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.