“Poshlost”’

In his 1950 lecture on “Philistines and Philistinism” (.LRL 309-314), Nabokov expanded the concept with additional features. “Poshlust” or “poshlism” is the mental essence that emanates from a “smug philistine,” a “dignified vulgarian,” a “bourgeois” (in a Flaubertian, not a Marxist sense-for it reflects “a state of mind, not a state of pocket” [LRL 309]). “Poshlust” always presupposes the veneer of civilization, but the values enjoyed by the philistine as genuine are by implication a fraud. Manifestations of “poshlust” range from petty to cosmic: they include the harmless kitsch and make-believe of advertisement, the banality of mass culture, the automatic exchange of platitudes, trends, and fads in social and cultural life, bogus profundities, pseudo-“great books,” hackneyed literary criticism, political propaganda, totalitarian forms of government, organized cults and anthropomorphic notions of the “beyond,” and much more. For example, shoddy thinking such as comparing Senator McCarthy to Stalin or Hitler, and concluding that “America is no better than Russia” or that “We all share in Germany’s guilt” is “poshlust.” “Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name-that of the treasurer) is genteelposhlosf (SO 101).