed, which had its own independent impact on the form and content of literature. For example, the attack on Islam continued unabated, but this time the guise of radical progressive ideas and programmes was preferred to the more deep-seated form of nostalgic glorifications of pre-Islamic Persia. Likewise, Europeanism became an even stronger outlook and sentiment than before, but its favourite model began to change from France and Germany to Soviet Russia. In the same vein - except in the case of Jamalzadeh, who was writing in Geneva largely unperturbed by these domestic Iranian developments - literary social criticism lost Hedayat's realistic detachment, and Hejazi's detached idealism, and became a vehicle for overt manifestations of political dissent.

Much of this was carried out through literature in its broader sense, that is, essayism, journalism and pamphleteering, rather than prose fiction and poetry. The freedom of expression and publication resulted in an explosion of published material, largely attacking the sins of the defunct dictatorship, of which literature in its specific sense had but a small share. Bozorg Alavi's romantic epic about fifty-three Marxists in Reza Shah's jail is one of the best and, considering the political atmosphere, most moderate representatives of that broader political literature. In the collection of short stories he published in the same year, Prison Notes, much

membership of the leading elite of the Tudeh party. That, however, is a general peculiarity of Alavi and his works, as we have seen.

Hedayat's Haji Aqa (1945), on the other hand, is an attempt by a politically plain and uncalculating writer, with no claim to ideological commitment or political activity, who has been swept by the tides of hopeful political currents. Consequently, and despite his use of a few well-known ideological terms and allusions, the work lacks ideological depth and authenticity. In fact, the only absolutely genuine political aspect of this novel, and one which is close to Hedayat's own heart, is the scathing attack on Reza Shah and his regime (see Chapter 10). This finds expression once again in his The Morvari Cannon (1947), as also in one or two unimpressive fables. Far from being a contribution to literary politics, The Morvari Cannon is an explosion of combined anti-political, anti-religious, as well as ontological anger and indignation, a synthesis for which there is no other example in his works (see Chapter 11).

Ideological literature, therefore, was to develop gradually and largely to the exclusion of the old guard. It was the new generation who began to write prose, poetry and criticism which increasingly began to resemble the ideological aspirations of the New Man. But even that had to take time. For, putting aside the Tudeh intellectual Ehsan Tabari's direct borrowings from Soviet guidebooks to literary criticism, there was still little in the new literature which was authentically Marxist-Leninist. Jalal Al-e Ahmad's From Our Suffering might be an exception to the rule, but, even in this case, the author's own later description of it as a social realist work is more indicative of the vagueness of his own ideas regarding the rules and requirements of that school.

It was when the Tudeh party split in 1948, and was banned in the following year, that theoretical Soviet Marxism began to dominate its politics and literature. The young modernist poets - Shamlu, Akhavan, Kasra'i, Ebtehaj, and others - took to the field to sing hopeful hymns about the imminent recovery of the promised land, in the language and paradigm which they had been taught by Nima. That is also when Bahar died, Alavi left the country and wrote no more fiction, while Jamalzadeh carried on

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Hedayat and modern Persian literature

15

16

Sadeq Hedayat

Khanlary gave up poetry altogether, and AI-e Ahmad was still a promising writer of hazy prospects. This is also when Hedayat became disillusioned with the Tudeh party, vehemently attacked Tabari in a fit of suicidal fury, turned almost every power centre against himself, and took his own life early in 1951 (see Chapters 12 and 13).

Hedayat's life and works have been subjected to description and appraisal in various languages, although nowhere has this been done comprehensively. This study reviews the whole of his life and works their interconnections, their relations to literary, cultural

,

and social developments of the period, and their impact on the Iranian intellectual community for decades after his death. The book also classifies Hedayat's fictional works into four groups which, respectively, reflect his existential, ontological and psychological beliefs and experiences; display his critical realism in portraying the lives of common Iranians; reveal his romantic nationalism; and show his ability in writing satire. There is no denying, however, that elements of all these four categories exist in most of his works. Furthermore, and unlike many previous studies, the present study does not view Hedayat either as an Eastern or as a Western writer, but as one who wrote both on parochial and universal subjects, and was himself subject to both Eastern and Western influences in his upbringing and intellectual development. It is precisely these qualities which have provided Hedayat with the unique position that he enjoys among modern Iranian writers.

2

EARLY YEARS

Sadeq Hedayat was born in February 1903, seven years after the assassination of Naser al-Din Shah, and two years before the onset of the Constitutional Revolution. He was six when the revolutionaries captured Tehran, fifteen when the First World War ended, eighteen when the 1921 coup took place, and twenty-thr~e when Reza Khan founded the Pahlavi state and dynasty. Rapid changes in politics, literature and society occurred in these two decades, and left their mark on Hedayat and his works.

He was born into an influential and well-to-do Divani family, the Diuani being somewhat comparable to the Mandarin class in Chinese society, although considerably less formalized than the latter. The founder of the Hedayat clan was Rezaqoli Khan, a notable poet and distinguished historian of letters, who flourished in the first seven decades of the nineteenth century. He was entitled Laleb Bashi (or Master Tutor) on account of his tutorship of royal children, and he adopted the pen-name Hedayat (Guidance) in his poetry, which has suf connotations. Rezaqoli Khan produced a number of important works, of which the voluminous Majma' al-Fusaha (a history of Persian poetry) is justly famous, and an important source of later works and commentaries on the subject. He was a descendant of Kamal Khojandi, a poet of note, and a contemporary of Hafez.1

Rezaqoli Khan's descendants became more or less important men of politics, government and letters in Qajar and Pahlavi Iran. He had two sons. One of these, Mokhber al-Dowleh, was minister of education. the other. Naiver al-Molk, minister of science. Of the