The Origins of Nostalgia

Memories and Reflections

Svetlana Boym author Dr Ron Roberts editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:7th Apr '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Origins of Nostalgia cover

The final unpublished works of the late philosopher, cultural critic and media artist, Svetlana Boym, The Origins of Nostalgia comprises a series of autobiographical reflections which provide unique insights and background to Boym's existing body of work.

This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and semi-autobiographical “snippets of experience” written by Svetlana Boym in the final period of her life capture her penchant for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.

Poetic and analytical by turns, Svetlana Boym’s 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 émigré’s 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 Boym’s 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 Boym’s creative intertwining of her life and her compelling life’s work. * David Damrosch, Harvard University, USA *

ISBN: 9781501389931

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

168 pages