What happens to Old World memories in a New World order? Svetlana Boym opens up a new avenue of inquiry: the study of nostalgia.
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About the Author
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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The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
This book is ingenious, absorbing, and by turns difficult and thrilling. Do not be misled by the kitschy or simplistic associations you might have to the term "nostalgia." Exile is its precondition.
Most of the examples and references are Russian and Eastern European. Each of the seventeen chapters is an essay of depth and precision. They are greatly satisfying: rich and dense with associations and references from art and literature, and the entire span of recorded human history.
Boym names Part One "Hypochondria of the Heart," and variously introduces her kaleidoscopic interests in nostalgia - as an "epidemic." Nostalgia, she asserts (and proves convincingly) is "the disease of an afflicted imagination." It afflicts those who would become assimilated to their new worlds - as well as those who (variously and often highly individualistically) resist. The second section, "Cities and Re-invented Traditions" contains five chapters that focus on Russian and European conceptions and realities. The final part, "Exiles and Imagined Homelands" is my favorite. Its chapters cover among other things the excess of souvenirs to be found in immigrants' apartments (knickknacks of identity and remembrance that would not ever be displayed back home); cyberspace, which "makes the bric-a-brac of nostalgia available in digital form"; the persistence of immigrant eccentricity; the preservation (and transformation) of attitudes, and various phenomena of adjustment. Some of the personages discussed (for there is never mere name-dropping in this book) are Adam and Eve ("the first exiles") Ovid, Telemachus, Oedipus, Odysseus, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Hanna Arendt, painter Ilya Kabakov Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov - to name a few.
I loved this book. There isn't a slow page in it. Boym is passionately interested in art, history, psychology, signs and symbols, literature, urbanism, politics, and people. She's a deep thinker who is guided by her considerable ability to keep several balls in the air at once, to teach with clarity, and to really understand what makes people tick. There's a good index and over thirty pages of notes that enable a lot of further reading in this big and interesting subject.
A great book that deserves a wide readership.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Zarathustra
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The book would appeal to those with interest in the history and culture of socialism. However it touches upon other fields as well, psychology for example, in explaining the roots of nostalgia as an illness in the past to the contemporary experiences of it as a cultural phenomenon.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Really great book, which I have come to reference a hell of a lot for my projecct. Great index, great end notes and the way she writes is very pleasant. I would actually have read this even if it wasn't for my course.
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