Word: poshlost
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...were the Marcos shoes, like the billions of stolen dollars, merely grotesque? The Russian word poshlost suggests the transcendent vulgarity at work in the Marcos spectacle. Poshlost is something preposterously overdone but without self-knowledge or irony. It is comic and sad and awful. An 18th century French merchant of great wealth named Beaujean came to the same dead end as Marcos with his Swiss gold and his ruined kidneys. "He owned amazing gardens," the historian Miriam Beard wrote of Beaujean, "but he was too fat to walk in them . . . He had countless splendid bedrooms and suffered from insomnia...
...poshlost, as the Russians say, an overheated lunge toward the profound, to think of Casablanca in terms of deeper allegory. Still, it is hard to resist delving for Jungian archetypes, primal transactions of the kind that lurk in, say, the Oedipus story (Here's looking...
...distorted. It is one thing to change an author's lines or his characters. It is quite another to destroy his soul. Mann's Death in Venice is, in fact, no more about homosexuality than Kafka's The Metamorphosis is about entomology. Visconti's poshlost may aspire to tragedy, but it does not even achieve melancholia; it is irredeemably, unforgivably...
...culture," said Bly. "It turns out that we can put down a revolution as well as the Russians in Budapest, we can destroy a town as well as the Germans did at Lidice, all with our famous unconcern." For his hyperbole-the kind of thing that Vladimir Nabokov calls poshlost-Bly drew some expected cheers, and a resounding volley of jeers...
...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 as if war were...