toska

What it means

A cab driver waits for fares. His son has just died. He tries to tell each person he meets, and none of them want to hear it. Late at night he tells his horse. Chekhov called that 1886 story “Тоска”, and the title names what the driver carries: a heavy, aimless ache that wants an outlet and finds none.

Gramota.ru’s dictionaries define toska as a heavy, oppressive feeling, an anxiety of the soul mixed with sadness and despondency. A second, colloquial sense is wearying boredom, the kind produced by a monotonous room or nothing to do. Russians use both. Тоска по родине is longing for the homeland; the same noun can describe a dull lecture. The word covers a range that English splits across anguish, yearning and ennui.

Vladimir Nabokov, annotating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in 1964, wrote that “no single word in English renders all the shades of toska”. He placed it on a scale from spiritual anguish with no cause, through longing with nothing to long for, down to plain boredom.

Where it comes from

Toska is an old Slavic noun, not a compound. Russian Wiktionary, drawing on Max Vasmer’s etymological dictionary, traces it to Proto-Slavic *tъska, with Old Russian тъска meaning unrest or sorrow, and relatives in Ukrainian, Belarusian and Polish tęskny, longing. English Wiktionary adds two possible links, to тощий, thin or empty, and тискать, to squeeze. Neither is settled.

The word has a family. The verb тосковать means to pine or to yearn, and the adjective тоскливый means dreary or melancholy. A 2017 thesis on Chekhov notes that Vladimir Dal’s 19th-century dictionary even has nouns for people who carry toska for a long time, тоскун and тоскунья. Gramota’s stress dictionary puts the accent on the last syllable: тоска́.

How to use it

Мне так тоскливо без тебя, такая тоска. (I am so miserable without you; there is such toska.) Intimate spoken Russian, with the adjective and the noun side by side.

By the third week of rain in the dacha, the toska had set in, and nobody bothered to get dressed. Literary English, using the borrowed word for its bored, heavy end.

What it is not

Saudade. Infopédia defines saudade as sorrow and incompleteness caused by the absence of people, times or places one was fondly attached to. Saudade remembers something specific and half-enjoys the memory. Toska needs no object at all. At its heaviest it has no cause, and nothing about it is pleasant.

Skuka. Скука is ordinary Russian boredom: a long train ride, a slow afternoon. Toska can include boredom, but Nabokov put boredom at its lowest level. The same empty afternoon becomes toska when it starts to feel like a weight on the chest.

In the wild

• Anton Chekhov, “Тоска” (translated as “Misery”), Peterburgskaya Gazeta, 16 January 1886: the cab driver Iona, who ends up talking to his horse.
• Vladimir Nabokov, translation and commentary of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, four volumes, 1964, with several commentary notes on toska.
• Molchat Doma, “Тоска”, track 5 on Etazhi, 2018: released by Detriti Records and reissued in North America by Sacred Bones in 2020.