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The Future of Nostalgia
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.
432 pages, Paperback
First published March 21, 2001
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About the author
Svetlana Boym
29 books91 followersSvetlana Boym is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, and a media artist, playwright, and novelist. She is also an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University.
Boym's written work explores relationships between utopia and kitsch, between memory and modernity, and between homesickness and sickness of home. Her research interests generally include 20th century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies.
Source: Wikipedia
Obit
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Boym's written work explores relationships between utopia and kitsch, between memory and modernity, and between homesickness and sickness of home. Her research interests generally include 20th century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies.
Source: Wikipedia
Obit
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews
March 9, 2024
This is an excellent book. I like reading it for its style. I give it 5 stars for its scholarship. I disliked it for its politics, that in a very subtle way embraces Trumpism ( in a Harvard style)).
However, I am not sure of its content and the kind of politics the book backs. She writes about nostalgia in great detail. This makes the book an interesting read. What irritates me is that she writes about certain specific nostalgias. As if nostalgia is something that only happens to immigrants– to certain types of immigrants, of a certain period. In the context of America, for instance, she mentions first and second wave migrants and states how the second generations seek their roots (unfettered by Visa restrictions). While this makes sense in a European context, the term first wave immigrants is ironical in regards to America. Who is not an immigrant in America?
So she applies nostalgia and its very nuanced theories to certain types– so the knowledge around nostalgia is constructed through very specific kinds of immigrant experience. For instance, nostalgia is not something that has ever bothered immigrants from Scandinavia and Great Britain to America. She is more interested in the world from 1960 onwards. Though she talks about Russia and its (white)authors, the nostalgia theory only seems to fix the undesirable (coloured) immigrants. Of course it is not stated in the book as thus. However, this dimension runs throughout the book– right from its exciting Introduction.
In the age that seeks death of democracy and deglobalization (because globalization cannot give more, and the west does not like a monster like China.) This book embraces the contemporary politics, or rather spawns it. It is this that I did not like about the book–her politics. Very carefully couched in nostalgia theory that objectified and used only certain people, groups, and communities.
However, I am not sure of its content and the kind of politics the book backs. She writes about nostalgia in great detail. This makes the book an interesting read. What irritates me is that she writes about certain specific nostalgias. As if nostalgia is something that only happens to immigrants– to certain types of immigrants, of a certain period. In the context of America, for instance, she mentions first and second wave migrants and states how the second generations seek their roots (unfettered by Visa restrictions). While this makes sense in a European context, the term first wave immigrants is ironical in regards to America. Who is not an immigrant in America?
So she applies nostalgia and its very nuanced theories to certain types– so the knowledge around nostalgia is constructed through very specific kinds of immigrant experience. For instance, nostalgia is not something that has ever bothered immigrants from Scandinavia and Great Britain to America. She is more interested in the world from 1960 onwards. Though she talks about Russia and its (white)authors, the nostalgia theory only seems to fix the undesirable (coloured) immigrants. Of course it is not stated in the book as thus. However, this dimension runs throughout the book– right from its exciting Introduction.
In the age that seeks death of democracy and deglobalization (because globalization cannot give more, and the west does not like a monster like China.) This book embraces the contemporary politics, or rather spawns it. It is this that I did not like about the book–her politics. Very carefully couched in nostalgia theory that objectified and used only certain people, groups, and communities.
March 5, 2008
This is going to break you brains this one. I have to read a page and then think, and then read a page, and then stare into space and contemplate some shit. Anyone who quotes Walter Benjamin, and Donald Winnicott in the same book should get a star. You know how awesome theories and musings on nostalgia are? Pretty fucking awesome.
September 16, 2020
I want to write books like this. Basically.
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November 8, 2021bazı kitaplar sayesinde bazı yerleri görmüş, bazı yazarları okumuş, bazı insanları tanımış gibi oluruz; bazılarınaysa sürekli o şehirleri görmemiş, o yazarları okumamış ve o insanların adını bile duymamış olmaktan kaynaklanan eksiklik hissi eşlik eder, çünkü o şehirleri gördüğümüz, o yazarları okuduğumuz, o insanları da bir şekilde duyduğumuz varsayılarak yazılmıştır. böyle genellemek mantıklı oldu mu bilmiyorum, ama nostaljinin geleceği ikinci türdendi. bu yüzden şehirlere ve yazarlara dair bazı kısımları atlaya atlaya okudum. ama nostaljinin tarihi, eski avrupa, rusya ve abd'nin nostaljiyle ilişkileri, yazarın düşünsel ve yeniden kurucu olarak ayırdığı nostalji türlerine dair anlattıkları, diaspora mekanının kurulumu ve göçmenlerin hatıra eşyalara bakışı ile ilgili kısımları okurken büyük keyif aldım.
