Cthulhu is ours

The Extraordinary Adventures of Howard Lovecraft in Russia

November 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first work of the American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937): his story “The Alchemist” was published in the magazine for “amateur writers” United Amateur. Little known during his lifetime, Lovecraft was later recognized as the founder of the entire genre of “Lovecraftian horror.” His popularity crossed the ocean, like the giant Cthulhu, and reached Russia.

Who is Mister Lovecraft?

Coming from a conservative white Protestant middle class family, a native of Providence (Rhode Island), Howard Phillips Lovecraft was doomed from birth to a life of eccentric eccentric. His parents, one after another, went crazy, ending their days in a psychiatric clinic - the idea of ​​ancestral curse will run through Lovecraft's work. Since childhood, Howard was a painful neurotic: he could lose consciousness from the cold, he was overcome by vivid but terrible dreams. Due to illnesses, real and imaginary, he was unable to finish school and spent a significant part of his life as a recluse.

The main motive of his works is the collision of man with manifestations of cosmic Chaos, unknowable and inexplicable. Be it a sleeping ancient deity (“Call of Cthulhu”) or a colony of amphibian people (“The Darkness Over Innsmouth”); traces of the presence of an alien civilization (“The Ridges of Madness”) or hypnotic echoes of an archaic cult (“Rats in the Walls”). In whipping up supernatural horror, he truly has no equal.

Lovecraft's best friends were books; he preferred to communicate with people by correspondence, and these verbose letters are sometimes better than his prose. Because of his eccentricities, he was unable to become a professional writer, although he was very prolific: his executors published revised manuscripts for decades. Most of Lovecraft's stories were published in magazines for amateur writers and pulp fiction anthologies, one of which, Weird Tales, went down in history thanks to him (although the puritan Lovecraft tore off the covers of Weird Tales with half-naked girls from his author's copies).

His ideal was an old-world gentleman, an enlightened conservative, who studied literature not for the sake of earning money, but for idealistic reasons. Lion Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft's biographer, is convinced that this attitude, learned from childhood, turned his whole life around. Instead of becoming a successful writer, he posed as an amateur landlord, living on the rent of his estates (like his idol, Baron Dunsany), but did not have the means and opportunities for this and eventually faded into poverty.

In Russia, where it is customary to be suspicious of material success, such a writer is destined for a great literary destiny. However, Lovecraft himself was of little interest to our country. Contemporary Bolshevik Russia, gripped by the feverish construction of socialism, was extremely disgusting to the writer, an opponent of modernity. “Inspired or not by the disastrous example of the almost subhuman Russian mob, irrational elements throughout the world appear to be animated by exceptional depravity and exhibit symptoms such as those that appear in a crowd on the verge of stampede. While loquacious politicians predict universal peace, long-haired anarchists preach a social revolution, which means nothing more than a return to savagery or medieval barbarism,” he wrote in the article “Bolshevism.” If someone sees Russophobia in this, then for balance one can cite Lovecraft’s description of a crowd on the street of New York: “A bastard mess of sweaty half-breed flesh, devoid of intelligence, disgusting to the eye, smell and imagination - heaven send the merciful cloud of cyan that suffocated If only all this incredible ugliness would end the suffering and cleanse the place.”

The most significant “Russian trace” in Lovecraft’s biography was left by his wife, Sonya Green, who was born in the town of Ichnya in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, now the regional center of the Chernigov region of Ukraine. At the age of nine, her parents took her to America, where in 1924 she met Howard Lovecraft. The writer's declarative anti-Semitism could not resist the spell. The love of Sonya and Lovecraft is worthy of a separate book: the recluse from Providence, under the influence of his wife, opened up to the world for a while, but then, fearing himself, Lovecraft ran away from both the world and the woman, slamming the shutters back.

The path to the Russian reader

During the Iron Curtain, Lovecraft was not translated - his texts were full of devilry and mysticism that did not fit into the Procrustean bed of scientific communism. The reactionary views of HP itself, obsessed with the ideas of the degeneration of humanity, did not contribute to this. However, one of his stories, “The Sinister Alien,” was published in the September 1976 issue of America magazine, published for the USSR by the US State Department (yes!) in exchange for the publication of a Soviet propaganda magazine in the States. The magazine did not reach the general Soviet reader (although it could be bought on the “black market”); “America” was read mainly by party functionaries and security officers “for work.” Nevertheless, the publication did not go unnoticed among fans. In 1989, this story was reprinted in Valery Okulov’s fanzine “Okula-89” along with the publisher’s article about Lovecraft. HP would probably be flattered that his path to the Russian reader lay through “amateur journalism” so dear to him.

