Section: Book, Reader
The Future of Nostalgia
Svetlana Boym
What happens to Old World memories in a New World order? Svetlana Boym opens up a new avenue of inquiry: the study of nostalgia.
Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Svetlana Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities — St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague — and the imagined homelands of exiles — Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.
References
Svetlana Boym is a writer and Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard. She is the author of Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia and Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, as well as of short stories, plays, and a novel. She is a native of St. Petersburg, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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