Toska and Other Hard-to-Translate Russian Words

Did you know there’s a Russian word that can’t be translated into any language in the world?

When Nabokov was translating Eugene Onegin, he came across this word and simply left it in its original form.

The word is “toska.” And now I’ll tell you why it can’t be translated.

Nabokov worked on his translation of Onegin for almost twenty years.

The result was a two- volume set, over a thousand pages long, published in 1964.

And he wrote an entire paragraph about the word toska.

Here are his words: “No single English word conveys all the shades of toska.

In its deepest and most painful sense, it is a feeling of intense spiritual anguish.

At less severe levels, it is a dull ache in the soul, a painful yearning, vague unease, mental torment.

In some cases, it is a longing for someone or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness.”

At the lowest level, there is gloom and boredom.

One Russian word, seven layers of meaning.

But тоска is not just a concept, it is a physical force.

In December 1917, Sergei Rachmaninoff left Russia forever.

He wrote, “Having left Russia, I lost the desire to compose.

Having lost my homeland, I lost myself.”

For ten years, the genius of one of the world’s greatest composers was silent.

Only after some time did toska turn into music.

Rachmaninoff’s final work, “Symphonic Dances” is a heartrending conversation with his homeland, one that has continued for more than eight decades.

By the way, тоска isn’t the only word like that.

Nabokov explained пошлость to his students with an image: a family gazes in delight at their new sofa and feels like a family of heroes.

That’s пошлость. Nadryv. Dostoevsky’s key word.

Intense emotional breakdown. Not quite. Bespredel. Literally, “without limits.”

But the essence is extreme impunity, when rules cease to exist.

No language has captured this in a single word.

Volya isn’t just freedom. Freedom plus space.

An endless field with no walls. The words exist, but there are no translations.

Swiss psychologists from the Center for Affective Sciences studied the phenomenon of the word toska in 2014 and concluded: it has no equivalent in any other language among those they studied.

Toska isn’t a pure emotion, but a mixture of emotions, hermetically sealed in one word.

Tyutchev wrote in 1866: “Russia cannot be understood by reason.”

Maybe it’s because Russians have words that other people don’t.

And one last thing. There’s a theory that untranslatable words are the very soul of a language.

What you can't explain to a foreigner is exactly what sets us apart from them.

We have тоска, vast open spaces, daring, and a faith that things will work out.

So what does that tell us about ourselves, about Russians?