HPL 131 (En)

The ancient garden seems tonight

A deeper gloom to bear,

As if some silent shadow’s blight

Were hov’ing in the air.

(HPL, September 17th, 1934)

Lovecraft turns 131 today.

What else can you say about an author apart from the plain fact that he completely changed your path in studying literature and reflecting upon it in a way that reshaped your life—as a scholar and as a functioning human being in general—completely? When such things happen to you at a young age, it is considered normal and as a phase of growing: it did indeed happen to me once (more than 30 years ago, to be precise) with the poet Alexander Blok and then Russian Symbolism as a part of the world fin de siècle aesthetical movement, and as it eventually progressed (and, especially, when I started working at the Archive with manuscripts in my late 20s) that childish joyous bliss eventually faded away.

No, the literary figures did not seem to be getting less potent: they just could be seen through the lens of “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches,” and I tried to not be overtaken by this aspect completely. So I read, I wrote, I deciphered, I published, I edited, and then I repeated, trying to remain as academically sensible and rational as I could. It kept continuing in this way for many years until the late summer, just like this one, six years ago, when I turned my eye to the text of the author whom I had read earlier in Russian translations and liked, but forgotten completely for what exactly.

I know I’ve written about that, yes: it’s not only my forgetfulness (although, I am, sadly, getting very good at it), but a strong desire to recollect that sensation again and again, which was close to synaesthesia, from reading Lovecraft’s works in English—the plot, the structure, the almost non-existent (and non-essential) characters’ arcs, the lack of any “love interest” (which became increasingly annoying in pre-/Modernist subplots especially), and, of course—of course!—the language. It is hard to compare my own experience with native speakers in this sense, because it has absolutely different sources of growing and developing, but I was immediately enchanted by its encyclopaedic and archaic heaviness without any wish from the author’s side to “get easier and clearer” (that is why it is so perfect for parodying and making every sort of pleonasms and malapropisms—not because it is done in “poor taste,” as one category of readers try convince the other, but the other way around: many parodies represent the highest level of appreciation and, forgive the cliché, flattery).

When you describe the primal fear in Malthusian/pre-Victorian terms, does it make you less afraid of the Unnameable and Unfathomable? No, it goes vice versa: the strike of horror feels deeper and egregiously evident when you force it to collide with the (final) moves of a sophisticated mind, utterly shattering its cohesiveness. That is what makes Lovecraftian writings so academically appealing and, simultaneously, so frightening. You love to face your most powerful fears: there is no escape anyway. That chap from Innsmouth managed to run away only to come back and join Those Wrong Ones, because he was one of them.

The odd thing that I am not so keen on post-Lovecraftian lore in general: mea culpa. Is it unforgivable for a scholar whose main subject is “HPL and his oeuvre”? I don’t know; maybe. But I love to think about HPL in the eschatological terms of Russian Gnosticism and post-Symbolism (that is why I delivered a talk in Russian last year about Lovecraftiana as an answer to the Russian post-fin de siècle Apocaliptica): it helps me, as a unit of Russian intelligentsia living in the West, to cope with my own ghosts. It does.

Happy Birthday, Old Gent.