Пошлость and Лишний человек

 

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 19^th 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.