Metronomicon: Horror in the Moscow Metro

The "Metronomicon" photos (with a name clearly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon) comprise a highly unsettling and underexposed series by Russian artist Alex Andreyev. Moscow's extensive underground network has long encouraged artists' nightmares - most recently sweeping readerships in Russia and beyond through Dmitry Glukhovsky's dark sci-fi novel, Metro 2033. However, Andreyev's work is a bit different.

If someone emptied out the skulls of H.P. Lovecraft, Franz Kafka, and Yevgeny Zamyatin, the deleterious result might look something like these images. Andreyev's over-sized insects and warped locomotives recall much. They remind us that marvels like Moscow's extensive transit system are human entryways into an underworld both mysterious and horrifying.

Many of these pieces represent a loathsome clash: the ultra-modern with the prehistoric. Nothing seems more ancient and out of place than enormous insects in a techno-bureaucratic shrine. Other photographs give a more direct nod to Lovecraft, with tentacles casually plugged into passengers' heads, and tunnel dwelling horrors that may well represent the Providence writer's unfathomable Dholes.

Like the best grim artists, Andreyev also shows us how commonplace the macabre and terrible can be. None of his Moscovites are shocked at the strange happenings around them. Workers in bio-suits get along as best they can with otherworldly monstrosities. His people take an express ride through horror every day, between homes, jobs, and errands. And so do we.

Meanwhile, the shadow circus filling the Metro is as bleak and oppressive as the out-of-place creatures that reside in the darkness. There's a noticeably dystopian aura to the whole business. If the tyrannical Benefactor of Zamyatin's novel, We, had been able to employ otherworldly things that slither and titter, rather than an advanced form of social conditioning, then this Metro might be a glistening slice of that world. Kafka's frightful power rests in the exposure of the surreal and terrible all around us, and he, too, used Cyclopean insects to make his point in tales like "The Metamorphosis" (don't hesitate to pick up Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories immediately, if this tale is unfamiliar).

When you really get down to it, Metronomicon is an appropriate name for this exhibit. Alex Andreyev's magic is his ability to show us other worlds hidden from blind eyes, much like the feared Necronomicon. While the visual, rather than the literary, is his chosen medium, consider him a kindred spirit with Kafka, Zamyatin, and Lovecraft. All have expressed, in one way or another, the unquenchable black tyranny that pervades this cosmos.

Visit the full Metronomicon gallery here.

-Grim Blogger