{"id":293586,"date":"2013-03-28T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/03\/28\/arnon-grunberg-on-dubrakva-ugresic\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:40","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:40","slug":"arnon-grunberg-on-dubrakva-ugresic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/03\/28\/arnon-grunberg-on-dubrakva-ugresic\/","title":{"rendered":"Arnon Grunberg on Dubrakva Ugresic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, The Millions ran this excellent piece<\/a> by Arnon Grunberg on fellow Open Letter author Dubravka Ugresic:<\/p>\n

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The Russian word poshlost<\/em>, according to a seminal essay by Vladimir Nabokov, has a number of possible definitions \u2014 \u201ccheap,\u201d \u201cinferior, \u201cscurvy,\u201d \u201ctawdry\u201d \u2014 but is perhaps best grasped by example. He cites a character from a story told by Gogol. A German tries, unsuccessfully, to seduce a young girl who sits each evening on her balcony along a lake. At wit\u2019s end, he decides at last to go swimming in the lake each evening with a pair of swans, prepared by him specially for that purpose. He succeeds in embracing both swans while swimming. The ritual repeats itself for a few successive evenings. The girl resists at first, but finally, in Gogol\u2019s telling, \u201cthe lady\u2019s heart was conquered.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Poshlost<\/em>, then, is the generation of sentiment in the hope that it will elicit someone else\u2019s favor. Or, as Nabokov puts it, a form of sentimentalism \u201cso cleverly painted over with protective tints that its presence often escapes attention.\u201d [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Seduction is one of the great themes of the Croation writer Dubravka Ugresic\u2019s essays . . . but not \u2013 or only rarely \u2013 the seduction that takes place between two lovers. She is far more interested in the seductive tactics of generals, intellectuals, wartime profiteers, academics, and businessmen (the latter category being one in which she also places publishers). Seduction, she suggests, is not only the lead-up to the conquest of a lover, but also the lead-up to war, ethnic cleansing, and the rewriting of history. No ideology, no sales, no religion, no democracy, and no dictatorship without seduction.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The bitter truth behind all seduction does not escape Ugresic\u2019s notice, either: the seducee is merely an obstacle. The seducer conquers like a supreme commander, without worrying too much about the collateral damage, focusing solely on efficiency, on the result. Poshlost<\/em>, Ugresic observes, is an inevitable byproduct.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Indeed, poshlost<\/em> is one of Ugresic\u2019s favorite words, cropping up all over her five collections of essays. For her, it is linked inextricably to Nabokov\u2019s earlier essay, and is often deployed alongside her own formulation: \u201ca gingerbread heart.\u201d But what continues to amaze and agitate her in these essays is that the imitation, the gingerbread, turns out to be so seductive. Indeed, it is the lie that seduces us, that makes our hearts skip a beat. Two swans embraced by a German in a lake at dusk \u2014 how could one ever resist that?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Poshlost<\/em> is, of course, a subspecies of kitsch; it is kitsch that is no longer recognized as such, that is to be found everywhere, including in what we may call \u201cgreat art,\u201d and from which one can never escape. The writer himself is caught up in the thick of it. He too, after all, is a seducer, he too wishes to sell something, and to the extent that he has ever felt ashamed of that, he stopped noticing a long time ago.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Ugresic, and this speaks in her favor, does not feign coyness about this situation; coyness, after all, is one of the hallmarks of poshlost. No, she is very much aware of the fact that she herself is a part of the literary and intellectual machinery and its sales techniques. She knows that she, too, seduces in a professional capacity. (Ugresic cites approvingly another remark of Nabokov\u2019s: \u201cIn the kingdom of poshlost<\/em>, it is not the book that \u2018makes a triumph\u2019, but the reading public.\u201d) An essay in Thank You for Not Reading<\/em> discusses a prostitute in America who claims not to be a prostitute but a \u201cpleasure activist.\u201d Ugresic ends the piece with the statement that she too is a \u201cpleasure activist,\u201d and that no one may take her profession away from her.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Then again, the pleasures of Ugresic\u2019s essays are unusual ones. Some one hundred and fifty years ago now, the Dutch writer Multatuli pointed out that the author has a great deal in common with the prostitute. Multatuli himself tried to maintain his dignity, he said, by haranguing his customers. Ugresic in turn, I believe, tries to maintain her dignity by not giving her customers what they expect from a Balkan-born writer. Gripping tales of communism and post-communism, for example, stories about standing in line for butter and about no longer having to stand in line for butter.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Instead, she asks: What are we to do if we breathe in kitsch every day, if kitsch saturates even our private lives? How can intellectuals maintain a critical stance with regard to something ubiquitous, unless they, as Isaac Babel put it, become \u201cmasters in the genre of silence?\u201d Ugresic\u2019s melancholy conclusion is that there remains no position possible outside the world of poshlost, not for the intellectual either. A position like that would be a pose, insincere and misleading: poshlost<\/em> itself, in other words. Ugresic concedes, in short, its inescapability. She admits that it would be deceitful to pretend that poshlost<\/em> has not won the final victory.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The whole piece<\/a> is definitely worth reading, as is Arnon’s latest book, Tirza<\/em>,<\/a> along with Dubravka’s two Open Letter titles: Nobody’s Home<\/em><\/a> and Karaoke Culture.<\/em><\/a> <\/p>\n

Speaking of Dubravka, her new book, Europe in Sepia<\/em>, is currently being translated by David Williams and will come out from Open Letter in February 2014. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, The Millions ran this excellent piece by Arnon Grunberg on fellow Open Letter author Dubravka Ugresic: The Russian word poshlost, according to a seminal essay by Vladimir Nabokov, has a number of possible definitions \u2014 \u201ccheap,\u201d \u201cinferior, \u201cscurvy,\u201d \u201ctawdry\u201d \u2014 but is perhaps best grasped by example. He cites a character from a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[42666,2186,3536],"class_list":["post-293586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-arnon-grunberg","tag-dubravka-ugresic","tag-the-millions"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339866,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293586\/revisions\/339866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}