August 16, 2009
A whole book devoted to the idea of nostalgia, what it is and how it works in our world. Reminds me a lot of the philosophy/criticism of Walter Benjamin. Not literary criticism per se, but profound and questioning criticism that covers the waterfront. It recalled to me wonderful books like Time and the Art of Living by robert Grudin, Shklovsky and even a bit of Sebald. A look at culture in a way Americans usually aren't exposed to it, not for academics but for anyone interested in looking at our world in a slightly different way--estrangement, the Shklovsky futurist tool.
February 3, 2024
Svetlana Boym (1959 – 2015) fue una experta en literaturas eslavas nacida en San Petersburgo que desarrolló carrera en Harvard, y que se interesó por la nostalgia no como enfermedad individual, sino como una emoción histórica, como síntoma de nuestra era: “Añoro, luego existo”.
Siempre desde una perspectiva de rusa exiliada, en la primera parte del ensayo traza la historia de la nostalgia como afección incurable, presentándola como restauradora o reflexiva. En la segunda parte se centra en las ciudades y los recuerdos poscomunistas, viajando a Moscú, San Petersburgo y Berlín, y en la tercera parte analiza las patrias imaginarias de los exiliados Nabokov, Brodsky y Kabakov, que nunca regresaron a sus países.
Al ser un libro publicado en el año 2000, incide en la transformación económica y social que se produjo en Rusia solamente hasta los años noventa. En cualquier caso, es muy recomendable para los interesados en descubrir la Rusia postsoviética, uno de los lugares más controvertidos, emocionantes y contradictorios del mundo, en el que la libertad radical, lo imprevisible y la experimentación social coexistían con el fatalismo, con el renacimiento de la religión y de los valores tradicionales.
El hogar, a fin de cuentas, no es una comunidad de la no se puede escapar. Puede que el paraíso en la Tierra no sea más que otra aldea Potemkin sin salida.
Siempre desde una perspectiva de rusa exiliada, en la primera parte del ensayo traza la historia de la nostalgia como afección incurable, presentándola como restauradora o reflexiva. En la segunda parte se centra en las ciudades y los recuerdos poscomunistas, viajando a Moscú, San Petersburgo y Berlín, y en la tercera parte analiza las patrias imaginarias de los exiliados Nabokov, Brodsky y Kabakov, que nunca regresaron a sus países.
Al ser un libro publicado en el año 2000, incide en la transformación económica y social que se produjo en Rusia solamente hasta los años noventa. En cualquier caso, es muy recomendable para los interesados en descubrir la Rusia postsoviética, uno de los lugares más controvertidos, emocionantes y contradictorios del mundo, en el que la libertad radical, lo imprevisible y la experimentación social coexistían con el fatalismo, con el renacimiento de la religión y de los valores tradicionales.
El hogar, a fin de cuentas, no es una comunidad de la no se puede escapar. Puede que el paraíso en la Tierra no sea más que otra aldea Potemkin sin salida.
October 12, 2021
много потрясающих книг в одной!
есть ощущение, что мне не хватает ни фундаментальных знаний, ни интеллектуальной мощи для того, чтобы полноценно оценить экстраординарную работу, проделанную Бойм. но я под сильным впечатлением и в восторге.
есть ощущение, что мне не хватает ни фундаментальных знаний, ни интеллектуальной мощи для того, чтобы полноценно оценить экстраординарную работу, проделанную Бойм. но я под сильным впечатлением и в восторге.
May 6, 2024
Wat een worsteling, ik werd van dit boek nostalgisch naar de tijd dat ik dit boek nog niet aan het lezen was
July 30, 2020
Muy bueno, sobre todo su primera parte en la que la autora aporta su marco teórico. De especial interés me han resultado sus conceptos de nostalgia restauradora y nostalgia reflexiva, ideas heredadas de Walter Benjamin que ilustran a la perfección las dos vías de relación emocional que establecemos con nuestro pasado tanto individual como colectivo. Un gran libro ameno y estimulante.
May 25, 2020
I'm in love with this woman!
I'll continue to return to this book many times in this life.
I'll continue to return to this book many times in this life.
April 26, 2018
I absolutely loved the opening chapters, as well as the other (rather occasional) sections that engage directly with the question of locating and theorizing nostalgia. But as an impatient reader coming to the book without an overwhelming interest in the histories of specific Russian and European cities, the very lengthy chapters that narrated the social and cultural histories of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin and Prague were a bit much, and I ended up skimming quite a few sections. Nevertheless, Boym's acerbic writing is superb, and her wide-ranging interests and always-insightful reflections on questions of culture and politics are hugely impressive.
