Philistines and Philistinism

Vladimir Nabokov

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose

mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said

"full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a

small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white

heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much

on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also

use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse

than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel

and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in

Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified

vulgarian.

A philistine is not likely to exist in a very primitive society although no doubt rudiments of philistinism

may be found even there. We may imagine, for instance, a cannibal who would prefer the human head he

eats to be artistically colored, just as the American philistine prefers his oranges to be painted orange, his

salmon pink, and his whiskey yellow. But generally speaking philistinism presupposes a certain advanced

state of civilization where throughout the ages certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have

started to stink.

Philistinism is international. It is found in all nations and in all classes. An English duke can be as much

of a philistine as an American Shriner or a French bureaucrat or a Soviet citizen. The mentality of a Lenin

or a Stalin or a Hitler in regard to the arts and the sciences was utterly bourgeois. A laborer or a coal

miner can be just as bourgeois as a banker or a housewife or a Hollywood star.

Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities

expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely

consists. But it should be admitted that all of us have our cliché side; all of us in everyday life often use

words not as words but as signs, as coins, as formulas. This does not mean that we are all philistines, but

it does mean that we should be careful not to indulge too much in the automatic process of exchanging

platitudes. On a hot day every other person will ask you, "Is it warm enough for you?" but that does not

necessarily mean that the speaker is a philistine. He may be merely a parrot or a bright foreigner. When a

person asks you, "Hullo, how are you?" it is perhaps a sorry cliché to reply, "Fine"; but if you made to

him a detailed report of your condition you might pass for a pedant and a bore. It also happens that

platitudes are used by people as a kind of disguise or as the shortest cut for avoiding conversation with

fools. I have known great scholars and poets and scientists who in the cafeteria sank to the level of the

most commonplace give and take.

The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the

total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the

conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-

idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine.

All such great words as "Beauty," "Love," "Nature," "Truth," and so on become masks and dupes when

the smug vulgarian employs them. In Dead Souls you have heard Chichikov. In Bleak House you have

heard Skimpole. You have heard Homais in Madame Bovary. The philistine likes to impress and he likes

to be impressed, in consequence of which a world of deception, of mutual cheating, is formed by him and

around him.

The philistine, in his passionate urge to conform, to belong, to join, is torn between two longings: to act as

everybody does, to admire, to use this or that thing because millions of people do; or else he craves to

belong to an exclusive set, to an organization, to a club, to a hotel patronage or an ocean liner community

(with the captain in white and wonderful food), and to delight in the knowledge that there is the head of a

corporation or a European count sitting next to him. The philistine is often a snob. He is thrilled by riches

and rank—"Darling, I've actually talked to a duchess!"

A philistine neither knows nor cares anything about art, including literature—his essential nature is anti-

artistic—but he wants information and he is trained to read magazines. He is a faithful reader of the

Saturday Evening Post, and when he reads he identifies himself with the characters. If he is a male

philistine he will identify himself with the fascinating executive or any other big shot—aloof, single, but a

boy and a golfer at heart; or if the reader is a female philistine—a philistinette—she will identify herself

with the fascinating strawberry-blonde secretary, a slip of a girl but a mother at heart, who eventually

marries the boyish boss. The philistine does not distinguish one writer from another; indeed, he reads

little and only what may be useful to him, but he may belong to a book club and choose beautiful,

beautiful books, a jumble of Simone de Beauvoir, Dostoevski, Marquand, Somerset Maugham, Dr.

Zhivago, and Masters of the Renaissance. He does not much care for pictures, but for the sake of prestige

he may hang in his parlor reproductions of Van Gogh's or Whistler's respective mothers, although secretly

preferring Norman Rockwell.

In his love for the useful, for the material goods of life, he becomes an easy victim of the advertisement

business. Ads may be very good ads—some of them are very artistic—that is not the point. The point is

that they tend to appeal to the philistine's pride in possessing things whether silverware or underwear. I

mean the following kind of ad: just come to the family is a radio set or a television set (or a car, or a

refrigerator, or table silver—anything will do). It has just come to the family: Mother clasps her hands in

dazed delight, the children crowd around all agog; Junior and the dog strain up to the edge of the table

where the Idol is enthroned; even Grandma of the beaming wrinkles peeps out somewhere in the

background; and somewhat apart, his thumbs gleefully inserted in the armpits of his waistcoat, stands

triumphant Dad or Pop, the Proud Donor.

Small boys and girls in ads are invariably freckled, and the smaller fry have front teeth missing. I have

nothing against freckles (in fact I find them very becoming in live creatures) and quite possibly a special

survey might reveal that the majority of small American-born Americans are freckled, or else perhaps

another survey might reveal that all successful executives and handsome housewives had been freckled in

their childhood. I repeat, I have really nothing against freckles as such. But I do think there is

considerable philistinism involved in the use made of them by advertisers and other agencies. I am told

that when an unfreckled, or only slightly freckled, little boy actor has to appear on the screen in

television, an artificial set of freckles is applied to the middle of his face. Twenty-two freckles is the

minimum: eight freckles over each cheekbone and six on the saddle of the pert nose. In the comics,

freckles look like a case of bad rash. In one series of comics they appear as tiny circles. But although the

good cute little boys of the ads are blond or redhaired, with freckles, the handsome young men of the ads

are generally dark haired and always have thick dark eyebrows. The evolution is from Scotch to Celtic.

The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the

glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable

and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser. Of course, the world they create is pretty harmless

in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer

will join in the make-believe. The amusing part is not that it is a world where nothing spiritual remains

except the ecstatic smiles of people serving or eating celestial cereals, or a world where the game of the

senses is played according to bourgeois rules, but that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual

existence of which neither sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts—especially in this wise

quiet country.

Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the

obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely

attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a

moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a

simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization.

A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest

Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism.

It is possible that the term itself has been so nicely devised by Russians because of the cult of simplicity

and good taste in old Russia. The Russia of today, a country of moral imbeciles, of smiling slaves and

poker-faced bullies, has stopped noticing poshlism because Soviet Russia is so full of its special brand, a

blend of despotism and pseudo-culture; but in the old days a Gogol, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov in quest of the

simplicity of truth easily distinguished the vulgar side of things as well as the trashy systems of pseudo-

thought. But poshlists are found everywhere, in every country, in this country as well as in Europe—in

fact poshlism is more common in Europe than here, despite our American ads.