Poshlost’ is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and lack of spirituality. The war against poshlost’ is a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia from the 1860s to 1960s. Perhaps nowhere else in the world has there been such a consistency in the battle against banality. In Dostoevsky, poshlyi is an attribute of the devil (or at least of his dreamline novelistic apparition), while Alexander Solzhenitsyn uses it to characterize Western-oriented youth. In every-day speech a “poshliak” (boor or slob, with a diminutive pejorative suffix) is not a servant of the devil or a “Western spy” but only a man who frequently uses obscene language or behaves like a common womanizer. Poshlost’ has also a broader meaning, close to byt, when it refers to the incommensurable everyday routine, obscene by virtue of being ordinary and evil by virtue of being banal.
[…] Poshlost’ is not exactly prostitution, but rather a taste for the obscene, or for excessive sentimentality. In his fictional autobiography, for example, Tolstoy writes that at the time of his youth serious conversations with girls about love were considered to be poshlost’. […] The problem with poshlost’ is that it trivializes both high culture and low folk culture and blurs the distinctions between cultural levels. Poshlost’ risks “prostituting” national culture, turning tradition into fashion, love into sexuality, spirituality into triviality.
Svetlana Boym. Common Places : Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Harvard University Press, 1994.
The Russian language is able to express by means of one pitiless word the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term. The absence of a particular expression in the vocabulary of a nation does not necessarily coincide with the absence of the corresponding notion but it certainly impairs the fullness and readiness of the latter’s perception. Various aspects of the idea which Russians concisely express by the term poshlost (the stress-accent is on the puff-ball of the first syllable, and the final ‘t’ has a moist softness that is hardly equaled by the French ‘t’ in such words as ‘restiez’ or ‘émoustillant’) are split among several English words and thus do not form a definite whole. On second thought, I find it preferable to transcribe that fat brute of a word thus: poshlust – which renders in a somewhat more adequate manner the dull sound of the second, neutral ‘o.’ Inversely the first ‘o’ is as big as the plop of an elephant falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a bathing beauty on a German picture postcard.
English words expressing several, although by no means all aspects of poshlust are for instance: ‘cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue, high falutin’, in bad taste.’ My little assistant, Roget’s Thesaurus, (which incidentally lists ‘rats, mice’ under ‘Insects’ – see page 21 of Revised Edition) supplies me moreover with ‘inferior, sorry, trashy, scurvy, tawdry, gimcrack’ and others under ‘cheapness.’ All these however suggest merely certain false values for the detection of which no particular shrewdness is required. In fact they tend, these words, to supply an obvious classification of values at a given period of human history; but what Russians call poshlust is beautifully timeless and so cleverly painted all over with protective tints that its presence (in a book, in a soul, in an institution, in a thousand other places) often escapes detection.
[…] Open the first magazine at hand and you are sure to find something of the following kind: a radio set (or a car, or a refrigerator, or table silver – anything will do) has just come to the family: mother clasps her hands in dazed delight, the children crowd around, all agog, Junior and the dog strain up to the edge of the table where the Idol is enthroned; even Grandma of the beaming wrinkles peeps out somewhere in the background (forgetful, we presume, of the terrific row she has had that very morning with her daughter-in-law); and somewhat apart, his thumbs gleefully inserted in the armpits of his waistcoat, legs a-straddle and eyes a-twinkle, stands triumphant Pop, the Proud Donor.
The rich poshlust emanating from advertisements of this kind is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.
[…] Literature is one of its best breeding places and by poshlust-literature I do not mean the kind of thing which is termed ‘pulp’ or which in England used to go under the name of ‘penny dreadfuls’ and in Russia under that of ‘yellow literature.’ Obvious trash, curiously enough, contains sometimes a wholesome ingredient, readily appreciated by children and simple souls. Superman is undoubtable poshlust, but it is poshlust in such a mild, unpretentious form that it is not worth while talking about; and the fairy tales of yore contained, for that matter, as much trivial sentiment and naive vulgarity as these yarns about modern Giant Killers. Poshlust, it should be repeated, is especially vigorous and vicious when the sham is not obvious and when the values it mimics are considered, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the very highest level of art, thought or emotion. It is those books which are so poshlustily reviewed in the literary supplement of daily papers – the best sellers, the ‘stirring, profound and beautiful’ novels; it is these ‘elevated and powerful’ books that contain and distill the very essence of poshlust.
[…] From the various examples collected here it will be I hope clear that poshlust is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.
Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, 1944.
Poshlust, or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples.
[…] A tinge of poshlost is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass.
Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 1973.
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