Vulgarity/Poshlost : On the Nature of Cultural Emptiness

 

Vulgarity/Poshlost : On the Nature of Cultural Emptiness - Claude.ai

Nabokov was perhaps the only Russian writer who made vulgarity a subject of almost systematic study. He understood: vulgarity is not just bad taste, and not just ignorance. It is a particular state of spirit in which a person is completely unaware of their own spiritual emptiness. It is this ignorance of oneself that is its essential feature. He who knows of his own vulgarity is already half-saved. He who is self-satisfied is lost forever.

What happens when such a person comes to art?

They bring with them not malicious intent, but something more terrifying—indifference to meaning. A director makes a film about Pushkin in much the same way they might produce a line of air conditioners: demand is studied, the target audience is calculated, the packaging is made recognizable. Recognizability here is key—the consumer must feel safe, encounter nothing unfamiliar, experience no tension. In this logic, Pushkin is not a poet, but a brand. A brand with a high level of trust, verified by the school curriculum. His name on a poster signifies something akin to a seal of quality—only the quality is substituted, the contents discarded, while the shell remains. This is the "poshlost" (vulgarity) according to Nabokov: form without content, confidently passing itself off as content.

There's an important psychological subtlety here. The vulgarian does not lie in the same way a swindler lies. The swindler knows they are deceiving. The vulgarian is sincere—they are genuinely convinced they've made a "wonderful film" and a "future classic." It is this sincerity that makes the phenomenon culturally significant, not merely criminal. We are faced not with a crime, but a diagnosis—the atrophy of the organ responsible for distinguishing between the genuine and the counterfeit. Such atrophy is contagious: it is transmitted through a billion rubles in box office receipts, through the smiles of a million and a half viewers who also don't feel the difference—or feel it but don't trust their feeling, because the majority around them is applauding.

This is the deepest problem. Vulgarity in art acts as a mechanism for training perception. The viewer, exposed to it frequently, is gradually weaned off genuine experience. They stop expecting from a work of art that internal event that should happen to them—the shock, the recognition, the touch of something greater than themselves. Instead, they get used to safe entertainment. Nothing touched them, nothing demanded effort, everything was nice and committed them to nothing. And gradually this "commits to nothing" becomes the main criterion: good cinema is that which leaves you in no pain afterward.

But art that leaves you in no pain is not art. It is anesthesia.

Interestingly, genuine cultural life has always presupposed a certain violence towards the viewer—not physical, but existential. Greek tragedy existed precisely to evoke catharsis—purification through shock. Pushkin wrote "Eugene Onegin" as a novel in which the reader inevitably confronts questions about themselves.

Vulgarity in art is always a story about what has been discarded. Meanings are discarded, uncomfortable questions are discarded, quiet pauses are discarded, complexity is discarded. What remains is a shell that can move and produce sounds. This is precisely why actors so often resemble "posthumous masks, temporarily come to life": behind their movements, there is no internal impulse, because the film itself does not assume that the internal matters. Appearance matters. Dimples on cheeks. Lush historical costumes. A CGI island with a swan.

There is another dimension—the social one. Vulgarity in art is never politically neutral. It always serves consensus—a silent agreement between producer and consumer that thinking is unnecessary, doubting is unnecessary, worrying is unnecessary. This makes it a convenient tool for any authority that prefers tranquility over honesty.

So what is to be done with this knowledge?

Perhaps the only answer is as simple and as old as the accusations against vulgarity themselves: to preserve living receptivity. To not consent to anesthesia. To remember how it should hurt—after Chekhov, after Tarkovsky, after the real Pushkin, not the branded one. This requires effort, because living receptivity is always vulnerability. But it is precisely this vulnerability that art exists for. Vulgarity offers to get rid of it. And therein lies its main temptation, and its main lie.

Claude.ai based on a post by Katerina Barabash 02/25/2026

And a bit about "culture." Sarik Andreasyan's film The Tale of Tsar Saltan is approaching a staggering box office figure — 1.5 billion rubles. At the same time, I haven't seen anything worse in the last many years. Those who saw his Eugene Onegin should know: compared to The Tale of Tsar Saltan, that film is a masterpiece.

Once upon a time, there was a matchmaker woman, Babarikha, and she had three daughters: Manya, Dunya, and Annushka. Manya and Dunya were cheerful chatterboxes, but mean, while Annushka... What Annushka was like, we never find out, because although she was beautiful, she seemed a bit mute and slightly not all there. She most resembled a slightly animated Lot's wife, who, out of mercy, was allowed to move a little and utter a few words, but was warned not to let a single muscle twitch, or she'd be banished. And the actress Lisa Moryak, who is also the director's wife, diligently keeps her face as impassive as Stierlitz. Occasionally, she'll say something like, "There's something unclear here," and then fall silent again.

The other characters resemble their own death masks, temporarily brought to life and made to speak, much to the horror of the audience. The dyed blonde with dark roots, Gvidon, smiles endlessly and foolishly, as if afraid that if he stops smiling, everyone will forget he has dimples. Pavel Priluchny, as a Lord-of-Hosts-style Tsar Saltan, seems to carry the burden of his ancestors' guilt back to the seventh generation. To say that his eyes, barely peeking out from under his curls, express melancholy would be an excessive compliment: throughout the entire film, they express absolutely nothing. The one bright spot is Olga Tumaykina as Babarikha — she's lively and funny.

Andreasyan has kindly preserved Pushkin's plot. It's just that Pushkin's rhymes have desperately gotten in his way more than once before, so, just as he did with Eugene Onegin, he leaves the poetry to a voiceover while the characters speak in vulgar prose.

Andreasyan is the chief purveyor of vulgarity (poshlost') in Russian cinema. The very quintessence of it.
"Poshlost' is not only obviously trash but also falsely significant, falsely beautiful, falsely clever, falsely attractive," said Nabokov.

Under the guise of love for Pushkin and an attempt to instill this love in the youth, he made Eugene Onegin, stripping it of all Pushkin's meaning. Under the guise of respect for Soviet cinema, he remade one of the older generation's most beloved films, Office Romance, transplanting the action to a modern office and destroying all of Ryazanov's humor and tenderness towards the characters. Under the guise of a film about the search for justice, he made the frighteningly immoral The Unforgiven — where Andreasyan, without a moment's hesitation, justifies murder. Under the guise of "wholesome family entertainment," he turned The Tale of Tsar Saltan into monstrous, hackneyed rubbish, trying to make children laugh with a tasteless squirrel dancing to "In the Garden, in the Orchard" in a Panama hat and ending the film with the entire cast dancing to a Dima Bilan song.

Elena Yampolskaya, Putin's advisor on culture, has already unleashed all her might against Tsar Saltan, promising to begin cultural enlightenment among the popular masses entrusted to her. But it's better to have Andreasyan's versions of Saltan and Onegin than for Yampolskaya, as she threatens, to actually take on "the work of linguistic and general cultural enlightenment of authors." Because then it won't just be Andreasyan who suffers — the fruits of such "enlightenment" would be yet another boundless list of prohibitions, and that's scarier than all of Sarik's creations put together.

Yesterday Sarik wrote on Instagram: "What a wonderful film we've made! Went to see it with Lisa and the kids. A miracle! Future classic!" Well, isn't that just lovely?
"Poshlost' is the complacency of the spirit," Nabokov also defined it. As I said — a textbook example. Of course, Andreasyan isn't really a director — he's a pure businessman, cynical and calculating. It just so happened that his marketing talents led him to cinema, but they could just as easily have led him into button or air conditioner manufacturing. To him, whether it's Galustyan or Pushkin, it's all the same damn thing.

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