Litost - A feeling we have no english word for

There is one book that I return to again and again.  Not only beautiful and funny but clever and quirky.  The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt-Smith is a treasure trove of emotional language – full of words that express some feeling or another that we know in our bones, but don’t have the language to articulate.  One of my favourites is Cyberchondria – ‘anxiety about symptoms of an illness fuelled by internet research’.

But the one I want to share with you here is LITOST (pronounced lee-tost).  It’s a Czech word that describes a feeling of shame, resentment and fury felt when another person makes us feel wretched.  And the goal of this feeling is to make the other look and feel as miserable as we do. A feeling of torment alongside a desire for revenge if you like.

To help us understand this feeling Tiffany uses a character in Milan Kundera’s Book of Being and Laughter – a child is belittled by his music teacher for making a wrong note, and ‘blinded by litost, the child concocts and ingenious plan: he deliberately repeats the mistake until the teacher becomes so enraged that he snaps and throws the pupil out of the window’. As the child falls they have a feeling of delight that the ‘nasty’ teacher will be charged with murder.

We’re all familiar with the feelings of revenge that can come with heartbreak – cutting up the suits of your infidel husband being something of a trope.  But have any of you ever had this litost feeling, where you own destruction is secondary for the need to punish your tormentor? We’d love to know