This year marks the 77th anniversary of the death of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, founder of "horror literature". The great Borges called him the most mysterious genius of the 20th century culture. Iris Murdoch believed that Lovecraft wrote his books in a state of mystical trance, and that he was led by people from Other Worlds.
Lovecraft is considered to be the final person of the great trinity of classics of mystical American literature, which includes Edgar Poe and Ambrose Beers. For all three geniuses, fate is in many ways similar - intense creative burning and early death, the circumstances of which are rather mysterious. But if Poe and Bierce received some recognition during their lifetime, then Lovecraft did not.
For almost the entire 47 years, Lovecraft lived in Rhode Island, in the town of Providence, one of the darkest places in New England. All his life he suffered from bad heredity. His father, a perfume dealer, ended up in a psychiatric hospital when the future writer was two years old. And until the age of 14, his mother forced Howard to wear women's dresses, which could not but affect his psycho-emotional state.
Lovecraft published all his masterpieces in 1921-1936 in small mystical journals, most of which came out in meager print runs and quickly ceased to exist. Own publishing projects - such as the Conservator newspaper - collapsed in a couple of months. The writer tried to get involved in the literary life of America through correspondence with writers and critics - Lovecraft's epistolary legacy numbers over 9 thousand letters! But the writer never received any fame outside his native Providence.
"Lovecraft's boom" burst out in the mid-50s, when published in one volume, the best works of the writer became a national bestseller in the United States in a couple of weeks. Soon, Lovecraft's books were translated into the world's leading languages, and Hollywood began to film them, but none of them became successful.
The greatest minds of that time - Borges, Camus, Sartre, Heidegger and others - were shocked by the unusual ideas and the power of expression of Lovecraft's prose. They were amazed at how convincingly the American genius showed that next to the ordinary, considered real world, there is an Other World, full of evil, horror and death. And this Other World, constantly intruding into individual lives and destinies, at any moment can pour into earthly life in a non-stop stream and completely destroy it.
Martin Heidegger was also struck by the fact that Lovecraft was creating his literature of "metaphysical horror" just during the years when he was working on his great book "Being and Time", which many consider the main philosophical work of the twentieth century. In it, Heidegger put forward the thesis of the existential loneliness of a person, thrown into an alien and hating Universe. A suffering person who understands the futility and meaninglessness of everything earthly, since any goals and aspirations are neutralized by death.
Intellectuals around the world discussed Lovecraft's clear historical and philosophical concept. According to the views of the writer, man is far from the first intelligent race that existed on Earth. Before humanity, the planet was inhabited by entities of an absolutely terrible, from our point of view, species, embodying truly universal evil.
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Lovecraft believed and very convincingly showed that the races of these terrible entities did not disappear anywhere - they simply, for inexplicable reasons, hid in the depths of the oceans and Antarctica. It was in the latter that Lovecraft saw the concentration of metaphysical evil and was extremely afraid that the exploration of the sixth continent, which began in the 20s of the last century, could induce nightmares that had slept for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years.
In addition, Lovecraft believed that the essences of evil also live in the depths of the ocean, constantly maintaining contact with their "agents", which are especially numerous in depressed historic cities. One of the centers of such communication, he considered the cities of New England, which, by the way, after the death of Lovecraft became even more depressing and mystical.
According to Borges, the most eerie and philosophically significant masterpieces of Lovecraft should be considered the following stories - "Call of Cthulhu", "Color from Other Worlds", "Dunwich Nightmare", "Whispering in the Dark", "Darkness over Innsmouth", "Beyond the Edge of Time" and "Ridges of Madness", as well as the transcendent poetic cycle "Mushrooms from Yuggoth." And the great English writer Iris Murdoch was sure that Lovecraft wrote many of his books literally under the dictation of disembodied entities, which thus let humanity know that the era of his life on Earth was coming to an end.
Iris Murdock was not only a novelist, but also a philosopher and literary historian. She was shocked by the transpersonal crisis that happened to Freud's disciple and reformer of the psychology of the unconscious Carl Gustav Jung in the winter of 1916-17. Then Jung constantly appeared disembodied entities, and one of them, introducing himself as a second-century Gnostic Basilides, dictated an absolutely terrible text "Seven Sermons to the Dead", in spirit very reminiscent of the writings of Lovecraft.
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Iris Murdoch drew attention to the fact that in his letters from 1959-61, Jung more than once expressed the idea that Lovecraft could write his dark books under the dictation of supernatural beings who transmitted information to him from other space-time continua. According to Murdock, this is most intriguingly felt in the poetic cycle "Mushrooms from Yuggoth," written by Lovecraft in 1929.
Murdoch drew attention to the fact that all 36 sonnets of the cycle actually paint psychedelic journeys, mostly of an extremely negative nature. And the name itself, which has no connection with the images of any of the sonnets, suggests that Lovecraft used psychedelic mushrooms, which are an integral part of the mystical culture of the peoples of Mexico and Central America.
However, in the 20s of the last century, Lovecraft, who did not travel anywhere from Roy Island, could not have known about such mushrooms. Their scientific research began only at the end of the 40s, and the book of the greatest mycologists of the Wassons' spouses "Mushrooms, Russia and the History of Catfish" was published only in 1957.
Even more surprising Iris Murdoch found the 32nd sonnet of the cycle, called "Alienation". She competently said that he accurately conveys the impressions and consequences of the so-called. "LSD-travel" arising after taking the now universally banned psychedelic LSD-25. Here is the text of this sonnet in a magnificent translation by Oleg Michkovsky:
Remaining bodily on Earth, To which the ash dawn is a witness, In his soul he wandered between the planets, Entering the worlds lying in evil. Until the hour struck, he was lucky: He saw Yaddit and did not turn gray, He returned whole from the Gur regions, But somehow in the night calls came … The next morning he woke up an old man, and the world appeared to him completely different - Objects blurred like smoke, All life seemed like a dream and a trifle. Since then he has been holding his neighbors for strangers, Vainly trying to become one of them.
Murdoch's amazement was shared by the largest researcher of the psychedelic experience, Timothy Leary. He also told the writer an amazing thing. Sandoz scientist Albert Hoffman synthesized LSD-25 in 1937 (two days after Lovecraft's death), but discovered the unique properties of the drug on April 16, 1943. Hoffman unexpectedly decided to double-check the data of the study six years ago after a hard night with nightmares, which took place in Antarctica.
DYATLOV KONSTANTIN
