Charmed Life

John Bayley

• The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak by Richard Freeborn
  Cambridge, 256 pp, £27.50, January 1983, ISBN 0 521 24442 0
• Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art by Guy de Mallac
  Souvenir, 450 pp, £14.95, February 1983, ISBN 0 285 62558 6
• Pasternak: A Biography by Ronald Hingley
  Weidenfeld, 294 pp, £12.95, August 1983, ISBN 0 297 78207 X
• Selected Poems by Boris Pasternak, translated by Jon Stallworthy, by Peter France
  Allen Lane, 160 pp, £7.50, February 1983, ISBN 0 7139 1497 1
• Poets of Modern Russia by Peter France
  Cambridge, 240 pp, £20.00, February 1983, ISBN 0 521 23490 5
• Russian Literature since the Revolution by Edward Brown
  Harvard, 413 pp, £20.00, December 1982, ISBN 0 674 78203 8

The poet Blok once wrote about the ‘gloomy roll-call’ in Russian history of tyrants and executioners, ‘and opposite them a single bright name – Pushkin’. Quite true. But to put it like that is the equivalent of a single bright name outside the cinema – Omar Sharif as Dr Zhivago. The Russians have a word for the process – poshlost. This is not vulgarity, which is a good honest affair, but a factitious emphasis placed where none should exist, the facile forcing into expression and standardisation of what can only be true at the level of private, exploratory feeling. Television and advertising, politics and journalism, are the natural homes of poshlost, where it has its proper uses and its presence is so much taken for granted as to be relatively benign. Though bad art may embody poshlost, its pretensions are usually harmless and recognisable: worse things happen when good art is taken up by poshlost, and has the kind of qualities which it can take over.