Poshlost'

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Poshlost' is a Russian word (пошлость) defined by the critic Vladimir Alexandrov as a kind of "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity".

The first examinations of poshlost' in literature are in the work of Nikolai Gogol'. Gogol' wrote, referring to Pushkin, "He used to say of me that no other writer before me possessed the gift to expose so brightly life's poshlust, to depict so powerfully the poshlust of a poshlusty man [poshlost' poshlogo cheloveka] in such a way that everybody's eyes would be opened wide to all the petty trivia that often escape our attention." ("The Third Letter á Propos Dead Souls, 1843, quoted and apparently translated by Davydov, 1995).

D. S. Mirsky used the word in writing about Gogol', but Vladimir Nabokov made it more widely known in his book on Gogol', where he romanized it punningly as "poshlust", and in later writings. Azar Nafisi references poshlust in her book Reading Lolita in Tehran, saying, "Poshlust, Nabokov explains, is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." Davydov (1995) lists literary characters who Nabokov used to exemplify the term in Nikolai Gogol: "Polonius and the royal pair in Hamlet, Rodolphe and Homais from Madame Bovary, Laevsky in Chekhov's 'The Duel', Joyce's Marion Bloom, young Bloch in Search of Lost Time, Maupassant's 'Bel Ami', Anna Karenina's husband, and Berg in War and Peace." Nabokov often targeted poshlost' in his own work; the Alexandrov quotation above refers to the character of M'sieur Pierre in Invitation to a Beheading. Another notable literary treatment is Fyodor Sologub's novel The Petty Demon.

[edit] References

• Alexandrov, Vladimir (1991). Nabokov's Otherworld. Princeton University Press, p. 106. ISBN 0691068666. 
• Davydov, Sergej (1995). "'Poshlost' '", in in V. Alexandrov (ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Routledge, 628–632. ISBN 0-8153-0354-8. 
• Mirsky, D. S. (1927). A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, p. 193. 

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