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INTERVIEWER
What is most characteristic of poshlust in contemporary writing? Are there temptations for you in the sin of poshlust? Have you ever fallen?
NABOKOV
“Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudoliterature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.”
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Jorge Luis Borges, E. M. Forster, William Maxwell, Mary McCarthy, Aleksandr Blok, Nikolai Gogol, James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, H. G. Wells, Edmund Wilson |
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