July 9, 2020
First 40 pages: every artist should read this to better understand their relationship to their individual and collective past.
The general concept of nostalgia is a feeling of longing (desire) for the past. Furthermore as Boym drives home, the articulation of this concept is rooted in the observation of homesickness of Swiss soldiers, who when away at war strongly desired to be back home hanging out in the Alps (wouldn't you?)
So nostalgia historically is a kind of homesickness, as Boym sees it, and it occurs when one is far away from ones home. Then she begins to talk about the nostalgia observed of immigrants and the nostalgia of current generations for the past.
She demarcates nostalgia into "restorative" and "reflective" types. Restorative nostalgia more or less can be best exemplified by "Make America Great Again" (for whom?), but unfortunately the author did not live long enough to witness the waves of nostalgia surging in the US before and during the Trump administration (and our own nostalgia for basically anything remotely normal in the time of the current pandemic, which undoubtedly pushed me to seek out more info on nostalgia and why I have been experiencing it so much lately. Restorative nostalgia basically looks at the past through rose-colored glasses and, if I wasn't clear about this, is really dangerous to society. It is a kind of forgetting about the real past and a clinging to an idealized image of the past. Boym talks about this far more in depth through her history of ruins and monuments in Russia from the time of Perestroika (roughly the fall of the Soviet Union) onward. Restorative nostalgia also to elicit reconstruction and restoration.
I really wish Boym spent more time on Reflective Nostalgia, because I think there is a lot more there, otherwise her dichotomy is weak and nostalgia is much more dangerous than it is. What I took away from reading this was that reflective nostalgia longs for the past but with a critical eye. Reflective nostalgia leaves ruins as they are and says "look at what was built and destroyed, let's look at this with a critical eye." But what she doesn't seem to examine is how earth can one experience longing in reflective nostalgia?
Pages 40-100: meh. The digression about dinosaurs and american pre-history was kind of a pointless tangent and I'm not sure all that useful in her argument, it seemed forced in the kind of way that if somebody asked you: what do dinosaurs have to do with american nostalgia? this is the best thing you could come up with. The rest of the book (until I gave up): a history lesson, WAY too much detail unless you are interested in Soviet history. In some ways this perhaps is Boym's own exercise in reflective nostalgia.
I have been guilt tripping trying to finish this (I rarely stop reading books without guilt), but this may be one I need to put down, but in general this is some dry-ass academic writing. I like the restorative/reflective dichotomy discussion of nostalgia but I think Boyms nostalgia is of a very particular kind related to her experience of nostalgia as an immigrant to the US. I think there is more to unpack here re: homesickness and longing for youth which is where a lot of my own (and art’s) nostalgia lies, not in the ruins of Stalingrad or whatever. I carried on with the Russian history for fifty pages but I had to put this down. Interesting take on what nostalgia is but I think Boym (rip) got only one angle on the topic, albeit a sharp one.
I think there is a lot more here to nostalgia particularly when it comes to music and music production, and perhaps this work motivated me to do some of my own writing on this topic. I think it's a rich one and especially relevant. The phenomenon of retro music is nothing new but the vaporwave genre and the use of VHS and cassette sounds, cheesy synthesizers, samples, etc. for emotional effects is an interesting thing to explore, especially when it's not even clear that many of the vaporwave producers were even alive during the VHS boom.
But I digress. There's definitely food for thought here, and I think the more historically and politically minded readers will have more to take away from this, particularly in the discussion of monuments, which has become extremely relevant in recent times due to the destruction of many statues in the US and around the world. The pandemic has forced us to be with ourselves, and when our experience turns inward the past comes back to haunt us, or sometimes to greet us like a old friend.
The general concept of nostalgia is a feeling of longing (desire) for the past. Furthermore as Boym drives home, the articulation of this concept is rooted in the observation of homesickness of Swiss soldiers, who when away at war strongly desired to be back home hanging out in the Alps (wouldn't you?)
So nostalgia historically is a kind of homesickness, as Boym sees it, and it occurs when one is far away from ones home. Then she begins to talk about the nostalgia observed of immigrants and the nostalgia of current generations for the past.
She demarcates nostalgia into "restorative" and "reflective" types. Restorative nostalgia more or less can be best exemplified by "Make America Great Again" (for whom?), but unfortunately the author did not live long enough to witness the waves of nostalgia surging in the US before and during the Trump administration (and our own nostalgia for basically anything remotely normal in the time of the current pandemic, which undoubtedly pushed me to seek out more info on nostalgia and why I have been experiencing it so much lately. Restorative nostalgia basically looks at the past through rose-colored glasses and, if I wasn't clear about this, is really dangerous to society. It is a kind of forgetting about the real past and a clinging to an idealized image of the past. Boym talks about this far more in depth through her history of ruins and monuments in Russia from the time of Perestroika (roughly the fall of the Soviet Union) onward. Restorative nostalgia also to elicit reconstruction and restoration.
