"In my opinion my life is as much unnatural, vague and impossible as the pattern on this pen that I am writing with. It looks as an insane and obsessive painter has painted the pattern of this pen. Often when I look at this pattern, it seems familiar . It might be caused by this pattern… maybe this pattern drives me to write."
I was born to an aristocratic family and was educated at the Lycée Français (French high school) in Tehran. In 1925, I was lucky enough to be among a selections of few students who travelled to Europe to continue their studies. There, I initially pursued dentistry before giving this up for engineering.
After four years in France and Belgium, I returned to Iran where I held various jobs for short periods.
I subsequently devoted My whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore. The works of Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka intrigued me the most. During My short literary life span, I published a substantial number of short stories and novelettes, two historical dramas, a play, a travelogue, and a collection of satirical parodies and sketches.
My writings also include numerous literary criticisms, studies in Persian folklore, and many translations from Middle Persian and French. They have credited with having brought Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing.
In my latter years, feeling the socio-political problems of the time, I started attacking the two major causes of Iran’s decimation, the monarchy and the clergy, and through my stories I tried to impute the deafness and blindness of the nation to the abuses of these two major powers. Feeling alienated by everyone around me, specially by my peers, my last published work, The Message of Kafka, bespeaks melancholy, desperation and a sense of doom experienced only by those subjected to discrimination and repression.
my most enduring work is the short novel The Blind Owl of 1937. It has been called "one of the most important literary works in the Persian language" (S. A. Quidsu).
I ended my life by gassing myself and they buried me in the Père Lachaise.