“Perestroika” opened the doors to Chaos, and Lovecraft’s stories began to appear in various anthologies of scary stories published by lively co-operators. In 1990, in different parts of the still unified country - in Almaty and Vladivostok - anthologies were published in half a million copies, including Lovecraft's story "The Temple" about the collision of the crew of a German submarine with an artifact of an ancient civilization (translated by enthusiast Alexander Voevodin). In the same year, an obituary written by Lovecraft in memory of pen pal and Weird Tales magazine colleague Robert Howard was included in a volume of the latter’s works published in Minsk. (It is characteristic that Robert Howard, the author of the saga of Conan the Barbarian, which became popular in our country thanks to the film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, which was still sold on video cassettes, came to readers earlier than his contemporary Lovecraft).

The first true popularizer of Lovecraft was the writer, philosopher and occultist Yevgeny Golovin, the guru of the “Yuzhinsky circle” of home-grown mystics, from whose depths came such right-wing radical figures as Alexander Dugin and Heydar Dzhemal. In 1991, the Terra Incognita publishing house published the first author's collection of Lovecraft's stories, “On the Other Side,” in translations by Valeria Bernatskaya and with an afterword by Golovin, with a circulation of 100 thousand copies. In the article “Lovecraft - a researcher of the outside,” Evgeny Golovin writes: “It is common for everyone to experience horror in front of someone or something, to experience causeless horror is a feature of subtle, sensitive subjects, but recognizing the main and defining constant of existence is something few are capable of, and Lovecraft is one of the few.”

In 1992, Lovecraft was legalized in a thick magazine context: Lovecraft’s story “Swamp of the Moon” was published in the March issue of Foreign Literature. Under the same cover are texts by Mircea Eliade, Jorge Luis Borges and Gustav Meyrink - good company for the twilight genius.

Then came the turn of collected works: in 1991-1993, the Moscow publishing house Forum published a two-volume set of Lovecraft (two more volumes were planned, but not published). These books, with grotesque illustrations from the albums of artist Boris Vallejo with naked divas and muscular monsters (which have nothing to do with the texts), seem to have been in the hands of all the writer’s fans in the post-Soviet space. The books came out surprisingly at the right time: the old totalitarian world was collapsing, chaos was invading reality, and Lovecraft’s characters fit perfectly into everyday life.

Since then, Lovecraft has been regularly translated and republished by the monsters of the publishing market; his books can always be found in the science fiction section of any bookstore. In 2016 alone, seven collections of his stories were published.

Necronomicon, Cthulhu and Putin

Loughcraft's strength lies not only in the all-conquering Chaos, but also in his branched mythology. First of all, these are various ancient gods, who, as a rule, are sleeping or outside our space, but are waiting for an unreasonable person who will wake them up or let them into his world. Lovecraft's most famous character is Cthulhu, a giant monster with an octopus head and wings on his shoulders, who sleeps in the sunken city of R'lyeh and appears in the dreams of sensitive visionaries. His awakening will be the end of the world. Like his idol Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft loved to refer to fictional books in his texts and invented an entire warlock library. A key role in it is played by the book "Necronomicon", allegedly written in the 8th century by the mad Arab Abdul Al-Hazred: a collection of unholy secrets that threatens madness or death to anyone who wants to join them (the English translation of the "Necronomicon" was allegedly carried out by the alchemist John Dee). However, to get acquainted with this book, you need to get into the library of the fictional Miskatonic University. And of course, such a well-thought-out world makes you want to take part in the game and continue the work of the writer.

In English-language literature, there are successors and imitators of Lovecraft, including masters Stephen King and Neil Gaiman (his story “A Study in Emerald” combines the mythology of Lovecraft and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes), and numerous minor writers and authors of fan fiction. In particular, in the story "A Very Cold War" by Charles Stross, Cthulhu turns out to be a secret weapon of the Soviets, which is kept in a sarcophagus in the territory of Ukraine. In Russian science fiction, Lovecraft is not doing very well with followers yet. Based on his mythology, a series of humorous fantasy novels by Alexander Rudazov “The Archmage” was written, Lovecraft characters appear in the “Secret City” series by Vadim Panov, but it is difficult to classify these authors as leading representatives of the genre. An amusing compilation “Necronomicon of John Dee” (2013) was also published in Russia under the label of the publishing house “Society for the Consciousness of Death,” which contains the apocryphal text of a fictional book, as well as an essay by Lovecraft.

But it was in Russia that Cthulhu came to the attention of the head of state (after which Lovecraft’s character became a popular Internet meme). During Vladimir Putin’s online press conference in 2006, organized by Yandex and the BBC, one of the questions selected by Internet users was: “What do you think of the awakening of Cthulhu?” The President replied that otherworldly forces made him suspicious. “If someone wants to turn to true values, then it is better to read the Bible, Talmud or Koran,” Putin said then. The president’s caution can be understood, because another Russian wit, Viktor Pelevin, said that Cthulhu is just one of the names of the ancient Dog the Arctic Dog, the awakening of which does not bode well for Russia.