H.P. Lovecraft, suddenly popular in Hungary with a string of new pocket-book editions with fine translations.
Here’s a loose summary-translation of the review-article, trying to get some sense out of Google’s goulash of a translation…
… rumour has it that these two H.P. Lovecraft collections are among the most successful in Helikon’s impressively designed pocketbook series. Their success perhaps offers an insight into the current nervous state of the Hungarian people … [One little-remarked] characteristic is that Lovecraft’s work is that it is hardly inseparable from the works of those he felt to be his fellow warriors. One could muse at length on the intricate spread of effects and repercussions among his circle, and at times I feel that this literary program was emphatically, though never declared as such, movement-like. [When one considers his stances and his almost gnostic understanding of the world/cosmos] the tricky question is whether Lovecraft should be considered “reactionary” or just “progressive” from the point of view of the history-of-ideas. [Of course, many mis-read him, but his cult is guarded by] aesthetic priests who are the Jesuits of pop culture: their reputation may be fearsome, but whoever gets to know their views more thoroughly inevitably comes to understand them. For instance the Hungarian Lovecraft Society [is doing fine work nationally … but even they may not fully penetrate the] remarkable “local history” aspect to his reflexively “cosmic” works — perhaps then it is permissible for this zealous but distant deacon, interested in deliberate misreadings, to commit a dark hermeneutics. On Lovecraft’s gravestone not “I Am Providence”, but “I am the Providence.
