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
