Where does Lovecraft take place? Cthulhu tattoo: outrageous sketches with a sea monster

“Fear is the oldest and strongest of human feelings,
and the most ancient and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown.”
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, in a certain sense, turned out to be more fortunate than many other writers. Of course, this is not about success in the field of book publishing: during the life of Lovecraft, only one of his major works went into print, and the stories, although they were published, were in cheap magazines, where they published just about anyone. And not about a bright life rich in outstanding events: that at the beginning of the 20th century, that today few people can be impressed by moving from one house to another if they are at a distance of several tens of meters, right? And the trip from New England to Quebec is somehow not up to the milestone ...

Young Lovecraft, dressed according to the then children's fashion, - both boys and girls under the age of five were dressed up in approximately the same way.

However, Lovecraft achieved something more. A man who has been willingly amazed at various mysteries (more often imaginary than real) all his life, turned his biography and work into a single “Lovecraft phenomenon” - causing, if not amazement, then at least bewilderment. Before us appears quite a contradictory personality. A homebody who enthusiastically talks about deadly journeys and terrifying unknown spaces. A dense, terry xenophobe - who, however, does not adhere to these declared principles in real interaction with people. Virtually unknown during his lifetime - and all of a sudden became incredibly popular after his death ... Let's take a closer look at the horror classic.

Lovecraft is nine years old. His father had already died in a psychiatric hospital. His mother is still alive and in her right mind. And he himself has nightmares about the Lang Plateau

LIBRARY AND TELESCOPE

“He was a tall, thin and fair-haired youth, with serious eyes, a little stooped, dressed with slight casualness and gave the impression of a not very attractive, awkward, but quite harmless young man.”
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"

On August 20, 1890, a boy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the only and, by then standards, late child of the traveling jeweler Winfield Scott Lovecraft and his wife Sarah Susan Phillips. Both Winfield and Sarah came from old American families settled in the New World since the time of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that is, since 1630. Belonging to the descendants of the first settlers was very honorable. This "aristocratic" origin, apparently, formed the elitist and by no means tolerant views of the writer.

“All of them turned out to be people of mixed blood, extremely low mental development, and even with mental disabilities.
Typical Lovecraftian description of dark cultists

Whipple Van Buren Phillips, Howard Lovecraft's grandfather, liked to tell his grandson gothic horror stories when he was in the mood

In the big family house at number 454 Angell Street, the birth of the offspring was not only his parents, but also his mother's sisters, Lillian Delora and Annie Emeline, who lived there, and Howard's grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, a businessman, inventor and bookworm (who collected for his life, by the way, the largest library in Providence - and possibly in all of Rhode Island); they helped Howard's parents from the start.

The help of relatives was very helpful. Especially three years later, when Winfield Scott had to be urgently hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Providence - Butler Hospital - in a state of acute psychosis. Over the next five years, no matter how doctors tried to improve the condition of Lovecraft Sr., things went from bad to worse - and in 1898, at the age of only forty-five, Howard's father died of nervous exhaustion.

Of course, surrounded by four loving adults, Howard did not go unnoticed. The greatest contribution to his upbringing was made by Whipple Van Buren, who in every possible way encouraged the intellectual development of his grandson. Fortunately, he grew up as a child prodigy: he read classics and Arabic tales avidly, from the age of six he began to write poetry and stories. Young Lovecraft also became familiar with gothic prose from early childhood: not only were there enough such books in the home library, but also his grandfather, who was undoubtedly a creative person, but, unfortunately, did not write down his works, regularly told his grandson gloomy, mysterious and exciting stories.

The first literary significant story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft was "The Beast in the Cave", written at the age of 15 - in 1905.

Alas, an enviable intellect was accompanied by extremely poor health. The boy was constantly ill, and if until the age of eight he could still somehow go to school, albeit with large gaps, then after that he fell ill for a whole year and was eventually expelled. However, it cannot be said that he lost time - thanks to his grandfather, Howard became interested in history, chemistry and especially astronomy, and even began to publish The Scientific Gazette and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, dedicated to his scientific research.

Although at first Lovecraft's articles were quite childish, more serious publications soon noticed him. So, already in 1906, his article on astronomy was published by The Providence Sunday Journal. Howard went on to become a regular astronomical columnist for The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner. And then other publications became interested in his scientific articles: The Providence Tribune, The Providence Evening News, The Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News.

Howard's other problem was severe sleep disturbances. Nightmares, nocturnal paralysis (a condition in which a person wakes up before he is able to move, or falls asleep later than the muscles are completely relaxed. Often accompanied by irrational horror, suffocation, disorientation in space, fantastic visions), hallucinations (like vile winged creatures , who carried the boy to the Lang plateau, or appeared from the thickness of the fetid waters of Dagon) - all this extremely exhausted the already weak organism. Time after time, Lovecraft woke up in a panic with a pounding heart.

In 1904, a new misfortune struck the Lovecraft-Phillips family - the death of grandfather Whipple Van Buren. Financial affairs fell into complete disarray, and Howard and his mother were forced to move into a small apartment on the same street - 598 Angell Street.

The loss of a grandfather home- the place where he felt at least somehow protected from the frightening world - hit Lovecraft painfully. He began to think about suicide. However, after a while he was able to pull himself together and even go to new school- Hope High School. With school, Howard was unexpectedly lucky - both with classmates, and especially with teachers who encouraged his scientific interests. However, poor health still failed, and in 1908, after a severe nervous breakdown, Lovecraft was forced to leave school without receiving a diploma of secondary education. Howard was frankly ashamed of this detail of his biography: sometimes he hushed it up, sometimes he told an outright lie.

It did not work out with formal education further - an attempt to enter Brown University failed. It seemed that the future did not bode well at all, so Lovecraft turned to a reclusive lifestyle and hardly left the house for the next five years.

PUBLIC PUBLIC

The Argosy - the oldest pulp magazine

Pulp magazines (from the English pulp - recycled pulp and low-quality cheap paper made from it), with all the neglect of them by highbrow intellectuals, actually performed a very important function. They made it possible to read literature - albeit not the best - for those who were not able to pay dearly for it. Workers and employees on a penny salary who wanted to relax after work. Children and teenagers, who had even less money - and food for the imagination was required. Or just people who had to go somewhere or wait a long time for someone: you can’t take a book with you, it’s expensive, but a one-time magazine is fine.

The first American pulp magazine was The Argosy (originally called Golden Argosy), which began publication on December 2, 1882 and ran until 1978. Initially, it was aimed at children, published once a week and cost five cents, but it soon became clear that such a publishing policy did not pay off. So since 1894, the magazine became a monthly and a dime and began to publish detective stories, mysticism, westerns, gothic, stories about travelers, pirates, gold diggers ... Exactly what you need to get distracted and have fun.

Others followed The Argosy: The Popular Magazine, Adventure, All-Story, Blue Book, Top-Notch, Short Story, Cavalier… In the first decade of the 20th century, their number was already dozens - and they began to actively change (and form) mass culture.

