At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. Here is what writer Vladimir Nabokov once wrote about toska: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. The untranslatable word toska could be described as “emotional anguish”, or melancholy of a particular kind, or “Russian ennui”, except none of the aforementioned fully conveys its essence. It is not for nothing that every good computer game that has “Russia” as a location features panelkas. With time, these cheerless apartment blocks have become synonymous with post-Soviet depression in Russia and, at the same time, they are now part of the Russian cultural code. As a result, half the country ended up living in identical compact apartments and the panelka became a kind of bond uniting all Russians - wherever you went, be it the Urals, Moscow or Khabarovsk, you would find identical panelkas. Panelkas started to be mass built across the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century, as a way of solving the housing problem quickly: Housing that was spartan, as plain as can be and, most importantly, as cheaply made as possible, to provide millions of people with a roof over their heads. Panelkaĭespite our prostor, we still live in panelkas - apartment blocks built of prefabricated reinforced concrete slabs known for the modest floor area, low ceilings, uniform layout and very poor sound insulation of their apartments. In the Russian psyche, the dislike of rules and restrictions, even if the latter are justified, is akin to Russians’ disinclination to pretend to be happy with everything, just because it is polite to do so. Have you seen the crazy video footage from dashboard cameras of so-called “typical Russian driving”? In a sense, this is also about prostor. It is not just about territorial freedom, but about freedom as such. The word prostor also has another meaning - the absence of any restrictions or constraints in anything. The concept of prostor is deeply embedded in the national character. The saying: “The Russian soul loves prostor” and thousands of songs and poems about Russia's boundless open spaces are evidence of this. Over hundreds of years of territorial expansion, Russians have developed a special relationship with their land: They’ve become accustomed to huge distances and see them as an inalienable part of their landscape and indirect proof of their own might and strength (after all, all this land had to be acquired first!). Prostor means free and completely unrestricted space. ![]() ![]() There is no better word than prostor to describe the largest country in the world by area, covering 17 million square kilometers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |