In a former posting, I brought up Nabokov's description of the Russian word
"Toska"
Vladmir Nabokov: “
No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At
its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish,
often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the
soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness,
mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody
of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades
into ennui, boredom.”
There are developments to this
EO I- XXXIV entry in
n. to Three:VII: 10: "
Toska is the generic term for
a feeling of physical or metaphysical dissatisfaction, a sense of longing, a
dull anguish, a preying misery, a gnawing mental ache."
At the end of his note to"/Sgoráya négoy i toskóy:" (p.337)
Nabokov adds: "Pushkin's three favorite words, nega,
toska, and tomlen'e, are all collected here in one
bunch."
According to him "nega ranges from
'mollitude'...through various shades of amorous pensiveness...to outright
voluptuousness."
When Nabokov applies "mollitude", in Ada, there seems to be
no indication to Pushkin, rather the opposite for, from what I recollect,
in Ada it is associated to male vulgarity and not to a romantic
maiden's burning "with all the French languours of flesh and
fancy." [cf. also p.360: sensuousness...aching
(négi...toskúyushchey)].
From a different angle, Nabokov's returns once again to "Toska" in his
Lectures on Don Quixote (Ed.Bowers, p. 69)
"Sancho has gone and Don Quixote is strangely alone and
suddenly feels himself permeated with a strange sense of loneliness and
yearning, something more than merely a sense of solitude, a kind of purposeless
nostalgic longing." He retires to his room and the reader "can see through
the window bars the gleam of the bright green stockings he is slowly shedding
and studying - just as in reading another famous story, where the grotesque and
the lyrical are somewhat similarly interwoven, Gogol's Dead Souls, we
shall glimpse ...the glossy leather of a pair of new boots that a dreaming
lodger admires...But Don Quixote's stockings are anything bu new. O disaster,
the narrator sighs as he contemplates the bursting of several stitches in the
left stocking... The wrteched sense of poverty mingles with his general
dejection and he finally goes to bed, moody and heavy-hearted. Is it only
Sancho´s absence and the burst threads of his stockings that induce this
sadness, this Spanish soledad, this Portuguese
saudades, this French
angoisse, this German
Sensucht, this Russian
toska? We wonder – we wonder if it does not go deeper. Remember
that Sancho, his squire, is the crutch of Quixote's madness, the prop of his
delusion, and now Don Quixote is strangely alone.”
In both instances (EO and Quixote) it is mentioned close to
a lady (Tatiana and Altisidora) and, particularly in Quixote,
referred to a defenseless state of madness, when dreams
may permeate reality in a new revelatory way.