SALVATION FOR THE HERMIT

“Changes happened during sleep. I cannot remember in detail how it all happened, because my sleep, being restless and full of various visions, nevertheless turned out to be quite long. When I woke up, I found that I was half sucked into the slimy surface of a disgusting black bog, which stretched around me in monotonous undulations as far as the eye could see.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft "Dagon"

Describing the next period of Lovecraft's life, it is extremely difficult to resist the feeling that events do not take place at the beginning of the 20th century, but a century later. Indeed, imagine this picture. An eighteen-year-old young man, whose all interests at that time were astronomy and literature, lives with his mother in a small apartment, practically does not communicate with anyone and only reads, reads ... Something is missing to complete the image, isn't it? Active correspondence on Facebook or Vkontakte there, flamboyant posts that generate kilometer-long feeds of comments, with massive friend-off-friends, swearing and likes? Well, why is not enough - and it was too!

Issue of The Argosy where Frederick Jackson's story was published

Since by that time not only Mark Zuckerberg, but even his parents had not yet been born, the place of Facebook was taken by the pulp magazine for teenagers The Argosy - where in 1913 the story of Frederick Jackson that caught Lovecraft's eyes was published. Why did he dislike the completely ordinary love story(at that time there were more than enough of them in pulp magazines), it's hard to say, but Howard wrote an extremely emotional letter to the editor, in which he rattled Jackson's work to smithereens. Naturally, Jackson's fans reared up, and a long, furious correspondence began on the pages of the magazine, into which many people gradually became involved. Including Edward Daas, who then headed the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), this organization united young American authors who published their own magazines and wrote in them.

Looking closely at Lovecraft during the discussion, Daas invited him to join UAPA. Lovecraft agreed and began publishing The Conservative magazine (a total of 13 issues were published in 1915-1923), where he published his poems, articles and essays. The most important thing is that he (apparently, having felt the demand) was finally able to leave the house and live a much more full-blooded life: surrounded by people, and not just books.

The books were fine, though. Lovecraft returned to writing stories: in 1917, The Crypt and Dagon were published, then Memoirs of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Polaris, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, The Reincarnation of Juan Romero ... Tormenting him as a child Lovecraft's nightmares were melted down into fantastic works - fortunately, with such an anamnesis, there was no shortage of material.

Apparently, social activity - writers' conferences, meetings with colleagues and readers, copious correspondence with numerous addressees - helped Lovecraft to suffer another blow. In 1919, after years of depression, his mother's condition deteriorated sharply. Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft was hospitalized in the same Butler Hospital, where at one time they unsuccessfully tried to cure her husband. Her condition was, however, somewhat better - at least she could write letters to her relatives, and mother and son continued to maintain close relations until the death of Sarah Susan in 1921.

Sonya Green - writer, publisher and just a beauty

It is difficult to say what would have happened to Lovecraft - he experienced the death of his mother hard - if he had not had an outlet in the form of various writing events where they were waiting for him. A few weeks later he went to Boston for a conference of amateur journalists - and there he met Sonia Haft Green. Successful hat shop owner, self-made woman, widowed five years ago after a severe bad marriage, she was also a pulp writer, amateur publisher, and sponsor of several fanzines. Common literary interests brought Howard and Sonya closer, and on March 3, 1924 they got married.

Lovecraft's aunts did not approve of his novel - therefore they became aware of the wedding of Howard and Sonya only after the fact

Sonya Green - nee Shafirkina, daughter of Simon and Rakhil Shafirkin from the city of Ichnya, Chernihiv province - by her origin did not seem to fall into the category of “correct”, “our own”, so important for Lovecraft - at least judging by his works. However, when theoretical declarations and real life clash, most often the advantage is not on the side of declarations. Meeting a smart and charming lady pushed Howard's mentality into the background ... but only for a while.

ROUNDTRIP

“Gilman settled in ancient Arkham, where time seemed to stand still and people live only in legends. Here, peaked roofs rise to the sky in silent rivalry; below them, in dusty attics, Arkham witches hid from the persecution of the Royal Guard in colonial times.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Dreams in the Witch's House

At first, the marriage of Howard and Sonya was successful. The newlyweds moved to New York, where Lovecraft joined a group of writers and intellectuals, informally called the Kalem Club. He began to publish in the pulp magazine Weird Tales: editor Edwin Bird published many of Lovecraft's stories, despite criticism from some readers. Finally, Sonya took care of Howard's health - and her husband, previously painfully thin, thanks to his wife's culinary talents, recovered pretty well.

Then things got worse. Sonya left for Cleveland, trying to improve the business of her company - but the bank, where she kept her savings, went bankrupt. In addition, she also fell ill - so, in theory, Lovecraft was supposed to provide financial support for the family. However, he had absolutely no habit of systematic work, and he lacked professional skills.

At the same time, Lovecraft could reject even very profitable working options if they were associated with at least some inconvenience for him. So, he was offered a job as an editor at Weird Tales - but for this he had to move to Chicago. “Just imagine what a tragedy this move would have resulted in for an old ruin like me,” Howard, 34, mournfully replied.

While sick Sonya traveled around the States, trying to earn money, Lovecraft found himself in New York, more and more dissatisfied with this city every day. He (living on the money that his wife managed to send him) was forced to move into an apartment on Clinton Street in Brooklyn, where there were many emigrants who belonged to different nationalities and race, which both pissed off Howard and horrified him. It was there that he began to write "The Call of Cthulhu" - one of his most famous works about a cruel deity worshiped by disgusting sectarians and who is able to send deadly nightmares to people (and just eat them).

Lovecraft rated the Cthulhu story as rather average, and the editor of Weird Tales (Furnsworth Wright had become by that time) initially rejected it altogether - and published it only when one of Lovecraft's friends lied that Howard would send the work to another magazine. But The Call of Cthulhu was described by Robert Howard with great flattering words: “A masterpiece that I am sure will live on as one of the highest achievements of literature ... Lovecraft occupies a unique position in literary world; it has taken over, in every way, worlds beyond our paltry ken."

Admittedly, at least in regard to horror literature, Robert Howard was right.

Of course, Lovecraft could not stand such a life for a long time - and returned to his native Providence. His marriage, in fact, quietly fell apart, but the matter never came to an official divorce. He never saw Sonya again. And Providence - along with nearby Salem - became the prototype of Arkham, Lovecraft's most famous city.

YOUR NOT-OWN

Father Ivanitsky can be found at Arkham Cemetery or in the Secret Society of Dagon. Very useful ally - saves from the curse

As a rule, when it comes to xenophobes, you can define them quite clearly. For example, the author is an anti-Semite. Or a white racist. Or black... But not so with Lovecraft. His xenophobia did not fetter himself with rigid frameworks - why bother with trifles? Indians, Eskimos, Negroes, Egyptians, Hindus - everything, literally all of them, with the help of their nightmarish rituals, are going to destroy civilization, humanity and the Earth!

However, there were people who, not being WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant - white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, that is, according to the then concepts, the only full-fledged and one hundred percent Americans) and even Western Europeans, nevertheless did not fall into the category of “alien” for the writer . These are Poles.

The fact is that the turbulent history and not always prosperous economic situation of Poland in the 19th century led to mass emigration abroad - primarily to the United States. There were quite a few representatives of the Polish diaspora in New England, where Providence is located. And the Poles, familiar from childhood, apparently, did not embarrass the quivering soul of Howard Phillips. From which one can draw a not particularly original conclusion “the more you know, the less you are afraid.” And playing in board game"The Arkham Horror", you can take the local priest, Ivanitsky's father, as an ally.