I really wish Boym spent more time on Reflective Nostalgia, because I think there is a lot more there, otherwise her dichotomy is weak and nostalgia is much more dangerous than it is. What I took away from reading this was that reflective nostalgia longs for the past but with a critical eye. Reflective nostalgia leaves ruins as they are and says "look at what was built and destroyed, let's look at this with a critical eye." But what she doesn't seem to examine is how earth can one experience longing in reflective nostalgia?
Pages 40-100: meh. The digression about dinosaurs and american pre-history was kind of a pointless tangent and I'm not sure all that useful in her argument, it seemed forced in the kind of way that if somebody asked you: what do dinosaurs have to do with american nostalgia? this is the best thing you could come up with. The rest of the book (until I gave up): a history lesson, WAY too much detail unless you are interested in Soviet history. In some ways this perhaps is Boym's own exercise in reflective nostalgia.
I have been guilt tripping trying to finish this (I rarely stop reading books without guilt), but this may be one I need to put down, but in general this is some dry-ass academic writing. I like the restorative/reflective dichotomy discussion of nostalgia but I think Boyms nostalgia is of a very particular kind related to her experience of nostalgia as an immigrant to the US. I think there is more to unpack here re: homesickness and longing for youth which is where a lot of my own (and art’s) nostalgia lies, not in the ruins of Stalingrad or whatever. I carried on with the Russian history for fifty pages but I had to put this down. Interesting take on what nostalgia is but I think Boym (rip) got only one angle on the topic, albeit a sharp one.
I think there is a lot more here to nostalgia particularly when it comes to music and music production, and perhaps this work motivated me to do some of my own writing on this topic. I think it's a rich one and especially relevant. The phenomenon of retro music is nothing new but the vaporwave genre and the use of VHS and cassette sounds, cheesy synthesizers, samples, etc. for emotional effects is an interesting thing to explore, especially when it's not even clear that many of the vaporwave producers were even alive during the VHS boom.
But I digress. There's definitely food for thought here, and I think the more historically and politically minded readers will have more to take away from this, particularly in the discussion of monuments, which has become extremely relevant in recent times due to the destruction of many statues in the US and around the world. The pandemic has forced us to be with ourselves, and when our experience turns inward the past comes back to haunt us, or sometimes to greet us like a old friend.
March 27, 2021
I am being reminded how comforting it is to read Eastern European authors, how close to home their words hit, and how organic their experiences feel. I am being reminded that there is an unbridgeable gap between me and Western writers; but for the first time, it doesn't feel awkward or othering, it feels like coming home.
Although there's a big part of The Future of Nostalgia that I didn't find particularly interesting (and I have to admit to having skipped certain chapters), Boym's essays resonated with me on a very personal level. There must be an undercurrent of post-soviet sadness that transcends all kinds of space-time boundaries, that is inherited from past generations, and that makes this book so impactful to me. The mere act of reading this book is nostalgia-inducing. It made me hyper-aware of my homeland, of the transience of it all. And I am so glad for it.
Although there's a big part of The Future of Nostalgia that I didn't find particularly interesting (and I have to admit to having skipped certain chapters), Boym's essays resonated with me on a very personal level. There must be an undercurrent of post-soviet sadness that transcends all kinds of space-time boundaries, that is inherited from past generations, and that makes this book so impactful to me. The mere act of reading this book is nostalgia-inducing. It made me hyper-aware of my homeland, of the transience of it all. And I am so glad for it.
One becomes aware of the collective frameworks of memory when one distances oneself from one's community or when that community itself enters the moment of twilight. Collective frameworks of memory are rediscovered in mourning.
March 7, 2017
Just started reading, but it's kind of amazing already. seeing as I am the most pathetically nostalgic person I have to listen to in my head all day, this turns me on:
"Tracing the history of 'hypochondria of the heart' from a passing ailment to incurable modern condition, Svetlana Boym has achieved nothing less than a new area of inquiry, a new typology, the identification of a new aesthetic: the study of nostalgia. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin to explore the imagined homelands of writers and artists like Nabokov, Brodsky and Nabakov and examines the souvenir collections of ordinary immigrants. In short, Bym has written a new kin of encyclopedic meditation that captures the mysteries and rhythms of longing, a calendar that schedules out of time daydreaming and a treatise that diagnoses our global epidemic of longing and its antidotes"
It's full of drivel, but it is highly beautiful to read.
