From Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, page 56.
Quoted in review by daev walsh (Dave Walsh?) of
The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan.
Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here
In the original, Emerson lists "violence"
as or with the "things which are dreary and repel".
Gustave Flaubert,
letter to Louise Colet, 06 AUG 1846
The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert,
Trans. by Francis Steegmuller.
Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1953.
Here
"... the Russian word poshlost' (which Nabokov likes to transliterate as poshlust, which not only indicates the way the word is pronounced, but also uses two English words -- posh and lust -- that resonate with the meaning of the Russian).Links are mine -- ed.
It's sort of an untranslatable word. It is often rendered as "banality," but it can also indicate something that is in bad taste or is trashy or cheap, but often poshlust disguises itself as something great, true or beautiful. Nabokov says that 'poshlust is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely attractive.' ...
High school in general is a breeding ground for poshlust.
... poshlust can also be insidious, even at the same time that it is funny. Poshlust that goes unrecognized as such is dangerous because it causes people to respect and worship false forms of beauty and truth. ...
Working with your hands, doing something physical and concrete is a way to escape from poshlust, which depends on abstractions such as beauty, love, honor, truth, to sustain itself."
"Poshlust is a very general Russian term for all that is cheap, shabby, vulgar, and shopworn ..."
... Leaving Las Vegas is not simply a bad film; it is a bad film subtly impersonating a good one. It perpetrates a fraud. As Nabokov suggested in his biography of Gogol, this is the most dangerous category of contemporary artwork (he called it poshlust, the Russian for kitsch that thinks it is not). Real trash, said Nabokov, is often wholesome and transparent. Poshlust, on the other hand, '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.'
What we have, in the reception to Leaving Las Vegas, is a category mistake. Since art is about life, this mistake poisons the way we apprehend both other artworks and life."
"What is most characteristic of poshlust in contemporary writing?
Are there temptations for you in the sin of poshlust? Have you ever fallen?
(Ouch!! Mr. Gold should consider himself lucky that the age of dueling has passed!
-- as Maxin Shrayer asks in "Poetry, Exile, and Prophetic Mystification in 'Vasiliy Shishkov' ",
"What could have been worse to Nabokov than an accusation of poshlust?"
Nabokov: "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 cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature -- these are obvious examples.
Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. "
"The Consumer Superhighway and the Internet represent two opposing models of interactive communication. The Superhighway most likely will be organized on what Electronic Frontier Foundation chair Mitchell Kapor calls "the broadcast model." In this paradigm, a small group of people own the system and decide what gets air time. According to Kapor, this model 'breeds consumerism, passivity, crassness and mediocrity'." In contrast, the Internet is a network of computers and data lines that are owned by thousands of different companies and public institutions. If one of these lines or computers disappears, information can simply be rerouted. Also, the content of the Internet is programmed by the people who use it, rather than the people who own it. Kapor argues that a system like this 'breeds critical thinking, activism, democracy and quality'. "Emphasis and links are mine -- ed.
"... poshlost. For a full comprehension of the meaning of poshlost (pronounced "POSHlust"), readers are referred to Vladimir Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol (1944), which ...
###
"posted at 3:48 PM | Discuss I'm reading Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, which is quite humorous in it's look at banality. But it's more than just banality, according to the introduction: The word translated as "banality" here is the Russian poshlost. For a full comprehension of the meaning of poshlost (pronounced "POSHlust"), readers are referred to Vladimir Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol (1944), which contains a twelve-page disquisition on the subject. Poshlost is a well-rounded, untranslatable whole made up of banality, vulgarity, and sham. It applies not only to obvious trash (verbal and animate), but also to spurious beauty, spurious importance, spurious cleverness. It is an ideal subject for Gogolian treatment, a "gape in mankind," as he calls Plyushkin, an absence he can bring to enormous presence by filling it with verbal matter. Gogol's portrayal of poshlost goes far beyond topical satire or a denunciation of social evils. His characters are not time bound; they inhabit an indefinitely expanded time in which they lose the sharply negative features of vice and wickedness and instead become wildly funny. They also have no psychology, no "inner nature."
This word needs to be adopted into the english language, and quickly. Much of our media, society, and scholarship can be distilled down into that one single concept of poshlost. A "gape in mankind." I love it."
"If one is making an effort to maintain a high quality life and spiritual integrity, one is swimming directly against the force of this inexorable tide. So it's sometimes necessary to make distressing choices which may involve material sacrifice, such as accepting a lower income, or changing jobs, location and lifestyles, in order to achieve inner peace and maintain one's spiritual pursuits."
"Born 97 years ago (1899) in St. Petersburg, Nabokov had lived in "fifty or sixty lodgings" in Berlin and Paris before coming to America in 1940. Eventually, joshing and laughing uproariously with the official examiner (to the horror of the prim Russian who accompanied him), Nabokov passed his citizenship test and became, for the first time since 1917, the citizen of a country.
Nabokov's perspective on pain is shaped by loss -- of his country, to the Bolsheviks; of his father, to right-wing assassins; of his home in exile (twice); of a homosexual brother, to the Nazis; and, finally, of the Russian language. In a century of murderous political upheaval, Nabokov writes not as an ideologue but as a survivor of ideologies, who spent his last years (though still an American citizen) in Europe's only neutral country."
"Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful."
"Bloom begins by examining the students in our prestige universities, and he finds them deficient in moral formation, in reading of serious books, in musical tastes, and above all in eros. They have no love in their souls, no longing for anything high or great. Their minds are empty, their characters weak, and their bodies sated with rock and roll and easy sex."
"These two books by young female journalists offer a depressing view of modern sexual mores in which it is increasingly acceptable for men to sit in front of their computers ... in lieu of having relationships with actual women, and in which women are desperately trying to please these guys by looking as much like (adult materials) stars as plastic surgery and skimpy clothing will allow. ...
Ariel Levy's book on "raunch culture" also looks at the coarsening of society but focuses on the behavior of women rather than men. ... 'A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular.' ... Levy warns that women have essentially given in and joined 'the frat party of pop culture.'
The notion that being raunchy is about being progressive is hogwash, Levy writes. It's just about being brainwashed by a skillful and profitable industry that has been promoting a very narrowly defined, teenage boy's vision of female beauty and behavior. For example, between 1992 and 2004, the number of breast-augmentation procedures in America increased more than 700 percent, she writes. ...
Levy's thesis was pretty much summed up by Erica Jong when Levy interviewed Jong on the 30th anniversary of the publication of her sexy novel Fear of Flying. 'Let's not kid ourselves that this is liberation,' Jong warned. 'The women who buy the idea that (being exhibitionistic) is power -- I mean, I'm for all that stuff -- but let's not get so into the [body parts] that we don't notice how far we haven't come. Let's not confuse that with real power. I don't like to see women fooled.'"
Lycidas
by John Milton
I first encountered this on
a Web review of John Brunner's science fiction.
I suppose, though I am not certain, that it is
the epigraph of his
The Sheep Look Up