After many misadventures, Sonia Green went to California, where she married a second time - to Dr. Davis from Los Angeles (and while Lovecraft was still alive, which was generally considered a serious crime), then she was widowed again. Wrote a memoir, The Private Life of Lovecraft, under the name Sonia Davis. And lived in the end for quite a long time and successful life She died in 1972 at the age of 89.

August Derleth at his workplace

The next few years were the most fruitful for Lovecraft's work. He traveled a lot (mainly in New England, but not only - he also traveled to Quebec, Philadelphia, Charleston, St. Augustine), gained impressions - and, of course, wrote. Works from this time period are sometimes referred to as "Lovecraft's older texts": they include the novels The Ridges of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the short stories and novellas The Color from Other Worlds, The Dunwich Horror, The Silver key", "Shadow from timelessness", "Whisperer in the Dark". In addition to works of art, at the same time, many articles were published from his pen on the most different topics: from politics to architecture, from economics to philosophy. Lovecraft also maintained an extensive correspondence both with old friends like Robert Bloch and with young authors (who included, for example, August Derleth and Fritz Leiber).

According to his biographer Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft wrote about 100,000 letters during his lifetime (of which only a fifth has survived). If so, he set an absolute record among all people who have ever lived on Earth. Other biographers, however, believe that de Camp's figures are grossly inflated and Lovecraft wrote only about 30,000 letters. However, even this number means that he is in second place - after Voltaire.

Unfortunately, for all creative success The financial affairs of the writer were getting worse. He published little and rarely, the inheritance - on which he mostly lived - ended. Lovecraft was forced to move into a small house with one of his aunts. Health problems caused by regular malnutrition (he often went hungry to save money on paper and envelopes for correspondence) were exacerbated by the depression that Lovecraft fell into after the suicide of one of his closest friends, Robert Howard. As a result, in early 1937, doctors diagnosed him with intestinal cancer - by that time it had already developed to a state with which medicine could not do anything. On March 15, 1937, Lovecraft passed away.

Lovecraft's tombstone, delivered thanks to his fans

Lovecraft family burial

Initially, Lovecraft did not have a separate tombstone - his name and surname were written on the parental monument. However, when his works became popular, it seemed to the fans that this was not enough. So they raised money and in 1977 set up a separate headstone for their favorite writer in the same cemetery. On it - in addition to the name and two dates - the phrase I am Providence is written (this is not a self-epitaph, but simply a quote from one of his letters). Such a play on words, literally translated into Russian, means both “I am Providence”, and “I am Providence”, “I am God's providence”. Elegant, pathetic and with a slight touch of mystery - exactly as we would expect from Lovecraft.

"DO NOT LEAVE THE ROOM, DO NOT MAKE A MISTAKE"

“We live on a quiet island of ignorance in the middle of the dark sea of infinity, and we should not swim long distances at all. The sciences, each pulling in its own direction, have hitherto done us little harm; however, the day will come when the unification of hitherto scattered fragments of knowledge will open before us such terrifying views of reality that we will either lose our minds from what we have seen, or we will try to hide from this destructive enlightenment in the peace and security of the new Middle Ages.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Usually, on the death of a person, his biography ends. But if this were the case with Lovecraft, we would hardly remember the palpator of the 1920s and 1930s. Thousands of them. And a book published in his lifetime (“The Shadow over Innsmouth” was released in 1936 in Pennsylvania) would also hardly have changed the situation.

Howard Lovecraft books published by Arkham House

But when his executors and biographers got to the literary legacy of Lovecraft, the alignment changed dramatically. First of all, of course, thanks to August Derleth (an average science fiction writer, but a brilliant advertiser and book publisher), who created the Arkham House publishing house in 1939 specifically for publishing Lovecraftian works - an extremely rare case in this industry.

August Derleth, an ardent admirer of Lovecraft, did his best to contribute to the publication of his works during his lifetime. However, Lovecraft himself regularly interfered with him: he refused to provide what was written, declared that he had outlived himself as an author, and so on. But from the moment when Derleth was admitted to the posthumous archives without restrictions, everything began to spin - and so far, although eighty years have passed, it continues to gain momentum.

It seems that everything that Lovecraft wrote and that has survived was published (including unfinished works, multi-volume editions of letters and inter-author projects). Of course, not only Arkham House took part in this - other publishing houses also pulled up. Based on the works, about fifty films and anime were shot (starting with The Enchanted Castle in 1963 - he also laid the foundation for the fashion for Lovecraft plus X crossovers, in this case plus Edgar Poe). There are also about fifty computer games different genres and a little less than thirty - desktop. The amount of diverse fanart is generally uncountable. And there is no sign that we will soon forget Cthulhu, Arkham and the Lang Plateau.

Lovecraft Square in Providence

Why did Lovecraft, who was not particularly famous during his lifetime, become so popular after his death? We dare to offer a variant of the answer - although it is rather unpleasant for us. In short, Lovecraft was ahead of his time. True, this is usually said in relation to some scientific discoveries or other ingenious insights, but let's be honest: our being consists by no means only of outstanding achievements of the past.

Recall the standard scheme of Lovecraftian works: they seemed to live normally, but they stuck their heads where they didn’t need to or discovered what they didn’t need - and because of this, right now, someone else’s evil is breaking into the world, so terrible that it can’t even be described. Moral: and there was nothing to poke around and open, knowledge multiplies not only grief, but also downright chthonic horror.

For people of the late XX - early XXI century, such a subgenre of horror has become a real gift. Because - well, let's be honest with ourselves. We lock ourselves away from direct life in the house of virtual reality and remote communication. We involuntarily tense up if there are strangers next to us - that is, people who differ from us in appearance, clothing or religion. Our money is spent on shutting out the rest of humanity, not on space exploration, but we don't mind. We enthusiastically spread horror stories like a terrible thousand tentacles... GMOs that change us and drink bullshit and charged water. Let us remember at least about the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar - how many representatives of enlightened mankind believed in this secret knowledge, which would look great under the same cover with stories about Yog-Sothoth, Dagon and Nyarlathotep!

It all looks rather pathetic. And in order to ennoble the fear of another synthesized mold or Dolly the sheep, pathos is needed, the more the better. That's what Lovecraft showered us with a generous hand! "Monstrous deities capable of destroying the universe, and their awe-inspiring and disgusting cults" - this sounds much better than "I'm afraid of Vasya and genetically modified corn." Not so ashamed.

Thank you Howard Phillips. You have become a good mirror for us. Well, that the reflection could be better - it's true. And somehow we have to deal with this ourselves.

Everything, however, is not so simple. Lovecraft was made of contradictions. He was known as a racist and anti-Semite - but he married a Jewess and did not find out from his friends what blood they were. He was an unsociable gloomy misanthrope - but dozens of friends considered him a good-natured and disinterested person. He believed in the myth of the Aryans and admired the "loud battle cry of a blue-eyed, light-bearded warrior," but he himself once shot a squirrel and was so consumed by remorse that he swore never to hunt again.

Grim and honest, naive and shrewd, caustic and charming, Lovecraft was the epitome of contradiction. Only such a person could create the most bizarre literary universe.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in the American town of Providence in the family of a jewelry salesman Winfield Scott. When Howard was very young, Winfield went crazy and went to a psychiatric hospital, where he spent the rest of his days. The future writer and his mother were taken in by grandfather Whipple van Buuren Phillips, a venture capitalist and land speculator. Lovecraft's childhood was spent in his chaotically built three-story wooden house, surrounded by vast lands, well-groomed avenues, trees, an orchard, a fountain and a small stable.

