Writing is a profession whose representatives often use psychotropic substances. But we are all accustomed to thinking that when it comes time to create, most authors put all their mind-altering substances away for a while in the back drawer of their writing desk and get to work. But it turns out that some of the most famous books were written by people under the influence of such an incredible drug cocktail that it is amazing that they could write anything at all, and not pointlessly scratch the paper, staining it with saliva pouring from their mouths. For example …
Stephen King drank so much in the 1980s that he still can't remember half of his work
Stephen King has written so many novels that most of him cannot even remember, but King's memory lapses were not due to an overload on the brain, but rather on the liver. Kujo, for example, is one of King's most beloved works, but despite this, he cannot fully remember how he wrote the novel. The part of the brain that contained these memories was killed by enough alcohol to launch a rocket to Mars.
It is well known that Stephen King abused alcohol, as this was strongly reflected in much of his early work. But few people know that after he finally stopped drinking, he plunged headlong into coke, and it was not like his experiences with whiskey.
If all of King's works of the 1970s went through a whiskey filter, then his works of the 1980s were "sniffed from the mirror." For example, "Tomminokers" - a novel about a mysterious force that makes people stronger, smarter and more talented, clearly indicates the prototype of the force that inspired the author. As the heroes of the novel increasingly turn to power, they turn into monsters. In my opinion, the perfect subject for a book, written by a guy whose nostrils were the size of Spanish olives and stuffed with cotton wool to stop the profuse bleeding caused by the "dust" he sniffed for "inspiration."
Cox could be considered the inspiration behind some of King's most famous works. Suffering, for example, was written in the midst of addiction and is full of rubbish, which indicates the frenzy of the author as he was writing. The Tomminokers have become one of King's most criticized works. And his first and only attempt at directing, 1986's Maximum Acceleration, about trucks coming to life and trying to slay Emilio Estevez, has come to be known as something you'd least expect from an American novelist. It was more like a movie, based on the transcript of a difficult six-year-old kid playing with Hot Wheels.
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King admits that the film's legendary flop was a consequence of his brain being “coked” throughout production and not always knowing what he was doing. His brain is now clean, but Max Acceleration was enough to make King swear never to return to directing again.
But it cannot be said that King was the first author to draw inspiration from mood-altering chemicals …
Frankenstein was inspired by a crazy opium night
The story of Mary Shelley's novel "Modern Prometheus" (or "Frankenstein" if you don't know) says that Shelley, her husband Percy and their friend Lord Byron went on a hike with friends of writers, in which they came up with horror stories, sitting by fire. Shelley came up with such a damn good story about a mad scientist reanimating a corpse that Percy decided to publish it. But the story is silent about the most interesting, because the generally accepted version leaves one important fact aside - in most of the trips, in one of which Shelley invented "Frankenstein", all the participants took drugs.
It is speculated that Shelley and her literary friends took laudanum, a then-legal tincture of opium, pretending that they camped in a yacht cabin on Lake Geneva. They later recalled that Percy Shelley was so pumped up that, while Byron was reading creepy poems from the book, Percy jumped to his feet and began to scream that Mary's nipples turned into eyes.
Mary Shelley, as friends recalled, retired and in an opium delirium saw a reanimated corpse, which became the basis for the story that inspired the creation of the thriller "I am Frankenstein."
Many participants in this drug campaign became the founders of 19th century literature. Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein", her husband became the author of the famous poem "Ozymandias", Lord Byron wrote "Don Juan", and one of the participants, John Polidori, wrote "Vampire", the predecessor of "Dracula", but about him you are most likely, did not hear. All in all, it seems that we owe so much of our literary heritage to a drug that we are no longer allowed to buy.
So, it would seem that opium has laid the coke on the shoulder blades, but cocaine has a few more little-known tricks, in the end …
The story "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was written after six days of cocaine
The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson gave us one of the most enduring characters in literature. This is a story about a man who creates a substance that temporarily makes him the cruel jerk Hulk. We can say that technically Stevenson created two famous images. Unsurprisingly, the humble man who, in a famous novel, takes drugs to turn into a locomotive of bestial rage owes his existence to a fair amount of cocaine taken by Stevenson. But the author cannot be called a drug addict in the modern sense.
Stevenson spent his adult life suffering from the effects of tuberculosis. And in order to somehow help him, the doctor prescribed cocaine for him, because then there were awesome doctors! As a result, Stevenson became highly addicted to coke, but it also endowed the writer with superhuman endurance - the original 30,000-word novel was written in just three days thanks to the cocaine that filled his lungs.
Nevertheless, this draft, covered with cocaine, fell out of favor with the harsh critic Stevenson - his wife Fanny, who allegedly burned the work, declaring it "complete nonsense." Stevenson listened to his wife's criticism, tweaked the storyline, and wrote the second version, restoring the first version from memory. And that's another 30,000 words in three days. And remember, this was back in the days when writers wrote with a pen by hand and by candlelight.
This second version won Fanny's approval and thus bypassed the Stevenson family fireplace and became one of the most famous novels of the 19th century. And in fact, the novel was the result of a week-long cocaine binge.
Ayn Rand's novels were written at an insane speed
Ayn Rand is one of the greatest heroines of libertarian law, despite the fact that no one really likes to read her books. Her two most famous works, Atlas Shrugged and The Source, are essentially the Bibles of market capitalism. In addition, anyone who tried to read her works came to the conclusion that Rand was very responsible in her work. However, when it came to meeting deadlines, it worked against her. The original publisher of The Fountainhead, her first novel, dismissed Rand like a bag of shit when she couldn't deliver the manuscript on time because she spent years carefully checking the book down to the last detail.
