Sadegh Hedayat Pioneer as an Iranian literature

Sadegh Hedayat is one of the most renowned contemporary writers whose various works are discussed by many literary critics. With regard to the abundance of mood disorders among the artists and, life and death of Hedayat, number and time of creation of his works, this hypothesis that Hedayat suffered from a bipolar mood disorder is studied in the descriptive psychiatry framework. It was shown that besides full blown depressive episodes and two documented attempted suicides (۱۹۲۸ and ۱۹۵۱, the second one led to his death), Hedayat was generally known as a jovial, humorist, lively, and exaggeratedly generous man. It was found out that the rate of creation of his ۶۶ literary works did not follow a steady or monotonous course. Instead, during hypomanic phases he wrote abundantly, but during depressive phases he had no literary creation. In times between, when in a normal mood, he wrote one or two stories in a year. In the three years preceding his completed suicide (۱۹۵۱), he did not write at all and even tore the manuscripts of his unpublished works to pieces some days before suicide. His short story "The Case of Turkish (rock) Salt" is a humorous and satirical story is collected in Tittle-tattle alongside with five more short stories. The narrator of the story explains the history of human civilization and evolution based on his own perspective. “The Case of Turkish Salt” is not among his best-known stories, yet it can be employed to facilitate a deeper understanding of Hedayat. Rereading and exploring the story illustrates that Sadegh Hedayat was acquainted with the writings on the subject of history of man's civilization and evolution, and his materialist attitudes towards the subject are similar to those of Freud and Will Durant. This paper studies linguistic characteristics of bipolar mood disorder in Sadegh Hedayat’s letters. It attempts to explore the possibility of diagnosing bipolar disorder through qualitative analysis of text. The personal letters of Iranian author Sadegh Hedayat addressed to Shahid Nouraie are studied.

Keywords:

Sadegh Hedayat , Bipolar mood disorder , Semantic field , materialism.