Brown-eyed and golden-haired, Howard was a kid not only charming, but also developed beyond his years: by three he had learned to read, and at four he could write. Whipple's grandfather had the largest library in the city, and from childhood the boy plunged into the world of Gothic prose and ancient literature. But main love became "Tales of 1001 Nights". Five-year-old Lovecraft fell in love with the book and longed to become an Arab. One of the adults came up with the nickname Abdul Alhazred for him: either in honor of distant relatives named Hazard, or because of the boy's love of reading - all-has-read. The nickname became one of his pseudonyms, and later Abdul became one of Lovecraft's characters. It was this mad Arab who wrote the Necronomicon.

Lovecraft was generally an extremely impressionable boy. On another occasion, he became interested in ancient Rome, took the pseudonym Lucius Valerius Messala, built altars to Pan, Apollo and Athena near the house, and looked out for dryads and satyrs in twilight forests and fields. Imaginary dryads and books replaced the boy's friends. He did not communicate with the surrounding children, but he liked to unexpectedly jump out from behind the bushes. Their plotless games seemed meaningless to Howard, and he invented his own - for example, setting fire to the grass in a neighboring field.

From the age of six, Lovecraft began to have nightmares. In his dreams, hymenoptera and thorn-tailed monsters (Lovecraft called them “night beasts”) flew to him, grabbed him by the stomach, carried him away into a gray void and dumped him on the mountains.

Howard's subconscious obviously borrowed the images of monsters from Dore's engravings for Paradise Lost, and the creatures themselves from dreams soon flew to the pages of his stories.

In 1898, Howard's father died in a hospital. He left his son a fairly decent inheritance and his old-fashioned wardrobe: black jackets and waistcoats, striped trousers, a collection of ascot ties and a cane with a silver head. This extravagant attire later became part of the image of Howard himself.

Later, Lovecraft's grandfather also died, and the family was forced to move to more modest apartments. These events greatly crippled the young man, and in 1908 he had a nervous breakdown, because of which he left school. The writer never received a secondary education.

At the age of 14, Lovecraft wrote his first serious work - the story "The Beast in the Cave" - about a man who fights in the darkness of a gloomy cave with a huge white monkey. In the finale, it turns out that the creature was a man who had long lost his human appearance. In this story, the features of the Lovecraftian style are already visible: a craving for riddles without answers, a pretentiously detached manner of narration, sincerity on the verge of naivety. A little later, having already left school, the young man discovered Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle. Thanks to the stories about Holmes, Lovecraft even became friends with several neighborhood boys. They organized the "Providence Detective Agency", acquiring a charter, tin badges, flashlights and string handcuffs. They even had weapons. The boy's ten-year-old friends carried pistols and water pistols with them, and Inspector Lovecraft sported his father's combat revolver.

Lovecraft was determined to become a writer and acquired a used Remington typewriter. He never learned to print on it, until the end of his life he typed text with two index fingers. He also wrote by hand, spending huge sums on cheap current fountain pens. In his youth, his handwriting was clear, but over the years it became illegible. The mother of one of the pen pals somehow seriously mistook Lovecraft's scribbles for Arabic script.

The car was not the only technical innovation that Lovecraft acquired but never mastered. In his youth, he bought a Brownie 2 camera, and later a Kodak, but did not take them with him on trips.

Around 1907, he recorded a couple of songs on an Edison recording machine. On the recording, Lovecraft's deaf tenor reminded him of "the howl of a dying fox terrier." From fright, Howard dropped and broke the record, leaving thoughts of a career as a singer.

While still at school, Lovecraft began publishing popular science newspapers and over time turned this hobby into a way of earning money - albeit a very small one. In 1918, Lovecraft discovered that graphomaniacs were willing to pay him to go over their writings, bringing them into human form. At first, he only corrected spelling errors, but sometimes he rewrote especially neglected stories almost entirely.

Lovecraft became a "literary negro" - ironic, given his wary attitude towards other nationalities. It was this work that became his main paid occupation, bringing in up to three-quarters of his income. Perhaps many of the master's works are still unknown to us simply because they are signed by other people's names.

In 1919, Lovecraft's mother Sarah suffered a nervous attack and ended up in the same hospital where her husband died. Two years later, she was gone. In the summer of 1921, still struck by this news, Howard met at a conference of amateur journalists Sonya Green, a charming Jewess, the daughter of Russian emigrants from near Chernigov. Soon they got married, Lovecraft, who had already begun to publish his stories in Weird Tales magazine, moved in with her in Brooklyn. It looks like things are finally looking up.

In fact, everything was not so rosy. In Howard's career, falls followed ups, he did not like it in noisy New York (once the nationalist Lovecraft had to side by side - oh horror! - with a Syrian). Lovecraft was offered to become the editor of Weird Tales, but for this it was necessary to move to even more noisy Chicago - the provincial Howard could not even think about it. In addition, Sonya became seriously ill, her hat shop went bankrupt, and soon their marriage fell apart. The bleak New York years inspired the writer's stories "Abandoned House", "Nightmare at Red Hook" and "Him", and in 1926 Lovecraft returned to quiet Providence with relief.

The next decade was the most productive of Howard's life. Appeared "Call of Cthulhu", "Ridges of Madness", "Shadow from timelessness" - those stories and stories that have become his hallmarks. They were short works, teeming with unimaginable horrors, mindless entities and cultists - usually of mixed blood and mentally deranged.

Ordinary people, faced with these secrets, turned gray, went crazy and died in terrible agony.

For example, the baudlerist poet Justin Jeffrey (whom Lovecraft borrowed from pen-friend Robert Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian) died in an insane asylum "screaming out loud" - a more inexplicable and macabre fate could be imagined.

At the same time, he continued his famous correspondence with dozens of friends throughout America, among whom was Robert Bloch, the author of Hitchcock's novel Psycho. Lovecraft often wrote letters in tight and completely illegible handwriting on postcards, taking up the entire back of the card and leaving only a couple of square inches for the address. The total volume of Lovecraft's correspondence is estimated at one hundred thousand letters - several times more than his prose heritage.

In 1936, the mother of Robert Howard, his closest pen pal, fell into a coma after an operation. Upon learning that there was no hope, he borrowed a Colt from a friend, got into a car and shot himself. This loss finally crippled Lovecraft. He became depressed, and around the same time he began to develop bowel cancer. Howard Lovecraft outlived his friend by only a few months, emaciated, lost all loved ones, never received recognition and spent his talent on rewriting other people's drafts. The writer did not tell his friends about his illness. Robert Bloch wrote that if he knew about Lovecraft's condition, he would crawl on all fours from Chicago to Rhode Island just to get to his hospital bed.

On the inconspicuous gravestone of Lovecraft, in addition to the name and dates outlining his short life, there is only one modest inscription: “I am Providence” - a declaration of love to the small town in which he was born and died.

