Origins of Nostalgia

Svetlana Boym (1959-2015) 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 (1991), Common Places (1994), The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Another Freedom (2010) and The Off-Modern (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her artworks were exhibited in New York, Berlin, Ljubljana, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kaunas, and Cambridge.Ron Roberts is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Honorary Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University, London, UK.

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.

• Introduction: Snippets of Experience Ron Roberts1. Cosmos in the Girls’ Washroom2. Children, We’ve Been Deceived!3. The Secret Life of a Communal Apartment Neighbor4. 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 Objects7. My Significant Others: Zenita, Susana, Ilanka Index