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Understanding Russianness

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Understanding Russianness Understanding Russianness Edited by Risto Alapuro, Arto Mustajoki, and Pekka Pesonen 12 Two hundred years of poshlost’: a historical sketch of the concept Gennady Obatnin When approaching the study of the concept poshlost’ (‘vulgarity, philistinism’), one is confronted with two important factors. First, for a native of the Russian language and culture, there is nothing about this term that demands conceptualization or any other form of defamiliarizing critique. For confirmation of this fact one can cite the opinion of a popular rock musician and talk-show host Andrey Makarevich. In his autobiography, Makarevich muses: Since the definition of poshlost’ is perfectly known to all but at the same time is completely subjective, every one of us thinks he sees and senses poshlost’ clearly, but in fact sees it absolutely in his own way and in different things. (Makarevich 2008: 81) The musician conducted a survey among his friends and offered a number of answers to the question of how poshlost’ can be defined. The filmmaker Ivan Dykhovichny referred him to Nabokov; another filmmaker, Dmitry Svetozarov, suggested that it is ‘something to do with form’ (and not content); the actress Yuliya Rutberg responded by saying that poshlost’ ‘is always overkill’ and ‘too much’; the singer Alena Sviridova said that it is ‘the inorganic’; a certain A. Romanov generalized to say that poshlost’ is ‘among one’s innermost feelings’; the prose writer Yuz Aleshkovsky sent Makarevich a full letter (which cannot comfortably be quoted due to its vulgar language); and the rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov offered an entirely subjective formulation: ‘Poshlost’ is fear of rejecting your habitual vision of the world even when you are sick of it yourself’ (Makarevich 2008: 82–84). The same quality of being recognizable, but escaping definition is characteristic of what society calls ‘bad taste’ (cf. Eco 1989: 180). The need for such distance only arises in the context of an external point of view. A common theme in discussions of poshlost’ is the impossibility of preserving the word’s semantic fullness when translating it into foreign languages.1 Vladimir Nabokov insisted on the word’s absence in languages other than Russian, and apparently, were it not for him, the concept would not have found its way into the class of terms essential for describing the mentality of the Russian people, once again showing how important the role of individuals can be in an informational vacuum (Nabokov 1944: 63).2 Description of the concept cannot be organized 184 Gennady Obatnin through analogies with other cultures and languages, as, for example, when developing themes like ‘Russian eroticism’ or ‘Russian democracy’. It is precisely for this reason that poshlost’ is logically placed among those terms that form the basis for a specific piece of the Russian conceptual picture of the world.3 This leads to a second a priori consideration important in the description of such a concept: only analysis of its evolution reveals unfamiliar aspects of its meaning.4 Anything that a thoughtful native speaker of Russian could say about poshlost’, relying only on his own linguistic and cultural competence, would be too obvious to occupy anyone’s interest. As a rule dictionaries of the modern language only help formulate things, without adding anything at the level of meaning.5 It is unusual or unclear usages of the word, for example, or certain cultural actors’ excessive attention towards it, arising from personal interest or external circum- stances, that draw the literary historian to study such a word. The former can be found in abundance in the history of this concept, and the latter direct our focus to its critical moments, when its meaning underwent transformations. The historical side of things, most extensively presented by Viktor Vinogradov in a 1947 article, confirms our sense of the Russian term’s originality. According to Vinogradov, the verbal adjective poshly (from poyti, ‘to go’) ‘originates in prehistoric antiquity’ and is used in surviving examples of seventeenth-century mercantile language in the sense of ‘practiced since olden times, usual, normal’.6 Towards the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the word acquires a negative connotation –‘low in quality, utterly ordinary, trifling’–which is logical for the era of Peter I’s transformations and for the inheritors of his ideology. Vinogradov dates a renewal of interest in the word to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, although he refers to an 1847 dictionary, which features all three definitions: ‘ordinary/ trifling, low/unsophisticated, and long-standing/time-honoured’.7 Here we also come across the interesting problem of fixed collocations with the adjective poshly – the appearance of the phrase poshly durak (‘simple fool’) can be found in the Russian National Corpus, primarily among writers from the first half of the nineteenth century (Zagoskin, Narezhny, Gertsen, Belinsky, and others, twenty-three cases in all), and indeed today this expression intuitively strikes one as outdated.8 The fixed expression poshly fars (‘vulgar farce’) sounds just as stylized, in all likelihood belonging to the age of modernism with its amateur theatres (the corpus gives Kuprin’s 1905 ‘The Duel’ as the first example).9 According to Vinogradov, the revival of interest in the word poshly followed a rise of interest in Russian history at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it is then that the abstract noun poshlost’ appears. The abstraction of a given quality and attribution of additional features to the resulting noun is a process which can be observed in other cases of language change. For example, if Michel de Certeau is to be believed, this is precisely how the concept of ‘mysticism’ (la mystique) took shape, albeit over a much longer period of time (Certeau 1992: 76–82). Vinogradov cites the famous quotation from Selected Passages from Corre- spondence with Friends, where Gogol’ relates how Pushkin characterized his gift as a writer: ‘He would always tell me that no other writer had ever possessed such a Two hundred years of poshlost’ 185 gift for exhibiting the stark poshlost’ of life, for outlining with such style the poshlost’ of poshly people’ (1843). According to Gogol’,inDead Souls, it was precisely ‘the poshlost’ of everything that scared the reader so much’: ‘They would have forgiven me if I had exhibited portraits of evil fiends, but for poshlost’ I could not be forgiven’ (Gogol’ 1898: 94).10 As Gogol’ insisted, the same design produced the characters in the first part of his novel, which ‘had to be pure poshlost ’’ (Gogol’ 1898: 96). He abstracted from whole personalities particular features he found in his acquaintances and in himself, and conferred them upon his characters. It should come as no surprise that a Gogol’ scholar as well known as Vasily Gippius collected all instances of the author’s use of the word poshlost’, perhaps planning to write a separate work on the subject. The scholar’s archive contains several pages listed under the title ‘Gogol’s Usage of the Word Poshlost ’’. One also finds a reference to the use of the word poshly in the Novgorod dialect to refer to a merchant who is ‘in’ on a deal. On the back of an envelope with a stamp dated 27 November 1935, one finds the first attempts at a generalized definition: ‘Features lacking in any obvious signs of quality – (inertia), but harmful, i.e. inert in the sense of requiring resistance’(Gippius 1935: 6). From the perspective of how the theme will develop in this chapter, it is also important to note Gippius’ mention of Vladimir Odoyevsky’s story, ‘Princess Zizi’, in which one of the narrators says, ‘It is well-known that the most poshly thoughts are the most elevated, and, vice versa, the most elevated are the most poshly’ (Odoyevsky 2006: 61). Odoyevsky’s story, published in 1839, deals with an important theme for its time – what will be the fate of high moral principles, associated with an out- moded romanticism, as capitalism rises and the class of businessmen with their particular form of morality grows? In different ways, this problem confronts each of the story’s characters, including the two narrators and especially the heroine, who is forced to sublimate a passion for her sister’s husband into an exaggerated virtue. The words of Byron about hating life and holding the human race in contempt sound ridiculous in the mouth of a hack poet. High ethical principles, now no more than a phrase, enter the sphere of poshlost’ – this is the sense of the quoted passage. Vinogradov’s observations can be confirmed by material in the Russian National Corpus: Vissarion Belinsky’s review of Woe from Wit (1839), Valerian Maykov’s review of a collection of poems by Aleksey Kol’tsov,11 and again Gogol’s Selected Passages, while in poetry the first case is Nikolay Yazykov’s epistle To P.V. Kireyevsky (1835). Thus poshlost’ separates itself from the adjective poshly in the middle of the 1830s and does not belong to the epoch of romanticism, as might have been previously assumed, but heralds the following stage in the evolution of literary tastes. Significantly, the adjective poshly appears in the poetic corpus at least thirty years earlier, in Ivan Dmitriyev’s poem The Broken Violin (1805). One finds the first appearance of the adjective in a work of prose at the same time in Ekaterina Dashkova’s Notes, while Vinogradov cites as early an example as Trediakovsky (Vinogradov 1999: 532). Pushkin’s comment, however, is related to the mature Gogol’, who had become Belinsky’s ideal model, almost a kind of banner to which the critic remained loyal even when the author himself had changed 186 Gennady Obatnin direction.
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