Word: nabokovs
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...give his slow story some contrapuntal rhythm and social significance, Lelouch cuts from shots of the triangle (filmed in Technicolor), to monochromatic scenes of conflict in Africa and Asia, presumably covered by the hero. The vulgar-cliche style of these sequences can only be described in Nabokov's term, "poshlost." The reporter self-righteously editorializes: "The Nazis tortured because of a guilty conscience from oppressing Europe during the war . . . In Viet Nam, the U.S. is in the same situation ..." Meanwhile the horrors of battle are shown in pictures as stilted as window displays, the blood stylistically spattered...
...Christina Stead was relatively little known and appreciated in the U.S. The four novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl should firmly establish her reputation as a writer who can make the familiar meaningful without gimmickry. It is not without some reason that her work has been compared to that of Nabokov and Isak Dinesen. Her essential theme in The Puzzleheaded Girl is rootlessness. Her characters are continually trying to flee themselves. Europeans come to America only to find that they and their new country are incompatible; Americans go to Europe and dream of coming home. Miss Stead also fences with...
PHONY, kitch and camp are examples of a useful phenomenon: every so often a word breezes into common usage meaning many things and weaving together previously unrelated objects into a new category. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov offers a new word, poshlost (pronounced push-lost). In Russian it means vulgarity or triteness, but in an interview with Author Herbert Gold in the current Paris Review, Nabokov so expands the definition that it makes one wonder how the English language ever got along without...
Numerous contemporary writers obviously produce poshlost or are, for other reasons, Nabokov's black pets. "Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as 'great literature' by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced...
...Nabokov: "Nothing...