Lovecraft owes his posthumous fame to another pen-friend, Augustus Derleth. For several years he tried to attach Lovecraft stories to various publishers, and eventually opened his own. Lovecraft's first posthumous collection was published by Arkham House with a print run of 1,268 copies. Very soon, the small corpus of Lovecraftian texts dried up, but this did not stop Derleth. In 1945, he took several drafts of Lovecraft and, like a mad scientist, sewed them to life with a story “Lurking on the Threshold” - not in Lovecraft's peppy, almost dynamic thriller. Under the joint authorship of Lovecraft and Derleth, several dozen more stories and novellas were published. In fact, these were stories by Derleth, inspired by chaotic notes from Lovecraft's notebook or characters mentioned in passing.

Lovecraft fans love and hate Derleth. On the one hand, he exploited the name of Lovecraft, altering his ideas according to his ideas. Howard wrote about incomprehensible creatures without consciously trying to explain their motives and connections between stories.

Derleth systematized the "Myth of Cthulhu", creating two opposing pantheons - Elder and Old Gods. Such a battle between good and evil would hardly impress Lovecraft: his stories were not dominated by the cosmic confrontation of giant creatures, but by pure and indifferently cruel chaos.

On the other hand, it was Derleth who brought Lovecraft's name to light. By simplifying and even slightly vulgarizing his creative heritage, Derleth helped the world recognize Lovecraft, a crazy innovator who combined horror with science fiction in his stories.

The monstrous world of Lovecraft began to grow like a giant fungus on its own, uniting books of different authors into a single universe. In The Lot of Jerusalem, Stephen King mentions the Mystery of the Worm manuscript from Lovecraftian stories; Borges and Joyce Carol Oates have their own homages to Lovecraft's work; Neil Gaiman in A Study in Emerald Volumes crossed the world of Cthulhu with the stories of Sherlock Holmes that Howard loved so much.

Like it or not, Lovecraft and Derleth, like a cultist and his unreasonable servant, awakened some ancient evil that had previously only accidentally burst into our world through the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce. They created that horror literature that frightens us not with dancing skeletons or the ringing of chains in a Gothic castle, but with something so incredible that the mere thought of it can drive us crazy.

What was Howard Lovecraft afraid of?

On a completely unremarkable day on August 20, 1890, on one of the grains of sand in the boundless ocean of the Universe, filled with such terrible secrets that just thinking about them can drive you crazy, from timeless nothingness, the black abyss of true primary darkness, with a primitive wild cry, Something arose that cannot be rationally described. This creature would have many titles to match his deeds, such as "Father of horror stories of ancient monsters", "Master of horror literature of the twentieth century" and even "Grandpa Theobald", but that day he was called Howard.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft turns 126 in 2016. And although his physical shell sleeps in an eternal sleep, like death, his literary heritage still disturbs the imagination of many modern followers of the Cthulhu cult and many other entertaining characters of his mythology, who became widely known in the post-Soviet space thanks to an Internet meme. A whole sub-genre of horror literature is associated with Lovecraft's name - Lovecraftian horror. People, inspired by this writer, still write literature, music and make films to this day, although the genre has reached its peak in computer games.

If we disassemble Lovecraftian horrors purely in external form, then we are dealing only with monsters of various shapes, which Lovecraft himself briefly characterizes: “In the darkness, perhaps rational entities lurk and, perhaps, entities are hidden beyond the limits of all understanding. These are not witches or sorcerers, not ghosts or goblins that once frightened primitive civilization, but infinitely more powerful entities. According to his mythology, the Earth was once ruled by the Great Old Ones, to which the famous Cthulhu belongs, who were defeated by the Old Gods and sealed deep under water in a dream similar to death. Much later, humanity arose and developed on Earth, which does not even know that in fact it is not the owner of this planet, and one day the Ancients will wake up and in the blink of an eye the entire human race will be destroyed or enslaved. Knowledge about these terrible monsters is stored in different books, for example, known thanks to the film "Evil Dead" Necronomicon. Some especially enterprising people who possess this secret knowledge have already prepared to serve the Ancients, therefore they have founded various cults, sects and circles on which they are engaged in sacrifices in order to awaken their masters as soon as possible. And although not all of Lovecraft's stories are directly inscribed in this mythology, most of them tell about a person's contact with some unimaginably terrible, cosmic and otherworldly creature, which certainly threatens the life of one of the heroes or even all of humanity at once.

Let's take a look at Lovecraft's writing style for which he is so praised. In order for the reader to form an impression of the author's style, consider, for example, a paragraph from his famous "Call of Cthulhu" (The Call of Cthulhu, 1926), in which the climax of the story takes place - the meeting of the sailors with Cthulhu:

“The doorway gaped with darkness that seemed almost material. And indeed, this darkness had a life of its own - in a moment it joyfully rushed out like smoke after centuries of imprisonment, and as it flapped its membranous wings and swam out into the wrinkled distorted sky, the sun began to fade before their eyes. An absolutely unbearable stench rose from the exposed depths, and Hawkins, who had a sharp ear, caught a disgusting squelching sound far below. And then, clumsily rumbling and exuding mucus, It appeared before them and began to squeeze its green jelly-like immensity through the black doorway into the poisoned atmosphere of this crazy city ... The creature defied description - for there is no language suitable for conveying such abysses of screaming timeless madness, such a terrible contradiction to all the laws of matter, energy and cosmic order. A striding, or, more precisely, a waddling mountain peak.”

From this fragment you can see the standard Lovecraftian description of the monster. As you can see, he focuses not on the details of the structure of Cthulhu's body or some of his actions, but on the atmosphere of madness and horror in every word that reigns around such a seemingly ordinary action - the awakening of Cthulhu. Sometimes the writer is very much carried away by his mythology and creates such metaphors that, instead of inspiring awe, will simply cause misunderstanding to the ordinary reader. So, for example, it happens in the story “The Rats in the Walls” (The Rats in the Walls, 1923). The moment is also taken from the climax of the story, in which the hero, traveling through the dungeon of his mansion, hears a sound from a hole in the ground. Here is what the imagination of the protagonist draws:

“Then, from somewhere in this inky, endless depth, came a sound that seemed familiar to me. My black cat rushed there, into the unknown abyss, like a winged Egyptian creature. I did not lag behind either; in a second I heard the terrible sounds with which these devilish rats were making their way to new horrors, preparing to take me to the caves in the very center of the Earth, where the faceless and insane god Nyarlathotep howls in the dark to the incessant music of two bloated idiot flute players.

My flashlight broke, but I kept running. I heard voices, screams and echoes, but all these vile treacherous sounds drowned out. They rose and rose as a stiff, bloated corpse climbs the oily surface of a river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, poisoned sea.

In order to understand who Nyarlathotep is, you need to read Lovecraft's story of the same name (Nyarlathotep, 1920). But even from there it will be impossible to understand what this terrible god has to do with “bloated idiot flute players”, if you do not understand that this is a reference to the legend of the “Hameln Pied Piper”, connected by the writer’s imagination with the image of Nikola Tesla.

The reader has long been accustomed to this form, not to mention modern viewers and gamers. Well, who can be seriously scared by telepathic mushrooms from Pluto, an octopus with a dragon's body, or a luminous shapeless alien? Not particularly impressive is the fact that the reader does not often receive direct descriptions of nightmarish creatures, more often limited to sensations of the presence of some Evil. Many authors before him resorted to a similar trick. Then what is the secret of its popularity and relevance so far? Maybe the writer analyzes the human psyche in detail when in contact with the supernatural, revealing real nightmares that lurk in our subconscious? Also past, although his favorite technique is to portray how the characters go crazy. In general, the idea that a person or even the human psyche can be the center of a work about the supernatural causes his neglect.

