TOSKA
Russian: TOCKA
noun /to-ska/
(pronounced with stress on the last syllable)
“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 a desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
– Vladimir Nabokov.
Toska is the evidence of my attempts to recreate a feeling in a single editorial of a childhood spent looking up at the towering figures of the post-soviet Lithuania. Young, careless and rough around the edges was the typical adolescent, free to do as he may yet unsure of his identity, now unrestricted by the belt of the Russian socialist regime. Or, as a matter of fact, exactly this being their chosen identity.
Nostalgia, tinged with melancholy, was everywhere; in the textures of food, the colours of gopnik’s attire, the coolness of the concrete slab boroughs and the overcast face of the mischievous hooligan on the street.
All clothes were thrifted, the boys scouted, edibles cooked and curated based on distant undying memories, and architectural structures located around Liverpool (and a couple in Klaipėda) all in pursuit to paint the mood of almost fifty years of USSR in our blood.
Since then I have been simmering the questions…
Who are we once the oppressor has left? Can we find our way through the ennui and melt ourselves away from the frozen grip of the past?
Sun /is the strongest/ flower
It’s when you soften
that you become your most resilient.
Raw. Radiant.
Front-facing the sun
Shadows cast by bones and flesh that holds
your golden dreams together you are both —
Adam & Eve
He and her in perfect symbiosis
The compass and the voyageur
The androgyne of all flowers
Two sides of the coin one and the same
The delicate delicacy of thy heart and its yearning for flame.
Bees get drunk on your honey
All the while you do nothing you just be
You.
And the joke for the mind is –
can it really be that simple?