NonzeroClips | The Sacred Russian Sadness — Nikita Petrov & David Poleski @MeaningoflifeTV | Uploaded September 2019 | Updated October 2024, 4 hours ago.
This is an excerpt (actually, two excerpts spliced together) from an upcoming episode I did with an artist and a school bus driver David Poleski. We're trying to name, articulate, relate to and decide what to do about the different shades of the underlying existential sadness present in the human predicament.

Here's Vladimir Nabokov on what I call "the sacred Russian sadness" in this conversation: "No single word in English renders all the shades of *toska*. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

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