So why are you trying to scare us, Mr. Lovecraft? “There is more to a true story of the supernatural than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheet with rattling chains. There must be a perceptible atmosphere of boundless and inexplicable horror before external and unknown forces in it; there should be a hint in it, expressed in earnest, as befits the subject, to the most terrible thought of man - about the terrible and real suspension or complete stop of the action of those immutable laws of Nature, which are our only defense against chaos and demons of beyond space, ”he answers in his Supernatural Horror in the Literature (1927). Thus, it turns out that it is not the monsters themselves that are terrible, but the very fact of their existence in the world of the 19th-20th centuries, which so zealously clung to rationality and common sense.

But is Lovecraft really opposed to scientific progress and is a conservative who wants to return to the mythological past? No, it's not. Even as a child, he was very interested in various sciences, in many of his stories deep knowledge of certain natural sciences is visible. In addition, he was not an adherent of spiritualism and the occult, fashionable in his time, even considering them an obstacle to the depiction of real horror: for them, the phantom world is an ordinary reality and they treat it without much fear, which is why they do not know how to make such an impression as those who see it as an absolute and terrible threat to the natural order.

Then what is the reason for this mindset of the writer? I really want to delve into the personality and biography of Lovecraft himself. It would seem that the answers lie in plain sight: he lived most of his life in a small town, and his parents died in an insane asylum while Howard was still a child. Some psychoanalyst would definitely diagnose him with a neurosis, a fixation, or something like that. But such an approach will lead nowhere, because without understanding the nature of the era in which he lived and which he portrayed in his works, we will not understand either Lovecraft or his work.

The most significant event of his era was the First World War whose results have changed the face of the world. And although Lovecraft did not take part in it and there are no direct references in his stories, he could not but reflect such a significant event for the whole world with his art. So in the story "Polar Star" (Polaris, 1918), the main character's story is based on the story of how one day, looking at the night sky and the Polar Star, he fell asleep and saw a beautiful city made of marble. Since then, he often visited this city in a dream, turning from a simple observer into a full-fledged citizen, interacting with its inhabitants. Once he was sent to the watch tower as sentries to watch the enemies besieging the city and prevent them from getting into the city. However, once on the tower, the narrator was captivated by the spell of the North Star, which whispered magic words into his ear that lulled vigilance. Unable to resist, he fell asleep, seeing in a dream how the enemy was destroying the city close to him. Waking up, he found himself in his house, but since then he was sure that everything that was happening around him was a dream, and his visions were true. This story is based on Lovecraft's own dream, and critic William Fulwiler wrote that his writing was spurred on by feelings of guilt and worthlessness during the war. The writer denied himself the ability to fight, considering himself weak and incapable of enduring difficulties, and preferred to succumb to contemplative dreams. The same weakness will eventually be carried over into subsequent stories, in which the characters inevitably lose to Evil, or even are not able to show any resistance at all.

If in the “North Star” Lovecraft describes more his own feeling from some distant, but so close to him, war, then in the above-mentioned “Nyarlathotep”, the writer, also inspired by a dream, tries to connect social upheavals and the approaching end of the world:

“ A series of political and social upheavals was accompanied by a strange and painful premonition of a terrible physical danger, a danger on a scale and all-encompassing, such as can only be imagined in the worst nightmares. I remember people walking around with pale and worried faces, whispering warnings and prophecies that no one dared consciously repeat or admit to himself having heard them. A feeling of monstrous guilt hung over the earth, and from the abyss between the stars came cold streams, from which people shivered in dark and deserted places.

Based on the fact that Lovecraft was still not far from the life of society, no matter what image of a reclusive misanthrope he created for himself, one can try to understand whatvalidhorrors were described in his works.

The first thing that catches your eye is the presence of certain forces that exist on the other side of the individual. Naturally, these can only be the forces of nature and society unknown to Lovecraft, which he intertwines together in the form of powerful aliens. So, for example, in the story “Whisperer in the Darkness” (Whisperer in the Darkness, 1930), alien creatures Mi-go are described, which are either insects or mushrooms with telepathic abilities, whose morality is so alien to man that it seems to him absolute evil. It is horrifying here with what simplicity and indifference these forces can control the fate of a person, seeing in him only a means to achieve some of their goals, infinitely unknown and incomprehensible to the latter. While an individual person cannot even try to fight these forces, because he, without knowing it, is already woven into this picture of the universe and occupies an infinitely small place there. This nightmare came from reality, in which an individual person is turned into a cog in a factory, in an army or a state, and these infinitely huge mechanisms can easily exist without this separate and unique element.

The second is the fundamental inexplicability of such a state of affairs by science. Moreover, Lovecraft was well aware that science does not solve the contradictions in society, but only exacerbates them. So, it was the development of science and industry that led to the fact that the First World War was so large-scale and destructive. In addition, when a scientist loses his human and moral character, this leads to the fact that for some of them the use of chemical weapons in war will seem like a curious experiment. Or the well-known struggle of currents between competitors for the electricity market: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, in which the Edison company in 1903 publicly killed an elephant with alternating current to show its danger. It was not for nothing that the powerful Nyarlathotep conquered the world in Lovecraft, demonstrating his mastery of electricity. The very separation of science into such a separate monstrous force is a fairly common theme among many other writers in this genre. As you can see, this is not a fear of the progress and development of mankind itself, it is an anxiety that this development often has an inhuman form, turning a person into an instrument, not a goal, as already mentioned above.

In addition, Lovecraft saw the limitations of the main scientific method, claiming to be universal, - knowledge with the help of the senses and common sense. True, he expressed this not in coherent philosophical categories, but in demonstrating the power of the human imagination, which sometimes crosses the brink of everyday reality and encounters there something unimaginably terrible, destroying the foundations of the familiar universe. So, for example, it happens in “Call of Cthulhu”, when one of the heroes tried to imagine the scale of the possessions of an ancient monster:

“I assumed that only the very top of the monstrous citadel crowned with a monolith, under which the Great Cthulhu lay, came out on the surface of the water. Thinking about the length of the part that goes deeper, I almost gave vent to thoughts of suicide.

The writer very often uses the words "abyss", "infinity", "cosmos" to describe something that goes beyond common sense. This abyss is very real and corresponds to attempts to imagine something that is beyond our senses. Considering this abyss as the source of those forces unknown to man, his imagination populated it with various monsters.

Despite his insight and rich imagination, Lovecraft did not know how to go beyond common sense without damaging his mind. Therefore, he warned readers that sometimes you just need to give up knowledge and remain in a happy and safe ignorance.

In the 21st century, Lovecraft is still popular and relevant. Unfortunately, sometimes he is referred to only for the external form of those monsters that he describes. These kinds of references, which are used only as a recognizable brand, are often funny and ridiculous. Some writers, such as Stephen King, try to emulate its style, but the emphasis often shifts from the most supernatural to human psychology, something that Lovecraft himself criticized in his study of horror literature. However, computer game developers sometimes very successfully capture the atmosphere of his works and immerse players in his worlds, allowing them to participate in the discovery of the line between the familiar world and cosmic horror. So, for example, in the game Call of Cthulhu:In Dark Corners of the Earth, the first-person player experiences a plot that touches on many of Lovecraft's works, and observes through the eyes of the protagonist how the psyche collapses from the horror experienced.

