The alchemist
The Alchemist ( English The Alchemist ) is the title of an early fantastic horror story by the American writer HP Lovecraft , which was written in 1908 and printed in November 1916 in the amateur magazine United Amateur . It did not appear until 1959 in the anthology The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces published by Arkham House and was reprinted there in 1986 in a revised version ( Dagon and Other Macabre Tales ). A German translation by Michael Walter was published in 1982 in Volume 71 of the Fantastic Library of Suhrkamp Verlag .
The alchemist reveals the influences of Edgar Allan Poe , the romantic horror literature as well as the English essay writing of the 18th century and is Lovecraft's first surviving short story in which he deals with supernatural phenomena. In contrast to the later developed Cthulhu myth , extraterrestrial beings do not yet play a role. She describes how the last offspring of a noble family fathoms an old curse that weighs on his family .
content
The story is told from the perspective of Count Antoine von C, who lives lonely in the middle of a primeval forest on the high castle of his ancestors. The centuries have left their mark on the once mighty bastion . With the crumbling walls, faded tapestries and worm-eaten wall paneling , little reminds of the former size and power of the bulwark during feudalism . Of the four corner towers of the building, only one tower , in which the Count was born 90 years ago, is still habitable. Antoine's mother died at birth, his father at age 32. The old servant Pierre, under whose care he is, wants to keep him away from the rabble in the area, since there is rumored a curse that casts on the sex of those of C.
On his 21st birthday, Pierre hands him a family document that has been passed down from father to son for generations. The old papers lead him back to the thirteenth century, when the building was still a mighty fortress, and confirm his dire premonitions.
In the area lived a dreaded old man who was nicknamed “Mauvais”, practiced alchemy , looked for the philosopher's stone and elixirs that promised eternal life. He is said to have practiced black magic and to have sacrificed his wife to the devil by burning her alive. His son Charles was just as familiar with the black arts as he was and was therefore called "Le Sorcier". One night the castle company got into great excitement because Godfrey, the young son of the count, could not be found and several small children had already disappeared in the area, for which the team of magicians was held responsible. Accompanied by a search party, the angry father broke into Mauvais' home and saw him next to a seething cauldron. Driven by blind rage, without any evidence, he killed the old man only to learn a little later that his son had been found intact in a remote chamber of the castle. When the group left the house, the son of the dead came forward, cursed the count with the words: “May no noble of your murderous tribe reach an older age than you!”, A liquid from a vial splashed into his face and fled into it Woods. The Count, who had just turned thirty-two, died without a word and was buried the following day.
Since that event, none of the noble sons survived his thirty-second birthday, and Antoine realizes that he has eleven years at most. He delves into the secrets of black magic and studies the old tome of the library in order to uncover the mystery of the curse. But everything remains in vain, and at some point he seems to be reconciled with fate. He wanders through the walls and penetrates into increasingly remote rooms. A few days before the fatal date, he went into the depths of the abandoned part of the building and discovered a room that was reminiscent of a dungeon . He descends through a trap door and finds himself in a dark corridor. A door creaks open. Antoine sees a thin figure wrapped in a medieval cloak, whose claw-like hands and deep-set eyes are terrible. She begins to speak with a rumbling voice, lamenting the injustice that Antoine's ancestor has inflicted on himself, and uses a Latin that the count assigns to the Middle Ages. She explains that it was Charles Le Sorcier himself who killed the descendants at the age of thirty-two and is delighted that Antoine will soon die too. When the creature lifts a vial, Antoine's stupor dissolves and with presence of mind he throws a torch at her, whereupon the cloak catches fire and the count himself passes out. After waking up, he discovers an alchemist's laboratory. As he passes the charred remains of the being, his eyes, which are darker than the burned face itself, open and look at him with hatred. It screams at him that it has solved the secrets of alchemy and has even fulfilled the curse at the house of C's. "I lived six hundred years to take my revenge because I am Charles Le Sorcier!"
Origin and background
It was not until many years after the creation of the story that Lovecraft was convinced by W. Paul Cook to publish it. Cook, an amateur journalist and editor, campaigned for Lovecraft's work and published some early poems and short stories in his amateur magazine The Vagrant , including The Testimony of Randolph Carter . He had read the manuscript and thought it promised. It is mainly thanks to his urging that Lovecraft resumed his writing in 1917.
It was not a given that Lovecraft would return to prose, as in previous years he had mostly written articles and reviews for amateur magazines and was extremely self-critical. So he wrote to George W. Macauley of his desire to write stories, which, however, seemed impossible to him. The recipient of the letter later stated that he had clearly contradicted it. Admittedly, at this point in time, Lovecraft's stories were unknown to him; a thorough analysis of one of his own experiments had convinced him of Lovecraft's ability to write. By the time the short story was published, Lovecraft had been an amateur journalist for two and a half years. In May 1917, he followed up his own early work with a self-deprecating criticism: The magazine had taken on a heavy burden of publishing a "cloudy () and gloomy () short story from our own pen". It is his "long unpublished debut at United and at the same time the first and only story" that he has ever presented to a critical public. He must therefore ask for patience for a “humble and ambitious newcomer”.
Sunand T. Joshi holds the end of the story though for predictable, however, believes advances in style and narrative technique compared with the earlier story The Beast in the Cave ( The Beast in the Cave ) can be seen from the spring of 1904 that Lovecraft himself described later as bombastic . The plot of the atmospherically convincing story should actually take place in the 19th century , as Mauvais was killed in the 13th century and the curse lasted 600 years. Lovecraft managed to give it a medieval character. The last descendant of the old, once proud noble family itself indicates that modern science cannot influence him in his isolation and he could work, "as in the Middle Ages, deeply absorbed in demonological and alchemical teachings ..."
As in The Beast in the Cave , Lovecraft illuminates the narrator's feelings and puts them at the center of the considerations, but shows a deeper interest in his mental state, which reveals the influence of Poe. He describes the decline of the property and impoverishment processes in a way that is reminiscent of his own remark about his most important role model, he feels peculiarly related to his "dark heroes, who come from doomed families".
Text output (selection)
- The Amateur , November 1918
- The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces by Arkham House , 1959
- Dagon and Other Macabre Tales , 1986
- In the crypt and other macabre stories. German by Michael Walter , Volume 71 of the Fantastic Library, Frankfurt 1982
literature
- Sunand T. Joshi . HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1, German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 3944720512 , pp. 141–143
- Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Alchemist, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, ISBN 0-9748789-1-X , pp. 2-3
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Alchemist. In: Cthulhu, horror stories, translation by Andreas Diesel and Felix F. Frey, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2009, p. 26
- ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Alchemist. In: Cthulhu, horror stories, translation by Andreas Diesel and Felix F. Frey, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2009, p. 33
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi , David E. Schultz: Cook, W [illiam] Paul . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 46
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Alchemist, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 3
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 296
- ↑ Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 298
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 141
- ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Alchemist. In: Cthulhu, horror stories, translation by Andreas Diesel and Felix F. Frey, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2009, p. 27
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 143