'That Sheer Spiritual Tackiness'

An old acquaintance, Mikhail Iossel, has sent me a copy of his latest book, Sentence (Linda Leith Publishing, 2025), a volume that lives up to its title. Each of its thirty-eight stories is a single sentence, ranging in length from ten words to nineteen pages. Of necessity, most of the stories are exercises in free association, a creative deployment of and and other connectives, and a memory-driven linkage of memoir and commentary. He has plenty to remember: Mikhail was born in Leningrad (formerly Petrograd, now St. Petersburg again) in the Soviet Union, emigrated to the U.S. in 1986 and taught himself English. His obsessive concern is language – what he and the rest of us have lost and gained. 

Chapter 15, the punningly titled “Posh Lust,” celebrates one of the book's tutelary spirits, Vladimir Nabokov, a fellow multi-lingual man. In his charmingly eccentric critical biography Nikolai Gogol (New Directions, 1944), Nabokov introduces to English speakers the Russian word poshlust. He detested mawkish sentiment, the cloying sincerity of fake art, and defined it as “not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” He compactly defines poshlust as “smug philistinism.” It is the impulse that drives most art, literary and otherwise, as well as our politics, today. Cheap, strident sincerity. Mikhail writes:

 

“. . . brutal honesty and triumphant poshlost (that sheer spiritual tackiness whose elusive nature of a randomly semi-invisible and unpredictably shape-shifting Russian butterfly the matchless classifier Vladimir Nabokov, whose birthday happens to be today, along with that of his extreme antipode and altogether an uncommonly evil man Vladimir Lenin, had attempted repeatedly and largely unsuccessfully, alas, to pin down, referring to it by turns as ‘corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases . . .’”

 

It's tough deciding where to start quoting Mikhail and where to stop.

 

“‘. . . imitations of imitations, bogus profundities,’ and, of course, famously, as ‘posh-lust’ — indeed, that sublimated overpowering noxious, sickeningly narcissistic and self-destructive, ugly lust for the vapid poshness of unbridled mass attention and adoration, or even mass hatred, for that matter, it doesn’t matter, so long as one remains firmly lodged in the roiling center of popular attention and keeps being talked about, talked about, at any cost, regardless of what it takes,  how many people may get hurt in the process) . . .”

 

You can probably sense where this is going – “Trump’s posh lust for life.”