Two valuable concepts from Mother Russia
Courtesy of VN
We’ll get to some words in a minute. Having
grown up in a family of Slavicists (Russian scholars) I picked up a bit of
Russian in the process: way too little, alas. I keep thinking now that I’m a
codger, perhaps taking Russian at the local Free University (which isn’t free
by the way) might be a good exercise for my brain. I grew up listening to
Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Prokofiev, Glazunov, Glinka, Scriabin—but Chaikovsky
not so much. I read Tolstoy (including War and Peace and Anna
Karenin) straight through—as a teenager and shorter Tolstoy (which I adore).
And lingered over Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, other lesser known
Russian lights, although my final and longest Russian infatuation has been
Vladimir Nabokov (henceforward VN): probably the greatest influence on my non-gardening
life aside from parents and a few other relatives. I’m confident I’ve re-read
most of Nabokov more times than the myriad Tolkein and J.K. Rowling’s readers claim
they’ve read their heroes discursive novels.
Just two nuggets I’ve gleaned from VN seem
strangely relevant nowadays. One is Пошлость: which transliterates literally as
“poshlost” (although the transliteration “poshlust” is perhaps better, as VN pointed
out) a Russian word that translates very loosely as “vulgar”—but which VN
expands into a rather complex and very useful tool for literary and cultural
criticism. If you have not read his compact and extremely readable biography of
Nikolai Gogol, the poshlust passage occupies a significant section in the
middle that you will not miss if you read the book. It’s worth it. I have a
mint condition first edition of this book gifted me by my dearest friend and
love from my childhood, which I treasure, but I digress…
[You can also Google “Poshlost” or
“poshlust” and find a wealth of blog posts and discussions, often devolving on
Nabokov’s usage: this one is typical: https://www.rbth.com/blogs/2014/05/29/a_question_of_taste_the_untranslatable_word_poshlost_37047.html ]
My interpretation of poshlust is that it is a vulgarity such as the worship of material things perceived as "posh" to the point that one loses touch with truth.
Ironically, the concept may have been
invented in Russian imperial times, but the phenomenon has been raised to
colossal proportions by the Soviet and especially post-Soviet state: Putin
embodies poshlust in a positively Imperial form….and his American equivalent,
who recently abdicated to Mar-a-Lago even perhaps more so…but there’s a better
Russian word (or two words rather) for HIM:
Лишний человек (Lishniy
chelovyek) was bandied about the house quite a bit when I was a kid. This
translates as “superfluous man” or Person really. It was first used to describe
the failed Byronic heroes, like Pechorin in Lermontov’s classic “Hero of Our
Times” (beautifully translated by VN and his son—a resplendent book glinting in
the golden light of the Caucasus which I finally visited three years ago
deliberately NOT following Pechorin’s footsteps however). The “hero”—a
handsome, dashing Byronic figure, enters the lives of one after another person,
leaving behind him havoc, death and destruction while he moves to his next
unlucky destination oblivious to his un-Midas touch.
Russian literature (and Russia) is
littered with these high minded but destructive folk. Undoubtedly the most
hilarious and probably (alas) accurate of all these portraits was the fourth
chapter of The Gift, by VN, which consists of a biography written
by the hero of the book (Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev). This chapter (and its
fate subsequently in the realm of “reality”—it created a furor) are an object lesson
for the Left as much as America’s current blight of white supremacist republicans
should be for “conservatives”: the subject of the biography, Nikolai
Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, became an icon of Liberalism and the Left in Russia.
The fictional author skewers the icon, and reveals the extent to which he truly
was a superfluous man and perhaps a symbol of what ultimately subverted Russian
Liberalism, leading to the terrors of the Soviet State. Perhaps if enlightened Russians
in the 19th Century could have distinguished the poshlust of
Nihilism and the superfluous men who hijacked the 1917 February revolution in
October of that year, things for Russia (and us) would have turned out quite
differently.
This all may sound high-falutin’ and abstruse…but were you
to have internalized these concepts as I have, the news that flashes daily past
us on our computer screens and TV’s would take on a very new guise. Hopefully
if we can perhaps learn these useful terms from literary criticism we can gird ourselves to forestall any Stalins or Putins who might loom in America from the Right….or
who might emerge one day from the Left.