Howard Lovecraft cannot be called some kind of revolutionary or great writer, because the genre of horror literature itself was a response to the scientific revolution. His work is rather a worried and disturbing statement for arrogant fools who claim to have absolute knowledge of the universe.And as long as mankind will limit the power of its knowledge to the narrow limits of rational thinking, it will be forced to resort to phantasmagoric, terrible and nightmarish images of this writer and publicist, because what kind of monsters does not give rise to sensual, scientific, philosophical and indeed any kind of ignorance.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Date of Birth:

Providence
(Rhode Island, USA)
Date of death:

Providence
(Rhode Island, USA)
Citizenship:

USA
Occupation:

writer, poet
Years of creativity:

1897—1908, 1917—1936
Genre:

mystic Lovecraftian horror

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Eng. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, August 20, 1890, Providence, Rhode Island, USA - March 15, 1937, ibid.) - American writer and poet who wrote in the genres of horror, mystics, combining them in an original style. Ancestor of the Myths Cthulhu. During Lovecraft's lifetime, his creations were not widely known, but later they significantly influenced popular culture. His work is even singled out in a separate subgenre: Lovecraftian horror.

Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He was the only child of the traveling salesman Wilfrid Scott Lovecraft and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft. His ancestors are known to have lived in America since the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630). When Howard was three years old, Wilfrid was placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he was kept for five years until his death on June 19, 1898.
Lovecraft at the age of 9-10 years.

Lovecraft was raised by his mother, two aunts and grandfather (Whipple Van Buren Phillips), who took in the family of the future writer. Howard was a child prodigy - he recited poetry by heart at the age of two, and from the age of six he was already writing his own. Thanks to the grandfather who had the most a big library in the state, he met classical literature. In addition to the classics, he became interested in Gothic prose and Arabic tales of the Thousand and One Nights.

At the age of 6-8 years, Lovecraft wrote several stories, most of which have not survived to this day. At the age of 14, Lovecraft wrote his first serious work, The Beast in the Cave.

Lovecraft in early childhood, 1892. Until the age of 6, his mother forced the future writer to wear long hair and dressed like a girl.

As a child, Lovecraft was often sick, and did not go to school until the age of eight, but a year later he was taken away from there. He read a lot, studied chemistry between times, wrote several works (he reproduced them on a hectograph in a small edition), starting in 1899 (Scientific Newspaper). Four years later he returned to school.

Whipple Van Buren Phillips died in 1904, after which the family became very impoverished and had to move to a smaller house on the same street. Howard was saddened by the departure, and he even considered suicide. Due to a nervous breakdown that happened to him in 1908, he never finished school, which made him very ashamed and sad.

Lovecraft wrote fantasy as a child (The Beast in the Cave (1905), The Alchemist (1908)), but later preferred poetry and essays to it. He returned to this "frivolous" genre only in 1917 with the stories "Dagon", then "The Tomb". Dagon was his first published creation, appearing in 1923 in the magazine Weird Tales. At the same time, Lovecraft began his correspondence, which eventually became one of the most voluminous in the 20th century. Among his correspondents were Forrest Ackerman, Robert Bloch and Robert Howard.

Sarah, Howard's mother, after a long hysteria and depression, ended up in the same hospital where her husband died, and died there on May 21, 1921. She wrote to her son until her last days.

In 1919-1923, Lovecraft wrote actively - over the years he wrote more than 40 stories - including co-authorship.
Lovecraft and his wife Sonya Green, 1924.

Soon at a meeting of amateur journalists, Howard Lovecraft met Sonya Green, who had Ukrainian-Jewish roots and was seven years older than Lovecraft. They married in 1924 and moved to Brooklyn, New York. After the quiet Providence, New York life did not fall in love with Lovecraft. In many ways, his story "He" was autobiographical. A few years later, the couple broke up, although they did not file a divorce. Lovecraft returned to his hometown. Because of the failed marriage, some biographers speculated about his asexuality, but Green, on the contrary, called him a "beautiful lover"

Back in Providence, Lovecraft lived in a "big wooden house Victorian era at 10 Barnes Street until 1933 (this address is the address of Dr. Willet's house in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). During that period, he wrote almost all of his short stories published in magazines (mostly in Mystery Tales) as well as many major works such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Ridges of Madness.

Despite his writing successes, Lovecraft was increasingly in need. He moved again, now to a small house. The suicide of Robert Howard made a strong impression on him. In 1936, the writer was diagnosed with bowel cancer, a consequence of malnutrition. Howard Phillips Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

H. F. Lovecraft in Russia

The acquaintance of the Russian reader with the work of Lovecraft took place in 1991-1993. Two groups of enthusiasts played a key role in this:

1. St. Petersburg publicist Evgeny Golovin and Moscow translator Valeria Bernatskaya prepared a 256-page collection of the writer's stories for the Terra Incognita publishing house (1991).

2. A team of translators from Yekaterinburg, formed around the literary agency Kubin Ltd, prepared a complete 4-volume collected works of Lovecraft for the publishing house "Forum" (1991-93). The group included Igor Bogdanov, Vasily Dorogokuplya, Fedor Eremeev and Oleg Michkovsky. In total, they published 12 Lovecraft books in publishing houses in Moscow, Kyiv, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. The same team is responsible for the publication of the 7-volume reader's Encyclopedia and the creation of the Comic Factory publishing house.

At present, Lovecraft's collections are regularly reprinted in Russia by at least three major publishing houses - Azbuka, AST, Eksmo.

In 2006, interest in Lovecraft's works was greatly fueled by the "Question to Putin" campaign. At this action, the President of Russia was asked questions preliminarily selected by Internet voting. The vote unexpectedly won the comic question "How do you feel about the awakening of Cthulhu?" After that, the image and name of Cthulhu began to be used much more often on the Russian-language Internet.

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By the way, my favorite author

The American prose writer, poet and publicist Howard Phillips Lovecraftt (1890-1937) left his vivid and unforgettable mark on the literature of horror, mysticism and fantasy. During the life of Lovecraft himself, as is often the case, his works were not known, but later they had a noticeable influence on the formation of modern " mass culture". He, among other things, is the founder of the cosmological "mythology of Cthulhu" - a special subcultural phenomenon that has given many followers and imitators in literature, cinema, rock music, desktop and computer toys, etc. (For example, one of the popular stories of the famous Stephen King - "Crouch End" - contains direct borrowings from Lovecraft). The work of Howard Lovecraft is so original that other literary critics often distinguish his works into a separate separate subgenre - the so-called "Lovecraftian horrors". In addition, he, along with his good friend Robert Howard, is considered one of the founders of such a fashionable direction of "popular art" as fantasy.

Sometimes Lovecraft is also called "Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century." Indeed, in terms of their talent and fame, these two writers are now quite comparable. Of course, the great American predecessor was not without a strong influence on the development of the young talent and the work of the mature Lovecraft (contemporaries first mistook his story “Alien” for an unknown lost work by Edgar Allan Poe, accidentally discovered already in the next century after his death).

However, in our days, much more chilling horror in the Western reader of Lovecraft can be caused not by the most sophisticated flights of his dark and bizarre fantasy, but by many “politically incorrect” descriptions and “xenophobic” statements that the writer once had the imprudence to allow in a number of his works. Such researchers of his work as Michel Houellebecq in his book “G. F. Lovecraft. Against humanity, against progress”, creators and participants documentary film"Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown" (directed by Frank Woodward, 2008) is downright scattered in apologies and excuses about this.

