The drawings of Victor Hugo (1802–85), of which about 3,000 survive, mark the smouldering confluence of night scenes and night drawing. Hugo began making caricatures c.1830, then drew landscape views and architecture for his own amusement and as a kind of spiritual exercise. Technically daring and courting accident, they were made on his travels, at home with his wife and children, during seances, but mostly on the dining-room table of his lifelong lover, the actress Juliette Drouet, who followed him into exile in Jersey and Guernsey (1852–70). Only a handful of the seventy-seven drawings in an impressively lugubrious show at the Royal Academy look as though they were made during the day. They are early travel sketches, tremulously wiry architectural bits and bobs, gothicky but insufficiently picturesque to be “ye olde” or “pre-loved”. Daylight strips them down to “poor, bare, forked” things, vivisections revealing shameful dilapidation and structural nervous exhaustion. The author of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was a pioneering advocate of preserving and restoring gothic buildings, but artistically he was half in love with their decline and death. ©
The first of the strands is organized around “Movements”, in which the contributors subtly challenge and revise the traditional scheme of periodization favoured by Moser, acknowledging from the outset, for instance, that the texts of the “Age of Devotion” – treated with supreme nuance by Franklin – are the shared inheritance of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian cultures, not merely the first stage in the development of Russian literature [...] ©
For H. P. Lovecraft, missing Hemingway would have been much more difficult—nor did he. Though they were very different in their fictional focus, output, and success, Lovecraft and Hemingway were still contemporaries, and there are a number of references to Hemingway and his works in Lovecraft’s letters. These mentions of Ernest Hemingway, who had not yet become “Papa” of later years, reflect more on Lovecraft than on Hemingway himself, but show Lovecraft both coming to grips with a Modern writer of very different style and interests and how Hemingway’s influence spread.
Trends come from deeper sources than what is written on the surface of literature, and the average domestic adjustments of 1980 or 2030 will not depend on the question of whether Ernest Hemingway is suppressed or encouraged in 1930.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, June 1930?, LMM 267
