The Origins of Nostalgia: Memories and Reflections

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This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and semi-autobiographical snippets of experience written by Svetlana Boym in the final period of her life capture her penchant for seamlessly melding, poetically and dream-like, the intensively personal with the everyday and the world-historical. They illuminate the formative conditions for the thinking which she was to develop into her majestic work on nostalgia. Importantly, these pieces fill in gaps in understanding the genesis and scope of her take on the world. For readers both familiar with her work and for those new to it, The Origins of Nostalgia will enable our own cultural past as well as that of the former Soviet Union to be viewed in a different light.

Reviews

Poetic and analytical by turns, Svetlana Boyms charismatic energy lives in every page of these brilliant autobiographical writings. They chart her post Sputnik Leningrad childhood in one of the Soviet ideologically imposed communal apartments, with its multiple partitions, at once prohibiting privacy and striving for it, to her departure from Russia aged twenty. Ambivalent about Soviet communality and the American dream, the work is a profound meditation on the psychic shock of an ever unfinished emigrant life. She is doubly alien, estranged from Soviet Russia and a foreign-insider, resident and non-resident, in Boston. Nostalgia, here lyrically explored, is a leitmotif of her work. Broken bones, a shattered porcelain cup, become emblems in an migrs narrative of belonging, unbelonging, and longing. * Isobel Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of English, Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and author of Victorian Glassworks *
Eloquent, ironic, and haunting, this suite of Svetlana Boyms essays is a shifting kaleidoscope of vivid memories, from a Soviet childhood to her ongoing reinventions of herself in America. The Origins of Nostalgia is the culmination of Svetlana Boyms creative intertwining of her life and her compelling lifes work. * David Damrosch, Harvard University, USA *

Author Bio

Svetlana Boym (1959-2015) was a literary critic, visual artist, writer of fiction, and Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, USA. Her books include Death in Quotation Marks (1991), Common Places (1994), The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Another Freedom (2010) and The Off-Modern (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her artworks were exhibited in New York, Berlin, Ljubljana, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kaunas, and Cambridge. Ron Roberts is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Honorary Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University, London, UK.