Poshlost

Poshlost or Poshlost' (Russian: по́шлость ; IPA: [ˈpoʂləsʲtʲ]) is a Russian word for a particular negative human character trait or man-made thing or idea. It has been cited as an example of an untranslatable word, as there is no single exact English equivalent. It carries much cultural baggage in Russia and has been discussed at length by various writers.

It is derived from the adjective .

It has been defined as "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity", while Svetlana Boym defines it briefly as "obscenity and bad taste".

Boym goes on to describe it at more length:

Poshlost’ is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality. The war against poshlost’ was a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia from the 1860s to 1960s.

Early examinations of poshlost in literature are in the work of Nikolai Gogol. Gogol wrote (of 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' poshlovo cheloveka] in such a way that everybody's eyes would be opened wide to all the petty trivia that often escape our attention."

In his novels, Turgenev "tried to develop a heroic figure who could, with the verve and abandon of a Don Quixote, grapple with the problems of Russian society, who could once and for all overcome 'poshlost’, the complacent mediocrity and moral degeneration of his environment".Dostoyevsky applied the word to the Devil; Solzhenitsyn, to Western-influenced young people.

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