"Tracing the history of 'hypochondria of the heart' from a passing ailment to incurable modern condition, Svetlana Boym has achieved nothing less than a new area of inquiry, a new typology, the identification of a new aesthetic: the study of nostalgia. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin to explore the imagined homelands of writers and artists like Nabokov, Brodsky and Nabakov and examines the souvenir collections of ordinary immigrants. In short, Bym has written a new kin of encyclopedic meditation that captures the mysteries and rhythms of longing, a calendar that schedules out of time daydreaming and a treatise that diagnoses our global epidemic of longing and its antidotes"
It's full of drivel, but it is highly beautiful to read.
July 6, 2017
Wonderful book. I particularly liked chapter 5 and the concluding chapter.
I love this passage. It is so true about our need to slow down:
"The extreme version of the eliminational model of progress (which believes, for example, that the e-book will supplant the book altogether rather than that the two can happily cohabit in the same household) presents a kind of tunnel vision of the road toward the future. It presumes that there is no environment around that tunnel, no context, no other streets and avenues that take a detour from the underground speed lanes and traffic jams. Reflective nostalgia challenges this tunnel vision, backtracking, slowing down, looking sideways, meditating on the journey itself."
I love this passage. It is so true about our need to slow down:
"The extreme version of the eliminational model of progress (which believes, for example, that the e-book will supplant the book altogether rather than that the two can happily cohabit in the same household) presents a kind of tunnel vision of the road toward the future. It presumes that there is no environment around that tunnel, no context, no other streets and avenues that take a detour from the underground speed lanes and traffic jams. Reflective nostalgia challenges this tunnel vision, backtracking, slowing down, looking sideways, meditating on the journey itself."
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October 26, 2022I'm not giving it a rating because I skipped huge chunks that were not relevant to my research.
That being said, what I did read was really interesting. Boym has a charming (if not sometimes overly cutesy) writing style. Her writing is insightful, but at times she injects extra sentences that are more whimsy than anything else.
Still, Boym's book is interesting in its exploration of the ways we create vessels of nostalgia and process it. For instance, that nostalgia feigns apoliticality but then becomes a weapon used by politicians. (To quote from Aaron Sorkin's movie, The American President, "You get a group of middle age, middle income voters in a room and you remind them about an easier time, you talk about family, and you say she [a political activist character] is the one to blame for their problems. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.") Or how long gone and extinct entities, such as dinosaurs, are the ultimate nostalgic fixation, because we cannot truly get them wrong in our imaginings because we cannot know exactly what they look like. (And we get this awesome sentence: "The dinosaur is America’s unicorn, the mythical animal of Nature’s Nation” (33).)
So if you have any interest in the topic, then this book is very enlightening. Also, it's extremely accessible – anyone with an interest in the topic should be able to parse it out fairly easily.
That being said, what I did read was really interesting. Boym has a charming (if not sometimes overly cutesy) writing style. Her writing is insightful, but at times she injects extra sentences that are more whimsy than anything else.
Still, Boym's book is interesting in its exploration of the ways we create vessels of nostalgia and process it. For instance, that nostalgia feigns apoliticality but then becomes a weapon used by politicians. (To quote from Aaron Sorkin's movie, The American President, "You get a group of middle age, middle income voters in a room and you remind them about an easier time, you talk about family, and you say she [a political activist character] is the one to blame for their problems. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.") Or how long gone and extinct entities, such as dinosaurs, are the ultimate nostalgic fixation, because we cannot truly get them wrong in our imaginings because we cannot know exactly what they look like. (And we get this awesome sentence: "The dinosaur is America’s unicorn, the mythical animal of Nature’s Nation” (33).)
So if you have any interest in the topic, then this book is very enlightening. Also, it's extremely accessible – anyone with an interest in the topic should be able to parse it out fairly easily.
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June 28, 2024Using the fall of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Boym explores nostalgia as both poison and balm. Histories rewritten through memory while exiles wander out forever separate from the new history they are not a part of anymore.
Extensive use of physical spaces — clubs and museums and parks — as catalysts for nostalgia, while looking into works of Russian authors/artists and their relationship as exile from the myth.
Limited to her own personal story as Soviet exile, but we are all no more than our own story anyway. Her categorization of types of nostalgia is a framework to analyze or consider other texts.
Extensive use of physical spaces — clubs and museums and parks — as catalysts for nostalgia, while looking into works of Russian authors/artists and their relationship as exile from the myth.
Limited to her own personal story as Soviet exile, but we are all no more than our own story anyway. Her categorization of types of nostalgia is a framework to analyze or consider other texts.
December 30, 2019
Svetlana's humble/good observations make reader to dip into texts seperately. As time (Kant; in our world it is not already), nostalgic feelings are personal as well. So as long as we have persistence of memory (Dali), we will have a sadomasochist (suffering/enjoyment) relationship with nostalgia at its purest.
