The Origins of Nostalgia

This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and semi-autobiographical "snippets of experience" written by Svetlana Boym in the final period of her life capture her penchant for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, will enable our own cultural past as well as that of the former Soviet Union to be viewed in a different light.>

Auteur
Svetlana Boym 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, Common Places, The Future of Nostalgia, Another Freedom and The Off-Modern. Her artworks were exhibited in New York, Berlin, Ljubljana, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kaunas, and Cambridge. She lectured and performed in Freud's Museum in Vienna, in the New York Artists' Space, at the MoMA, Vienna Kunsthalle, The Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, La Maison de Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, and Moscow ICA.Ron Roberts is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Honorary Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University, London, UK.

Contenu
Introduction: Snippets of Experience Ron Roberts 1. Cosmos in the Girls' Washroom 2. Children, We've Been Deceived! 3. The Secret Life of a Communal Apartment Neighbor 4. Tearing Away (with an Introduction by Natal'ya Strugach) 5. Sasha, Misha, Napoleon and Josephine (circa 1992) 6. Replace the Irreplaceable! A Tale of Immigrant Objects 7. My Significant Others: Zenita, Susana, Ilanka Index