In fairness, we must immediately make a reservation that Howard Lovecraft was a racist and chauvinist to a slightly greater extent than the vast majority of citizens Western countries in that "barbarian era" in which he had to live. Actually, his views themselves were not something frozen and unchanged, but were “corrected” by lived experience.

While the writer led the life of a quiet recluse on his small homeland in Providence, Rhode Island, he probably, as any self-respecting Yankee should have been a hundred years ago, treated everyone who was not himself a w.a.s.p., with a kind of slight condescending arrogance, but without any serious hostility . However, having got to New York for family reasons, on the streets of Brooklyn, literally teeming with "colored" and migrants of various kinds, Lovecraft, as they say, felt all the inconveniences and dangers of such a neighborhood on his own skin.

In addition, being himself “economically unsuccessful”, “uncompetitive” in his life, as theorists and advocates of a market economy like to say now, undergoing endless ordeals in a foreign and hostile metropolis in search of at least some job and a piece of bread, he, too, time I saw with my own eyes how well adapted to the same conditions and even "successful" many of the "strangers" become. Which, in turn, could not but affect, ultimately, his work.

The motives for such “racial hostility” were especially clearly and vividly manifested in Lovecraft, perhaps in his famous work as "A Nightmare in Red Hook".

“From here, from this morally and physically decaying cesspool, the most sophisticated curses in more than a hundred different languages and dialects rush to the sky. Scolding in every way and bawling dirty couplets, crowds of suspicious-looking tramps roam the streets, and as soon as a passer-by who accidentally wanders here glances at the windows of houses, the lights go out and the swarthy faces seen behind the glasses, marked with the seal of vice, hastily disappear ... in its diversity, the composition of crimes here is not inferior to the ethnos.

Etc. That's it - neither more nor less. Similar, at first glance, rather neutral verbal passages can now shock someone from childhood well-bred in the spirit of tolerance, multiculturalism and tolerance. However, the famous detective Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" also had difficulties at the time due to its "inconvenient" title. However, Lovecraft, as befits a "true racist", expressed with his pen not so much any significant hostility towards "non-white" races, but rather his negative attitude towards the "products" of racial mixing.

Of course, such a refined intellectual as Lovecraft would not be himself if he were just some ordinary and rude everyday xenophobe.

From 1915 to 1923, Lovecraft published his socio-political magazine The Conservative (13 issues managed to see the light), which on its pages defended, above all, high cultural standards, “moderate, healthy militarism” (“Protection of one’s own land and existence race is the only justified goal of armament”), “pan-Saxonism” (fraternal unity and dominance of the Anglo-Saxons on the entire planet), etc. etc.

Like a large number of cultural and artistic figures, Lovecraft, to put it mildly, disliked capitalism for its greed and lack of spirituality. But, at the same time, he was very wary and even hostile to the appearance of young Soviet Russia on the world map, since he saw in socialism exactly the same economic determinism and vulgar materialism “mirrored” from capitalism, and the practical embodiment of Marxism - Bolshevism - it, as and many, simply frightened.

And here a direct analogy arises with the creator of Sherlock Holmes - Conan Doyle, the second part of "The Maracot Abyss" - "Lord of the Dark Side" - was never published in the USSR, not only because of its "anti-scientific" mystical content, but also the obvious anti-Soviet attacks encountered in it.

And yet, perhaps even greater hostility than to the "communist threat", the priest of the "original gods" had for "bourgeois democracy". This is not surprising, if we remember with what irony and squeamishness his famous fellow countrymen and fellow writers treated “democracy” in the American way: the same Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Jack London. But Lovecraft was perhaps even more categorical: "democracy is a false god - just a buzzword and an illusion of the lower classes, dreamers and dying civilizations", "the people are usually not smart enough to manage a technological civilization effectively."

Universal suffrage "is only a reason for uncontrollable laughter", as it provides an opportunity for "public politicians" who pursue personal or clan "hidden interests" to go to power only on the basis of possession of a "suspended tongue" and juggling "populist slogans".

Lovecraft treated the struggle for world peace as nothing more than “idealistic chatter”, considered internationalism “a delusion and a myth”, and called the League of Nations (the prototype of the current UN) nothing more than a “comic opera”.

Lovecraft, of course, was not the only one who explained slowly but surely the decline and degradation of the present world, already starting in that era, by the dominance of “low cultural standards of the underdeveloped majority. Such a civilization of meaningless work, consumption, reproduction and burning life is not worthy of existence. Of course, as you yourself have probably guessed, Lovecraft was strongly influenced by the well-known ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler.

But how did Lovecraft imagine an alternative version of social organization? He had an answer to this question.

The writer prophetically painted his version of the social and economic order with bright strokes, “which, while helping the dangerous masses at the expense of the overly rich, nevertheless preserves the foundations of traditional civilization and puts political power in the hands of a small and developed (but not too rich) ruling class, mostly hereditary , but subject to a gradual increase at the expense of other individuals who have reached their cultural level.

Although Lovecraft rejected egalitarianism, he was not a supporter of authoritarian methods of government either. He dreamed of self-improvement, intellectual and spiritual growth of as many people as possible. Lovecraft considered the then accepted division of society into classes as "erroneous", regardless of whether it comes "from below" or "from above": "Classes must be eliminated or their influence minimized." He relied on "natural aristocrats" who come forward from all strata and groups of society, regardless of their origin and financial situation. Such views, in essence, strongly coincided with the "ethical socialism" of Hendrik de Man, Marcel Dehat and some other thinkers of that time.

To guarantee such a reasonable and just social order, according to Lovecraft, a new special “type of imperious social and political management, which fills life with meaning” will have to be called upon. And the constant self-improvement of its citizens will be achieved due to the fact that their way of life "will be much more cultured than those fools who go to the movies, to dances and to the pool."

Another evidence of Lovecraft's "obscurantism" now could well be considered his anti-Semitism. Once in New York, he quickly concluded that this city was "completely Semitized" and had lost its original "national structure." Jewish influence on the economic and cultural life created a special environment here, "completely alien to the strong American worldview." However, such a position of Lovecraft, again, did not go far beyond the scope of that era. For he saw the Jewish question, rather, as a problem of the clash of "opposing cultural traditions."

And finally, the “pro-fascist” views of Howrad Lovecraft did not at all prevent him from marrying a Jewish woman from the former Russian Empire (the current Chernihiv region of independent Ukraine) Sonya Gray. However, it is difficult to call this marriage long and happy. Gray was mistaken in believing that she was marrying "a promising young writer." After just a year and a half, the newlyweds already lived in different cities and states. And in 1929 they divorced at all (at the request of Green). Sonya then happily married again (for the third time in her life) and lived in California until 1972.

But Lovecraft himself left this world too early: if he had lasted another couple of decades, he would have been able to achieve literary recognition and prosperity during his lifetime. And now we remember Lovecraft in the first place, as the creator of his own incredible and frightening otherworldly universe.

I bring to the attention of those who have not yet discovered the creative heritage of Howard Lovecraft, a short list of his most significant works (it does not include works written in co-authorship or completed after the death of the writer).

Dagon (1917)