Koshmarit (кошмарить in Cyrillic) • verb • (kosh-marr-it)
Definition: to nightmare someone, to give them nightmares
Origin: Russian
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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
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One of the added benefits of writing a newsletter about words is that my readers will share words with me so that I also have the opportunity to learn from them. Earlier this month, Peter Loge shared a word that ultimately became today’s newsletter.
Koshmarit, a Russian verb meaning “to nightmare,” is an especially timely word because it serves as a logical extension of last week’s word, “actively passive,” and also speaks to the rising tensions in eastern Europe as Russia threatens to invade Ukraine. Vladimir Putin appears intent to nightmare a nation as part of his dream to align all of the former Soviet states with Russia.
Additionally, within an actively passive, anti-bad westernized society, the word koshmarit is important because it is a verb and not a noun. Koshmarit is not merely a nightmare or a thing that already exists within the world. It is not something outside of yourself that you pursue akin to America’s pursuit of happiness. It is an action. Nightmaring is something that one makes and creates. It is the action of being actively bad.
A passive response to the actively bad will not create a good outcome. It may delay the bad action, and this delay may even make people believe that a good outcome is right around the corner and the next logical step. But the relentless creation of nightmares will eventually defeat passivity.
As America grapples with our ethnocidal foundations, we must also address how being actively passive in the face of the actively bad has long created preventable nightmares in America.
Koshmarit and Bad Dreams
When I first heard of the word koshmarit, I immediately thought about the French word cauchemar which translates as “nightmare” in English. These words mean roughly the same thing and sound nearly the same, but it is unclear if one word influenced the other.
I thought of cauchemar when learning of koshmarit because I still remember how eye-opening it was for me to learn that French people hardly said mauvais rêve, or “bad dream” as we more often say in American English. Growing up I used the word “nightmare” and knew what it meant, but it was less common to use the word in relation to something connected to myself. Horror movies could have “nightmare” in the title and a person could be a nightmare, but when I went to sleep I did not have nightmares. I either had dreams or bad dreams.
This distinction might seem insignificant, but to me it felt like an American cultural desire to want to apply a positive spin on everything, including the random images in our minds as we sleep. We all know that we do not control our dreams. We do not determine what our dreams will be before we go to sleep, so the cultural desire to depict something random as foundationally positive instead of neutral is incredibly bizarre. Our random thoughts as we sleep do not define who we are as people, and we clearly have a passive relationship with our subconscious, so there should be no need to label it as either good or bad.
This inclination towards positivity has reshaped American English and, in addition to altering how we describe our dreams and nightmares, it has encouraged Americans to apply a positive spin to bad situations. The desire to turn everything into a positive can seem harmless, but the desire to see the good in everything often equates to ignoring the bad or reimagining bad actions as good actions.
By ignoring objectivity and searching for positivity, we can also empower the spread of negativity. By renaming nightmares as bad dreams, one can actually facilitate the spreading of nightmares. Yet by renaming nightmares, one may also find themselves bereft of the language to name the nightmare before them.
As a middle schooler, I enjoyed the word cauchemar because it cultivated the freedom to describe something as objectively bad. I could have a nightmare without the need to describe it as a “bad dream.” The American South could be a nightmare and not a bad dream. The existence of “good” people in the South did not usurp its ethnocidal foundations.
Colonizers, slave owners, racists during Jim Crow, and the racists we still encounter today actively koshmarit people of color and they built and sustained a society with the explicit desire to make non-white existence a living nightmare.
It should surprise none of us that a society built upon ethnocide and genocide would both encourage its residents to always look for the positive and overlook the negative, and never find the need to create a word for actively turning existence into a nightmare. If the problem has a word or a name, then it becomes much harder to overlook.
Ethnocide, Poshlost, and Koshmarit
Despite the United States and Russia being adversaries since the end of World War II, the Russian language actually has some incredible words that can help explain American life. I believe that these words may exist in Russian and not in American English because Russia’s documented history of serfdom has made Russians more acquainted with living in a divided, yet powerful country.
As the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and democracy spread across Europe, Russia still had a society and economy based around serfdom—a condition of debt bondage or indentured servitude that developed in feudal European kingdoms during the Early Middle Ages—and Russian serfdom lasted until March 3, 1861 when Czar Alexander II issued the Emancipation Manifesto, nearly two years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in the United States on January 1, 1863.
However, despite receiving their freedom in 1861, Russian serfs still lived impoverished lives, and for many of them their lives remained essentially the same as before emancipation as they still worked the landowner’s land and waited for the Russian government to provide them with their own parcel of land. As former Russian serfs waited for their land, Emancipated Black Americans waited for forty acres and a mule.
The Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 that ended the Romanov dynasty and ushered in Communism finally ended de facto serfdom in Russia.
The Russian language has many words to describe the normalized terror and division of a serf-based society, yet America profoundly lacks the language to describe our own systemic ethnocidal divisions because we have never wanted to acknowledge the true nature of our society. Instead, we want to make sure that everyone, including Americans, view America in a positive light. America supposedly is not a nightmare, but instead a free place where bad dreams can happen sometimes but we’re always on track to being a more perfect union.
In Chapter 8 of my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, and also in a previous newsletter, I talk about the Russian noun poshlost that means vulgarity, banality, soullessness, and crudeness. The adjective is poshlyi.
This word succinctly describes the status quo of Russian life during the 1800s as serfdom remained the cultural norm. The cultural expectation to live via the exploitation and oppression of other Russians resulted in everyone leading a poshlyi existence.
The Russian aristocracy was soulless because their lives were dependent upon crushing and ignoring the souls of the serfs. In fact, the Russian measurement word for counting serfs translates as soul. Therefore, if a Russian noble sells 10 serfs to another noble, he would say that he is selling “ten souls of serfs.”
Can anything be more vulgar, crude, and soulless than buying and selling souls? Additionally, the normalcy of this dystopian Geistmord transaction has transformed a profound evil into a banal occurrence.
Intriguingly, the best Russian novel depicting poshlost is called Dead Souls and it was written by Nikolay Gogal, a Ukrainian who also lived in Russia. His accurate depiction of Russian society resulted in him being exiled from the nation.
Ukrainians and Russians have an awareness of the horrors of serfdom and they have the language to prove it. The brutality of this society could easily turn one’s life into a nightmare, and people were even encouraged to make another person’s life a nightmare so that they could sustain their lofty status within this divided, oppressive society. Koshmarit comes from an awareness of this brutal status quo.
America, despite being built upon the genocide of Indigenous people and the ethnocide of African people, prefers to cultivate a discourse that glosses over and neglects to adequately acknowledge these foundational horrors.
Colonizers obviously actively worked to make the lives of Indigenous people into a living nightmare. The United States’ slave-owning Founding Fathers also made the lives of all enslaved people in this nation into a living nightmare. The pro-slavery Americans made the lives of abolitionists, regardless of race, into a nightmare, and their terrorism continued into Reconstruction as they created the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist militias.
To this day, America still has many politicians who aspire to inflict a nightmarish existence upon Americans who advocate for racial equality and social justice within our democracy. Donald Trump was obviously a poshlyi president who engaged in koshmarit against anyone who got in his way, and these two words can also describe many of his supporters.
The United States’ desire to believe in the American Dream impairs our ability to recognize, name, and combat the nightmares that are being actively created right in front of our eyes.