ABSTRACT
The study of emotions is notoriously unstable: teasing out the beholder’s response to an image is a particularly fraught enterprise. Emotions are culturally coded, as are their triggers. When I look at Bosch’s image what I feel is an unsettling mixture of despondent angst and detachment tinged with lugubriousness: it is, unmistakably, what Russians refer to as toska (тоска). There is no word like it in English, or apparently in any other language. The epigraph to this chapter, taken from Alexander Pushkin’s magnificent Evgeniĭ Onegin, reflects just that: an accepted translation of it is “I’m young and still robust, you see; / So what’s ahead? Ennui, ennui!”3 And yet, “ennui” is a poor substitute for toska, the word that Pushkin uses to invoke his protagonist’s state of mind. Vladimir Nabokov, in annotating his own translation of Pushkin’s poem, once characterized toska as “a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any particular cause . . . it is a dull
ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning.”4 This is not to say that native Russian speakers have a monopoly on the emotion itself, but that we recognize, conceptualize, and define it readily, exclusively, and through linguistic, and therefore cultural, means.5 Russians describe toska as an often non-specific and just as often inexplicable emotion, at once lofty and quotidian, and not at all uncommon. I feel it not because Bosch’s painting stirs in me pity, or compassion, or pious melancholy – some of the feelings, I will suggest, stirred in the late medieval beholder – but because something about its dirty but luminous palette; its claustrophobic arrangement of figures cropped so as to represent a crowd without end; and the deformed, grotesque, distorted facial features of its protagonists, activates in me that sense of emptiness, of nagging dissatisfaction, and of existential, endless, displaced despair that is the definition of toska. It might be, in fact, because I see toska inscribed on Christ’s face imprinted on Veronica’s sudarium.
