This entry looks at the life and work of the Iranian pioneering modernist writer Sadegh Hedayat in the hope of finding out how the city, culture, and folklore influenced him and how he influenced them in turn. Hedayat’s life and work was presumably not irrelevant to the city, and there is evidence to support that both himself and his writings are connected with different urban spaces – mainly Tehran, Isfahan, Paris – and cultures as well as with their political aspects. These connections are more salient in his realist and satirical works in which he takes critical perspectives on the city, mostly on its cultural, social, and political aspects. It turns out that Hedayat looked at culture, worldviews, beliefs, monuments, etc., with a skeptical and critical lens at the same time as he maintained his relation with them and was a part of them.
