The Future of Nostalgia [Paperback]

Svetlana Boym (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 2002

Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Svetlana 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, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The future of nostalgia isn't what it used to be, or at least it won't be once this book starts making its way through academic circles. A sort of training manual for the wistful, Boym's book alternates "between critical reflection and storytelling, hoping to grasp the rhythm of longing, its enticements and entrapments"; along the way, the author not only gives new life to an old idea but also offers a number of original terms that can be used to describe the experience. The first part of Boym's study surveys the history of nostalgia as a disease and introduces two varieties, a "restorative nostalgia" that may contain conspiratorial elements (the notion that a certain "they" have destroyed "our" homeland, for example), and a "reflective nostalgia" that leads to a sense of not being able to go home again. Part two deals with postcommunist cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg (where Boym, now a Harvard professor of Slavic and comparative literature, worked as a tour guide in the late '70s) and may be of more interest to pure Russophiles than to intellectuals in general. The book's third and final section examines the work of Nabokov, Brodsky and other artists whom Boym calls, in her most useful contribution to critical vocabulary, "off-modern." Neither modern nor postmodern, these artists (and their ranks include such odd ducks from the last century as Igor Stravinsky, Walter Benjamin, Julio Cort zar and Georges Perec) "explore side shadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress." Thus the past may be conceptualized in any number of ways, and apparently, at least according to the author, the only truly pernicious nostalgia is the prefabricated, Disney-fied kind that keeps one from thinking about the future. Otherwise, says Boym, the sky, whether it's the one you see overhead or the one you remember, is the limit. (Apr.) Forecast: This is an interesting addition to cultural history, but a bit esoteric, and is unlikely to find a readerhip outside of the literati.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The current U.S. craze for nostalgia runs from automobiles (the PT Cruiser) to fashion (the return of bell-bottoms) to television (TV Land reruns). Despite modern technology and conveniences, we enjoy looking back to yesterday. Boym (Slavic and comparative literature, Harvard Univ.; Death in Quotation Marks) divides her study of nostalgia into three parts. In the first section, she examines the history of nostalgia, once seen as an ailment to be cured. The second part focuses on cities, specifically Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, and on post-Communist memories. In Part 3, Boym probes what she calls the stories of exile, looking at the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, and others who wrote of lost homes. She also examines how nostalgia affects us today, citing movies like Jurassic Park and the subsequent interest in dinosaurs. This multifaceted work gives the reader much to ponder in regard to what we hold dear. Recommended for larger public libraries and academic collections. Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First Trade Paper Edition edition (March 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465007082
• ISBN-13: 978-0465007080
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #101,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #92 in Books > History > World > Civilization & Culture

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exile's disease June 22, 2001

By Eileen Galen

Format:Hardcover

This amazing book has been efficiently described by its Editorial Reviews. It 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, either voluntary or forced - no small thing either way - is its precondition.

Many, but far from all, 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 more than five Amazon stars.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars On The Homesickness Of Modern Man November 29, 2002

By Chris Matthews

Format:Paperback

"How to begin again? How to be happy, to invent ourselves, shedding the inertia of the past? How to experience life & life alone, "that dark, driving, insatiable power that lusts after itself?" These were the questions that bothered the moderns. Happiness, and not merely a longing for it, meant forgetfulness & a new perception of time."

"The modern opposition between tradition & revolution is treacherous......"

So opens the second chapter of Svetlana Boym's "The Future Of Nostalgia" after she has traced the roots of the concept from being identified as a DISEASE of Swiss exiles into a recognition of the problem of all mankind at the start of the 21st century.

I hope I'm not wrong in saying that I think that this book may be an important new cornerstone in art, poli-sci & philosophy. I like this book THAT MUCH....

Ms. Boym's book fell into my hands quite serendipitously as I was researching material for my own novel; I was doing a search on "hypochondria" for a character I was trying to delineate with a certain kind of homesickness, and up popped the heading "Hypochondria Of The Heart" for an interview with Ms. Boym in a newspaper from Harvard University where she is a professor of Slavic Literature. The premise for her book deeply intrigued me since she elucidated some similar points that I had been trying to frame in my own work. I hurriedly ordered her book from our local library, anticipating something groundbreaking.

I wasn't disappointed. This book traces a link between poetry, philosophy & politics in the modern age which is rooted in nostalgia, the longing for home & the feeling of loss due to a disctinctly modern concept of time.

However, this is no futile deconstructionist tract, nor is it a conservative tome yammering on about the pervasive influences of the enemy in a "See? We told you so!" smug-but-ineffective posturing.

What Ms. Boym does is show both healthy & unhealthy effects of nostalgia on history & memory. The first part of the book lays out what the modern conception of time has done to modernity, popular culture, conspiracies & collective memory, et. al. This clarifies the reality of the problem of modern life not as meaningless, but a somatization of symptoms attributed to to fractured parts of humanity, cultural & individual.

She doesn't stop there, however. Boym is savvy enough to show examples of her position in parts two & three of the book.

Part two shows the impact of longing for return on Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin & Europe in general. This cements evidence for the concept of modern time on TRADITION, by showing
what particular post-Communist cities do to reinstill history after years of trying to synthesize it.

Part three cleverly goes to the other side for a balance by showing the longings of exiles like Nabakov,Brodsky & Kabakov.
In this mode, the idea of nostalgia affecting historical tradition is expanded to included the revolutionary INDIVIDUAL going against the grain & what they expected their hopes to gain them apart from their homelands.

All of this could be very boring however, except that Ms. Boym exhibits a clear & rich style, making this book a terrific read. I found myself wanting to read it again, not because of confusion, but because of the wealth of insights that flow forth from her.

This is the first book I've read to give any useful & pragmatic perspective on our seemingly fracturing globe these days, not because it points out what is going on, but because it takes the idea of "home is where the heart is" and shows what might have happened to the heart.

I feel that this book is universally useful to all political stripes and many different fields of the humanities. I'll wager that this may turn out to be one of the first most important books of the 21st century. Why? Because I feel a wiser & more articulate human being from reading it.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Book - One Warning March 17, 2011

By David B. Haugen

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The other reviews here are very helpful. What I wanted to add is a warning to those with older eyes: This book is printed in tiny 6 point type.