Poshlost • (пошлость) • noun
Definition: vulgarity, banality, soullessness, crudeness
Origin: Russian
I first learned about poshlost in 2018 from a friend of mine. It seemed like a relatively simple word that means vulgarity, with its adjective form poshlyi (пошлый) meaning “vulgar” or “crude.” (Poshlyi can also be transliterated as poshly, poshily, or poshlyy.) However, what caught our attention was an essay by Russian author Vladimir Nabokov about the uniqueness of this Russian brand of vulgarity and the importance for non-Russian speakers to understand this word.
The essay was in Nabokov’s biography of the Ukrainian-Russian author, Nikolay Gogol, and in the chapter devoted to Gogol’s celebrated novel Dead Souls. Over the course of 11 pages, Nabokov worked to articulate the uniqueness of poshlost. At one point he defined it as “not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” And at another, he attempted to change the word to poshlust to emphasize the lust-filled vulgarity that comes with poshlost.
After reading Nabokov, I then read an article in the Moscow Times by American journalist Michele A. Berdy that defined poshlyi as, “1) vulgar, crude; 2) a mix of pretentious, superficial, philistine, false, banal, soulless, hackneyed, mediocre, saccharine, tasteless, cliched, all served up with a fine sense of moral contempt.”
Neither poshlost or poshlust became well-known to English speakers, but the word immediately resonated with me because it perfectly described Donald Trump. Trump has a crude, philistine vulgarity that shapes all of his actions and he is the opposite of dignified or presidential. I thought about how much America has struggled to define the threat that Trump poses and the horrors of his personality, and I found it hilarious that Russia may have the word to define the specific iteration of vulgarity that Trump possesses.
As news emerges about Michael Cohen’s tell-all book that exposes stories about Trump and his “golden showers” in Vegas and dealings with corrupt Russian mobsters, it is even more important to talk about poshlost today.
A Poshlyi President
If you talk to a Ukrainian or a Russian about Trump, they probably will not describe him as poshlyi. This is not because Trump is not poshlyi, but because poshlyi is normally used to refer to someone at a club or walking down the street who hardly has any clothes on, or behaves like a lecherous creep. Their unrefined overexposure is obviously vulgar.
However there are many layers to poshlost, and the next common usage refers to mobsters and criminals, especially when their criminal lifestyle gets exposed. Walking down the street or in a club, they might seem like a perfectly dignified person, but when the cops kick down their doors and arrest them, their vulgarity is revealed. The sight of a mobster’s house adorned with gaudy gold coloring and various ostentatious junk purely to showcase the wealth they had “earned,” represents another iteration of vulgarity. It is undignified to lavishly spend corrupt money, so this is also poshlost. We have a moral contempt for these people.
While Trump may collaborate with Russian mobsters and is always litigating some criminal accusation in court, the police are yet to kick down his door and haul him off to jail. Trump has the same gaudy, tasteless aesthetic and he adorns everything he can, even toilettes, with gold, but until his arrest and the full-exposure of his criminality he tends to elude this iteration of poshlost.
The next iteration of poshlost is the rarest of all, and this would be a poshlyi head of state. When I spoke to my friends who speak Russian about Trump and poshlost, they were hesitant to describe Trump as poshlyi because it is rare for an objectively vulgar person to run a country, let alone one of the most powerful countries in the world. Yet when I asked them about the former president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, they were able to see that Trump is in fact poshlyi.
Yanukovych was a Ukrainian politician with strong ties to Russia. In 2004, he ran for president and lost despite committing rampant voter fraud. In 2010, he ran for president again and won. One of his first acts as president was to bring up charges of corruption against his presidential rival Yulia Tymoshenko, who would have been Ukraine’s first female president, and to throw her in jail. Throughout the rest of his presidency, Yanukovych gave big government jobs to his friends, misappropriated tens of billions of dollars from Ukraine’s treasury, built himself an opulent mansion outside of Kiev, and strengthened Ukraine’s connections with Russia.
By late 2013, the people of Ukraine had had enough of him, and the final straw occurred when he backed out of a deal that would strengthen Ukraine’s relationship with the European Union. Protests erupted across the nation and Yanukovych responded by increasing the militarization of the police. Over 100 Ukrainians died during the protests, but the people continued fighting. In early 2014, Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia and has been living in Russian exile ever since. After he left the country, the people stormed his luxurious home outside Kiev, and when they were able to see the gaudy, opulent waste of money that he called home, he undeniably became poshlyi. The name of the revolution that forced out Yanukovych is called the Revolution of Dignity. Ukraine needed to oust vulgarity in order to reestablish dignity.
The parallels between Trump and Yanukovych are obvious, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, even worked for Yanukovych. Trump is every iteration of poshlost, but the dignity of the presidency helps mask his vulgarity. We should not have to arrest or exile him in order to confirm that he is not the presidential definition of a dignified leader. We can take a look at his actions, words, and lifestyle choices today to see his poshlyiness for ourselves and hold him accountable. As Ukraine shows, a poshlyi president will inflict a lot of damage upon a nation.
A Poshlyi America
While poshlost can be a great word for defining the vulgarity of a person, it can also speak to the vulgarity of a culture, and in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, we get an image of a poshlyi culture. For America, this Russian culture is not too dissimilar from America’s Antebellum South and the racist, ethnocidal Southern culture that has continued since the Civil War.
In Dead Souls, the main character, Chichikov, seeks to buy the dead serfs of Russian landowners in the 1800s. In Russia, landowners need to pay a tax for each of their serfs, and the amount of this tax was based on the decennial census. Therefore, if serfs died before the next census, they still had to pay the taxes for them. Chichikov hoped to buy these dead serfs for next to nothing, and now on paper, he would look like an affluent landowner. By conning people that he was now a wealthy landowner, he hoped to get access to more money (which he would also use to cover the serf taxes). Chichikov led a soulless existence committed to conning people and crudely generating money. Therefore, Chichikov was incredibly poshlyi. Nabokov described Chichikov as “the ill-paid representative of the Devil, a traveling salesman from Hades.”
In addition, the wealthy, whose lives depended on the labor of the serfs, lived vapid, shallow lives. The serfs took care of the necessities of existence while the wealthy devalued the serfs and elevated the trivial aspects of life. Having refined manners became the barometer for status, class, and culture; and when people were not looking, they sold Chichikov their dead souls. Their lives became vulgar because they reduced the essential to nothingness, and elevated the nonessential to the height of existence.
In Russia, the ownership document for a serf is called a “soul,” so Chichikov linguistically bought the “souls of serfs” and the landowners sold him those souls. Dead Souls is a book about a culture of soulless people who live off of the trafficking of souls, whether or not they’re dead or alive. In 1841, the Russian government banned and prevented the publication of Dead Souls because it challenged the legitimacy and dignity of Russian society. After various adjustments and a title change, the book saw the light of day in 1842.
The society depicted in Dead Souls is similar to the chattel slavery of the South, where the vulgarity of becoming a landowner or aristocrat became something that people aspired to obtain. You are encouraged to become your worst self because the more soulless you are, the more money you gain. Both societies created a vulgar, undignified existence because they devalued human life. It becomes easier to see how both nations are continuing along the same path of attempting to silence the narratives that shine a spotlight on this crude, philistine existence.
When I think of Trump, America, and poshlost, I do not believe that Trump won the White House despite his vulgarity, but because of it. The poshlyi in America needed a poshlyi president to redeem their culture and now we all are forced to live within an increasingly less dignified society. However, in approximately 79 days, our democracy has the chance to civilly aid us in the quest to oust vulgarity and bring back dignity.
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