June 16, 2023
I have been reading this book, off and on, for almost a year and a half–in some sense, it feels simply like a relief to have finished it. I know this is a text I will return to again and again, and I already feel that in the time it has rattled around in my brain, it has influenced my thinking significantly. I preferred the outer edges of the book to the geographically focused center, which was at times difficult for me to connect with. At the same time, I find Boym's geographic interrogations of nostalgia to be some of her strongest stretches in the book. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in nostalgia, longing, sentimentality, and the modern meaning of 'home.'
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May 25, 2020Not rating as this was another PhD read - super interesting and felt quite appropriate with everyone experiencing nostalgia due to lockdown at the moment
November 20, 2024
insanely gute introduction, dann ganz viel Sowjet nostalgia und ein bisschen flaches cyberspace ende
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September 11, 2023FINALLY done.
first part (hypochondria of the heart: nostalgia, history and memory) remains one of the most gripping/pertinent things i’ve read. and then it falls off, simply because i find Boym to be lacking as an urbanist and a literary critic.
first part (hypochondria of the heart: nostalgia, history and memory) remains one of the most gripping/pertinent things i’ve read. and then it falls off, simply because i find Boym to be lacking as an urbanist and a literary critic.
December 10, 2024
Is nostalgia an eternal lack, or an alternative ironic fulfilment? Is it a disorder; or even a disease? Is nostalgia the manifest of the body-mind dynamic only humans are known to affect? Is nostalgia, in its spectral forms, human condition itself?
There are issues spinning around threads such as these and other philosophical & psychological, social & historical queries which Svetlana Boym, the Russian-American-nostalgic, has undertaken to address.
In this brilliantly focussed meditation on the philosophy of Nostalgia, Svetlana becomes increasingly interested in unveiling the creative potential of the concept in terms of that ever-ambivalent but human-all-too-human idea, known to us as 'Modernity'. She covers pretty much enough art history of the time: such as Paul Klee's 'The Angel of History' as emphasized by Walter Benjamin's discourse about its possibilities to traverse and go beyond fixed categories or isms.
In the first part of the book, Boym argues how nostalgia became a polarized or binarized category, in terms of the local and the universal.
Subsequently, the space and time vis-a-vis 'modernity' is unpacked by Boym daringly close to and in relation to the postmodernist concepts from critical theory. The paradox of our age emerges out of culture, art history, and the lives of the exiles whose sharp literary wisdom enable the past, present and future to coexist; in their poetry, architecture, essays and installation art.
...
With a vision of the 'reflective nostalgic', the author commentates on the capitalist outlook, and along with its perpetual commodification of our world, anticipates the 'ersatz nostalgia' / 'armchair nostalgia" (Appadurai) -- guides the reader detour and return to our age -- where everything could be put on sale, in a constantly advertised space, packed and delivered at the scale of the arenas of the metropolis/megapolises. As a corollary of that system, memories (genuine or manufactured and projected endlessly) are commodified. This effects the fine-tuning of the scrutinizing light of enquiry on ourselves amid our nostalgias.
...
and tells thus of the politics of nostalgia welded with politics of nationalism:
"American popular culture is growing more and more self-referential and all-embracing; it quickly absorbs the inventions of high culture, but as in Clement Greenberg’s good old definition of kitsch, the entertainment industry still mass reproduces the effects of art and stays away from exploring the mechanisms of critical consciousness."
All ideas, as they come to life, given thus by those who think them, emerge and advance towards their natural evolution as philosophical concepts. Svetlana Boym, in the 'Future of Nostalgia' achieves not only charting out the inception, conception, the historical evolution of the idea of 'Nostalgia' but conceptualizes it with the eyes of our paradoxical worlds. This means that what we are discussing here with respect to the 'modern condition' which stretches up to the postmodern times, and read or rather consumed now in a post-truth environment, is available as an essential reading of our most urgent inhibitions, as well as the concerns of the day, in general. For instance, the writer's injunction that unlike the popular conception, postmodernism was first developed in the post-soviet Russia, is a revelation of sorts, with respect to the human-nostalgic-condition.
In a comprehensive chapterization on tracing the historical roots of 'nostalgia' and re-reading it in the age of AI, the book facilitates our faculty of critical reading. The chapters on the city and the metropolis identify credibly our generations' existential strife: "The city, then, is an ideal crossroads between longing and estrangement, memory and freedom, nostalgia and modernity."
The way Svetlana Boym sees the three cities (which are always more than three cities) in philosophical detail, opens us a novel way of visualizing the phenomenon of a city; as a simultaneous perception of the authentic and fake experience.
In particular it is those sections that argue for the enabling side or power of Nostalgia, which is the core of the book for me: The Proustian return to the home is a return to his self.
