If it is true that one of the defining criteria of kitsch is not simply its perceived sentimentality but predictability, a predictability that constitutes itself as a ready-made emotional and aesthetic effect, then it seems not too fantastic to say that Lenin’s mummy has always been kitsch.

Lenin’s body produced the ideological map of the country, transforming a once revolutionary rupture into a mythical present. It is also his body that became the blueprint for the official face of the Soviet Union as a country of beauty, optimism, and glee. In this country, of course, the spaces of terror, the camps, are hidden from view and erased from the maps.

The kitsch of socialist realism, of course, is not only born of out of what in Russia is called meshchanstvo, the deal with the middle-class, but also the grand project of socialist realism. The Russian New Person is no longer the exemplary revolutionary but a more anonymous Soviet citizen mass-produced by bureaucratic and authoritarian de-individuation, a process that follows its own prescriptive rules and rules out creative choices.

Perhaps no other theorist of Soviet political culture than Vera Dunham (1990) has sought more persuasively to show that it was, ironically (and tragically for Nabokov), in Stalin’s time that banality and kitsch became a most integral part of Soviet culture. Arguing that especially after World War II a special pact, a “big deal” was made between the Stalinist government and “the people” (narod), a deal that acknowledges that in the mid-1940s almost everybody had become tired of the heroic asceticism of the revolutionary and war years, and that what almost everybody truly longed for were material possessions and homeyness, Dunham describes the “colored postcards that were tacked over beds, with views of Naples, Venice, and the sea,” and the way in which “embroider ed pillows were neatly arranged on the bed.” In this world, the crêpe-de-chinedresses, old fashioned dinnerware, and household decorations are no longer regarded as petit-bourgeois but are presented as legitimate awards for the heroes and heroines of labor, as well as the marching enthusiasts (at least officially) of the Stalinist order. Its most spectacular embodiment may be the Stalinist subway system– the ideal blueprint of Socialist realist culture, with neoclassical columns, mosaic portraits of great poets and great leaders, and plenty of exotic vegetation to adorn the Russian tropical utopia under the ground. This coziness, something that under the early Bolsheviks would have qualified as “domestic trash,” begins to compete with the persistent revolutionary rhetoric of political utopia and the aesthetic avant-garde.

In Russia, – at least to some extent – kitsch finds its semantic twin in the word poshlost’, a complex term that encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and lack of spirituality. Poshlost’ comes from poshlo: something that has been, has occurred, or has past. Among the older meanings of the word are“traditional” and “ancient”: thus poshlyi people can refer to ancestors and a poshlyi route means an old thoroughfare. There are important connections between poshlost’ and kitsch: both are associated with vulgarity and questionable taste, the superficiality of mass culture and, accordingly, moral invective. [...] In identifying poshlost’ as one key analytical category in the understanding of both unoriginality and staleness, Nabokov, in similarity to Greenberg, identifies with one particular intellectual obsession – the fight against banality. Nabokov’s own humorous, passionate, and occasionally infuriating descriptions of poshlost’ are simultaneously directed at Russian imitations of Western European middle-class culture as well as at American ads. Drawing on one particular Russian intelligentsia obsession, namely Russia’s relation to the West and “progress” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, used the term poshlyi to describe Russia’s Western-oriented youth), Nabokov turns poshlost’ into a perfect artifact of national criticism, yet without taking into consideration the kitsch of socialist realism and Stalin’s time. Conceptualized from the perspective of an émigré, the critique of poshlost’ is both a site and weapon in the struggle against banality.