‘Poshlost’ -- Self-Satisfied Vulgarity -- has Triumphed in Putin’s Russia, Besedin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 1 – Had Yury Olesha been writing now instead of 90 years ago, he would have called his most important novel, Envy, “Poshlost” instead, Sergey Besedin says, because the self-satisfied vulgarity that term refers to has become so widespread there is almost no one left in Russia to say that something should not be done because it should not be done.

            Instead, those infected by this notion in the arts, literature and public life are plumbing new depths on an almost daily basis; and they have become so influential that others who have up to now stood aside from this trend are deciding to join in on the principle that “we are no worse than they,” the Siberian commentator says (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5E0DA3F1A0FFB).

            Poshlost is everywhere now: “in the government and the ministry of foreign affairs, on television, in films, theater and literature. Thee main writers of Russia (Dontsova and Prilepin), the chief artist (Safronov), and the main singers (Leps and Mikhailov) are all passionate but quite common expressors of vulgarity.” 

            What makes the triumph of this way of approaching the world so striking is that for much of past century, fighting against poshlost, as Svetlana Boym has pointed out (Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, 1994), p. 41), was “a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia.”

            Now, as she defines it, this “Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual” and a term which “encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality” isn’t being opposed but rather celebrated. 

            At various points, Russia has given the world terms that help to understand not only it but the world around it, the aspirations and the nature of its people and those of others.  Sixty years ago, it was “the thaw” and sputnik, then is was “nyet,” and then it was “glasnost” and “perestroika.”

            Now the word that Russia is giving the world is poshlost, a set of values or more precisely anti-values that has infected not only that country but other major countries as well.