By the time she finally found a new publisher, the fear of a repeat of failure was deeply embedded in her. Thus, she turned to Benzedrine, an amphetamine-containing drug that was the legal equivalent of methadone in the early 20th century.
Over the next 12 months, Rand finished her manuscript, gliding through hundreds of thousands of words on a cloud of sheer speed. But The Fountainhead was just a warm-up, the epic Atlas Shrugged, one of the longest and most intense novels in the English language, required even more elaboration (read: methamphetamine). By the time she finished her masterpieces, Rand's addiction to Benzedrine had already made her aggressive, prone to mood swings, irritable and paranoid half-ghost-half-human.
"Atlas Shrugged" hit the shelves in 1957. Since then, the 645,000 words of the drug-addicted paranoid lunatic have continued to be one of the most influential novels of all time, and the book-based trilogy is considered the most boring ever made.
Voltaire drank nearly lethal amounts of caffeine
Voltaire was one of the most famous intellectuals of the 18th century, issuing sarcastic comments on philosophy and politics on a daily basis. He was essentially analogous to modern commentators on the Internet, but in the real world. His enthusiasm and purely personal and unbiased attitude towards world events in an era when everything was very serious can be explained, in part, by the amount of caffeine that would have led to a rapid heart rate even in a rhino.
"Caffeine"? You say: "I drink five cans of Red Bull a day, where are my enchanting articles that get to the top of LJ?" Sorry, but you haven't even gotten close to Voltaire. He is so addicted to caffeine that his face should be on display in front of every Starbucks in the world. We're talking about 30 cups of coffee a day … and sometimes twice as much.
Coffee consumption increased when Voltaire was working on something he considered important. His most famous work, Candide, was written in five months and required so much caffeine that any trucker would overfulfill his plan ten times if someone poured it into him. It is reported that at the time of writing Candida, Voltaire was drinking an average of somewhere between 50-70 cups of coffee a day. Like this, one cup every ten minutes, no lunch break. It’s amazing that he was able to keep writing, rather than crawling around the neighborhood on all fours, scaring passers-by with a steady stream of urine and wild hiss.
This lifestyle may sound like the surest recipe for a heart attack, but Voltaire lived to the ripe old age of 83 and died in his sleep. This was probably the first time in his entire life that he was really asleep, so the weight of all those wild hectic years fell on him and crushed him like a big boulder.
Sartre owes his philosophical work to amphetamines
You have probably heard the term "existentialism" before, but if you do not know what it is, then you better dig into other sources, since today we are approaching the issue from a not very scientific side. But you can begin to guess what lies behind this definition when you find out that one of the most defining figures in this movement, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, was literally on drugs.
At one time, Sartre was a kind of celebrity, which can be said to be an achievement for a man whom everyone unambiguously called a "philosopher". However, it was a different era, and Sartre's groundbreaking Critique of Dialectical Reason was a work that required as many drugs to write as it took to understand it. She has had a huge impact on various groups of people, from Jackson Pollock to Salinger and Fidel Castro. Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and was the only person to ever turn down the prize because he was a drug addict and behaved like a drug addict.
Too much work, too little sleep, too much wine and cigarettes, and the burden of an oppressive worldview (his most famous quote: “Hell is other people”) tired Sartre so much that he needed a way to normalize his life. So he started taking a daily cocktail of barbiturates, including Corydrane, a mixture of amphetamines and aspirin that doesn’t treat headaches as much as it does when you don’t care if you’re using them.
The recommended dose of Corydrane was one or two tablets in the morning, and possibly also at lunchtime, if the patient was dominated by some particularly deep existential idea. Sartre ate them heroically, like peanuts, because he had existential ideas all the time. When he wrote his Critique, he was taking about 20 pills a day, so the fact that the book came into being is doubly impressive, because he probably couldn't feel his own hands while writing it.
The Communist Manifesto was written by two drunken students
It is difficult to imagine a single book that would have had a greater impact on world history than the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. At the very least, this is by far the most influential book ever written during a bar gathering.
Before becoming the leader of the proletariat, Karl Marx was the "king of the student fraternity." In fact, for a man who will change the political landscape of the world over the course of a century, Marx was a pretty bad student.
In his first year at the University of Bonn, he became Assistant to the President of the Tavern Club. His father describes this period as "wild fury" - the phrase here means "participating in drunken pistol fights on donkeys while under the influence of alcohol."
Friedrich Engels was also familiar with the concept of drunkenness. While Marx played as a donkey tamer, Engels mastered the vineyards of France. He, as eyewitnesses testified, "was slightly tipsy all the time, to a greater or lesser extent." We assume that this means drunk, but it could also simply mean that he was just studying France. One of his biographers notes that reading Engels's diary is like reading the catalog of J. Peterman's expensive wine.
Therefore, when Marx and Engels first got together, they got drunk. They met at the Café de la Regence, but they were not going to waste time ordering coffee. In fact, the meeting in the brothel where they discussed their plans for the Communist Manifesto was described as soaked in beer. The ten-day booze was so impressive that it led to a hangover, which in some places has not yet ended.
Guys, do not use drugs, they will not help you in your work if you have a three in Russian. Learn and develop as a person …
The material was prepared by Dmitry Oskin