«English spleen» («английский сплин») is the term Alexander Pushkin uses in «Eugene Onegin» (1833) to describe his bored, disaffected hero’s fashionable melancholy, itself borrowed from the Romantic-era archetype of the world-weary English gentleman, popularized by Byron and his many imitators. By the early 1990s the phrase had long since entered common Russian usage as shorthand for a certain performed, aristocratic world-weariness, exactly the pose Roman wonders if he’s expected to strike at a disco he’s too broke, too unpracticed, and too out of place to actually enjoy.