...
Nostalgia, regardless, is a dynamic movement between forgetfulness and remembering ...
this dynamic keeps shaping into metamorphosed forms, informed by erased memories, enforced forgetfulness, manufactured recollections, or manufactured nostalgia of memories, and so on.
... leading up to reveal to ourselves the nostalgias: local, domestic, national, individual, social, personal, collective, commercial, political, ... and the 'nostalgia for world culture' in Mendelstam's words, or Benjamin's 'ironic nostalgia'...
not to mention the selective nostalgia/memory...
... and the nostalgia of the "many potentialities that have not been realized"...
... and what about "nostalgia for nostalgia" ...
to be read and perceived from the point of view of the 'ethics of remembering'...
The author devotes considerable space to the politics of the erasure of nostalgia, and thereby projecting/planting a reconstructed one:
"There are no ruins on the site ..... The obliteration of memory is at the foundation of each new project. .... enforces a collective amnesia about past destructions..."
...
Thus, reading 'into' nostalgia, to deepen understanding of its inherent paradoxes, allows accessing the philosophic vision of nostalgia... which is the most enabling force to take away the veneers and veils that shroud the immanent ambivalences of reality; nostalgically speaking then, would be seeing into the fissures, the interstices that embodies the nature of reality.
Boym approaches nostalgia, through the alleyways of memory and forgetfulness of memories; through accounts and rumours and misrepresentations of information, through the visible and the invisible both; the modus operandi to access human condition, which refuses to be pinned down: such as Nabokov's mediations:
"The literal is less truthful than the literary" ~ in Nabokov's seeing the photographs o
....
"Nostalgia is akin to unrequited love, only we are not sure about the identity of our lost beloved."
...
"Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home, at
once..."
... because sometimes the homecoming doesn't cure; it rather aggravates the longing.
'The Future (+Past+Present) of Nostalgia' is a significant book simply to traverse cities from the eyes of a modern nostalgic ... and meet, in other nostalgics, with authors and artists introduced by way of sensitive excursions taken to the museums, houses, the places where the literary augments the literal ... steering away the idea of nostalgia from the Russian 'poshlost' and the German 'kitsch'... or the sentimentalization of emotions and human feelings entrenched in nostalgia; ... like Kabakov's much ubiquitous "horizontality of the banal"...
There is much that would require coming back to this book for a well deserved repeat reading, a revisiting; even as I felt the deliberation to slow down finishing it the first time, to escape bringing it to the inevitable close, and with that the advent of a pining nostalgia that is brewing already--being nostalgic about all the peers, people and places that Svetlana has documented or archived with love.
There are issues spinning around threads such as these and other philosophical & psychological, social & historical queries which Svetlana Boym, the Russian-American-nostalgic, has undertaken to address.
In this brilliantly focussed meditation on the philosophy of Nostalgia, Svetlana becomes increasingly interested in unveiling the creative potential of the concept in terms of that ever-ambivalent but human-all-too-human idea, known to us as 'Modernity'. She covers pretty much enough art history of the time: such as Paul Klee's 'The Angel of History' as emphasized by Walter Benjamin's discourse about its possibilities to traverse and go beyond fixed categories or isms.
In the first part of the book, Boym argues how nostalgia became a polarized or binarized category, in terms of the local and the universal.
Subsequently, the space and time vis-a-vis 'modernity' is unpacked by Boym daringly close to and in relation to the postmodernist concepts from critical theory. The paradox of our age emerges out of culture, art history, and the lives of the exiles whose sharp literary wisdom enable the past, present and future to coexist; in their poetry, architecture, essays and installation art.
...
With a vision of the 'reflective nostalgic', the author commentates on the capitalist outlook, and along with its perpetual commodification of our world, anticipates the 'ersatz nostalgia' / 'armchair nostalgia" (Appadurai) -- guides the reader detour and return to our age -- where everything could be put on sale, in a constantly advertised space, packed and delivered at the scale of the arenas of the metropolis/megapolises. As a corollary of that system, memories (genuine or manufactured and projected endlessly) are commodified. This effects the fine-tuning of the scrutinizing light of enquiry on ourselves amid our nostalgias.
...
and tells thus of the politics of nostalgia welded with politics of nationalism:
"American popular culture is growing more and more self-referential and all-embracing; it quickly absorbs the inventions of high culture, but as in Clement Greenberg’s good old definition of kitsch, the entertainment industry still mass reproduces the effects of art and stays away from exploring the mechanisms of critical consciousness."
