I don't know Nabakov except from the Peter Sellers movie, but Lovecraft was a for-real creep. He would sleep out in cemeteries in order to get a chill and have nightmares, then go home and write them up. He used to hang out around all those creaky old wooden houses from the 1700's and he knew parts of New York that have never ever been written about before or since. His Antarctica obsession pretty much corresponds with Poe's North Pole Whirlpool obsession, simply because terra incognita is free game for writers and fantacists. But Lovecraft is like Castaneda and Wolfe in respect that you need to have a dictionary handy and vastly increase your vocabulary in order to get the full effect.