Vladimir Nobokov wrote that “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska.” That’s not just because English speakers lack the specific emotional concept of toska, but also because toska is not a single emotion even for native speakers of Russian.
Toska can, in its superficial aspect, merely refer to the emotion of boredom, but even boredom is not a simple emotion, when it is given appropriate consideration. Besides, toska refers to a wider range of feelings in addition to being bored, including weary nostalgia and an existential suffering that is detached from any certain meaning. There’s a feeling of nauseated yearning in toska, a tumultuous yet vague feeling of wrongness about one’s place in the world.
To ask which of these feelings is the core of toska is to misunderstand toska. In her book Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture, the linguist Anna Wierzbicka describes toska as a “complex but unitary concept” that consists of multiple elements that are “blended together and are all present at the same time,” even though certain aspects of toska may be emphasized in specific contexts.
A person experiencing toska might respond to Walt Whitman, “Yes, I contain multitudes, and they are all miserable.”
