In these, Hedayat greatly enriched Persian prose and influenced younger writers through his use of folk expressions. He also wrote a number of critical articles and translated the works of leading European authors, Chekhov and Jean-Paul Sartre among them. He began to study history, beginning with the Sāsānian period (224–651) and the Pahlavi, or Middle Persian, language, and he used this study in later fiction. In 1936–37 he went to Bombay (now Mumbai) to live in the Parsi Zoroastrian community there, in order to further his knowledge of the ancient Iranian religion.