Behazin (Bihāḍīn), born Maḥmūd Iʿtimādzāda (1915-2006) in Rasht, was a translator, writer, editor, and communist activist. He was an active member of the Tudeh, a communist party, throughout his adult life and helped introduce some key Western texts to Persian readers. After studies at Dār al-Funūn in Tehran, he was sent to France in 1932 to study engineering as a scholarship student, where he became familiar with writers and thinkers such as Honoré de Balzac and Romain Rolland, whose works he would later translate. In 1938 he returned