The Future of Nostalgia

by Boym, Svetlana

• ISBN13: 9780465007073
• ISBN10: 0465007074
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-03-01
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, 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, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

Author Biography

Svetlana Boym is a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Taboo on Nostalgia?	xiii
PART I HYPOCHONDRIA OF THE HEART: NOSTALGIA, HISTORY AND MEMORY
From Cured Soldiers to Incurable Romantics: Nostalgia and Progress	3	(16)
The Angel of History: Nostalgia and Modernity	19	(14)
The Dinosaur: Nostalgia and Popular Culture	33	(8)
Restorative Nostalgia: Conspiracies and Return to Origins	41	(8)
Reflective Nostalgia: Virtual Reality and Collective Memory	49	(8)
Nostalgia and Post-Communist Memory	57	(18)
PART 2 CITIES AND RE-INVENTED TRADITIONS
Archeology of Metropolis	75	(8)
Moscow, the Russian Rome	83	(38)
St. Petersburg, the Cosmopolitan Province	121	(52)
Berlin, the Virtual Capital	173	(46)
Europa's Eros	219	(32)
PART 3 EXILES AND IMAGINED HOMELANDS
On Diasporic Intimacy	251	(8)
Vladimir Nabokov's False Passport	259	(26)
Joseph Brodsky's Room and a Half	285	(24)
Ilya Kabakov's Toilet	309	(18)
Immigrant Souvenirs	327	(10)
Aesthetic Individualism and the Ethics of Nostalgia	337	(8)
Conclusion: Nostalgia and Global Culture: From Outer Space to Cyberspace	345	(12)
Notes	357	(34)
Index	391