Trying to tame the strange Gogol came across the Russian word, poshlost, which intrigues me straightaway.  That contagion, Wikipedia, says his writing is concerned with poshlost, and promptly translates this “untranslatable” word as

self-satisfied inferiority.

Better and better, I think.  And Time magazine thought so too.  In an article from 1967 it ascribes the word’s debut in the English-speaking world to none other than my pet, Nabokov.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov offers a new word, poshlost (pronounced push-lost).  In Russian it means vulgarity or triteness, but in an interview with author Herbert Gold, in the current Paris Review, Nabokov so expands the definition that it makes one wonder how the English language ever got along without it.

The article is very funny, not only for Nabokov’s relish in elaborating the concept but in the contempt he dishes out to fellow writers along the way.

Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me.  Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned.  Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me …

Gold: “What have you learned from Joyce?”
Nabokov: “Nothing”.

Poshlost, he says, means “corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature … if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism … social comment, humanistic messages … overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.”

Poshlost “speaks”, he says, in such concepts as

We all share in Germany’s guilt … Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Viet Name is seditious poshlost.  Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, that is simple, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays.  Poshlost calls Mr Blank a great poet, and Mr Bluff a great novelist.

Funniest of all is poshlost’s “favourite breeding place,” the Art Exhibition:

… there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds …

If only we’d had poshlost around to capture at one stroke the sanctimoniousness, sentimentality, conventionality of the Bill Henson “debate” of last year. All of it, the art and the hot air.

To read the Time article, click here.