(Reza-Quli Khan’s pen-name, Hidayat or “guide,” was the origin of the family name.) Technocrats and advisors to the government were numerous in the Hidayat family. His great-grandfather, Reza-Quli Khan (1800–72), was a tutor at the Qajar court and the author of a memoir describing Persian poets. Hidayat grew up in a prominent family that had been at the center of intellectual life since the nineteenth century. Sadiq Hidayat (1903–51 also spelled Sadegh Hedayat) spent most of his career at the periphery, exerting only an indirect influence on Iranian culture, but he ended up the most powerful literary voice of his generation. Narrated sometimes in realistic terms, sometimes in dreamlike fantasy, the two-part novella centers on two accounts of a woman’s death, in one account the narrator is a painter in the other, an invalid with an estranged wife.Įvents in History at the Time of the Novella A novella set in Iran in the city of Rayy (south of today’s Tehran) at an undefined historical moment published in Persian (as Buf-i kur) in 1936–37, in English in 1957.
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