The Truth
“Their devotion to art and artists produces in these people an inexpressible mawkishness; it is distressing to have to do with them and to talk to them; they are perfect logs smeared with honey. They never, for instance, call Raphael, Raphael, or Correggio, Correggio; “the divine Sanzio, the incomparable Allegri,” they murmur, and always with the broadest vowels. Every pretentious, conceited, home-bred mediocrity they hail as a genius; “the blue sky of Italy,” “the lemons of the South,” “the balmy breezes of the banks of the Brenta,” are for ever on their lips. “Ah, Vanya, Vanya,” or “Oh, Sasha, Sasha,” they say to one another with deep feeling, “we must away to the South … we are Greeks in soul—ancient Greeks.” One may observe them at exhibitions before the works of some Russian painters (these gentlemen, it should be noted, are for the most part passionate patriots). First they step back a couple of paces, and throw back their heads; then they go up to the picture again; their eyes are suffused with an oily moisture. “There you have it, my God!” they say at last, in voices broken with emotion; “there’s soul, soul! Ah! what feeling, what feeling! Ah, what soul he has put into it! what a mass of soul!”
A Hunter’s Sketches, Ivan Turgenev, trans. Constance Garnett, 1897
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“The truth? You want the truth?… It is your earrings! It is your chopsticks! But it’s so much more than that! You’re pretentious! You call everybody by their full name! You called my doorman Sammy “Samuel”! But you didn’t even say “Samuel”, you said it “Samuelle”! Papier-mache? What is pah-pee-ay mah-shay?”
George Costanza, Seinfeld, The Truth, 1991
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