Stan Kelly-Bootle:Nabokov actually reveals the truth behind the myth by defining Toska using a sequence of English words. No Anglophone can be in any doubt about the ‘meanings’ of Toska. It’s a wide contextually-mediated semantic spread not YET expressible by any single word in the OED.
 
JM:  Please, note that in his Quixote lectures Nabokov mentions "toska" and, quite deceptively, offers a string of "single word synonims" in different languages: “The wretched 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 Sehnsucht, this Russian toska? We wonder – we wonder if it does not go deeper”.
He describes a scene, poses a question, spreads this collection of foreign words ( btw most of them are cumulative: solitude+longing+anguish...) before he makes it clear that these words aren't enough to render an even "deeper" emotional state of affairs that remains unnamed.
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