All ideas, as they come to life, given thus by those who think them, emerge and advance towards their natural evolution as philosophical concepts. Svetlana Boym, in the 'Future of Nostalgia' achieves not only charting out the inception, conception, the historical evolution of the idea of 'Nostalgia' but conceptualizes it with the eyes of our paradoxical worlds. This means that what we are discussing here with respect to the 'modern condition' which stretches up to the postmodern times, and read or rather consumed now in a post-truth environment, is available as an essential reading of our most urgent inhibitions, as well as the concerns of the day, in general. For instance, the writer's injunction that unlike the popular conception, postmodernism was first developed in the post-soviet Russia, is a revelation of sorts, with respect to the human-nostalgic-condition.
In a comprehensive chapterization on tracing the historical roots of 'nostalgia' and re-reading it in the age of AI, the book facilitates our faculty of critical reading. The chapters on the city and the metropolis identify credibly our generations' existential strife: "The city, then, is an ideal crossroads between longing and estrangement, memory and freedom, nostalgia and modernity."
The way Svetlana Boym sees the three cities (which are always more than three cities) in philosophical detail, opens us a novel way of visualizing the phenomenon of a city; as a simultaneous perception of the authentic and fake experience.
In particular it is those sections that argue for the enabling side or power of Nostalgia, which is the core of the book for me: The Proustian return to the home is a return to his self.
...
Nostalgia, regardless, is a dynamic movement between forgetfulness and remembering ...
this dynamic keeps shaping into metamorphosed forms, informed by erased memories, enforced forgetfulness, manufactured recollections, or manufactured nostalgia of memories, and so on.
... leading up to reveal to ourselves the nostalgias: local, domestic, national, individual, social, personal, collective, commercial, political, ... and the 'nostalgia for world culture' in Mendelstam's words, or Benjamin's 'ironic nostalgia'...
not to mention the selective nostalgia/memory...
... and the nostalgia of the "many potentialities that have not been realized"...
... and what about "nostalgia for nostalgia" ...
to be read and perceived from the point of view of the 'ethics of remembering'...
The author devotes considerable space to the politics of the erasure of nostalgia, and thereby projecting/planting a reconstructed one:
"There are no ruins on the site ..... The obliteration of memory is at the foundation of each new project. .... enforces a collective amnesia about past destructions..."
...
Thus, reading 'into' nostalgia, to deepen understanding of its inherent paradoxes, allows accessing the philosophic vision of nostalgia... which is the most enabling force to take away the veneers and veils that shroud the immanent ambivalences of reality; nostalgically speaking then, would be seeing into the fissures, the interstices that embodies the nature of reality.
Boym approaches nostalgia, through the alleyways of memory and forgetfulness of memories; through accounts and rumours and misrepresentations of information, through the visible and the invisible both; the modus operandi to access human condition, which refuses to be pinned down: such as Nabokov's mediations:
"The literal is less truthful than the literary" ~ in Nabokov's seeing the photographs o
....
"Nostalgia is akin to unrequited love, only we are not sure about the identity of our lost beloved."
...
"Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home, at
once..."
... because sometimes the homecoming doesn't cure; it rather aggravates the longing.
'The Future (+Past+Present) of Nostalgia' is a significant book simply to traverse cities from the eyes of a modern nostalgic ... and meet, in other nostalgics, with authors and artists introduced by way of sensitive excursions taken to the museums, houses, the places where the literary augments the literal ... steering away the idea of nostalgia from the Russian 'poshlost' and the German 'kitsch'... or the sentimentalization of emotions and human feelings entrenched in nostalgia; ... like Kabakov's much ubiquitous "horizontality of the banal"...
There is much that would require coming back to this book for a well deserved repeat reading, a revisiting; even as I felt the deliberation to slow down finishing it the first time, to escape bringing it to the inevitable close, and with that the advent of a pining nostalgia that is brewing already--being nostalgic about all the peers, people and places that Svetlana has documented or archived with love.
February 8, 2016
The Future of Nostalgia (2001) este o carte-melanj, o lectură-maraton de 400 și ceva de pagini, care îmbină memoriile personale cu istoria, filosofia și studiile culturale, având miza de a revela resorturile nostalgiei în memoria colectivă a țărilor foste comuniste. Autoarea face un periplu de-a lungul orașelor-centru ale comunismului — Sankt-Petersburg, Moscova, Berlin și Praga — fotografiind și descriind relicvele unui regim totalitar mort și explicând cauzele existenței unei nostalgii după viața în comunism. pe alocuri, Uneori, m-am împiedicat în rânduri, pagini întregi chiar, cu alură pregnant teoretică, însă, acestea odată depășite, The Future of Nostalgia devine o carte foarte user-friendly, care-și transferă ideile către cititor într-un limbaj accesibil și precis. Iar anecdotele, imaginile și amintirile autoarei, presărate de-a lungul cărții, înlesnesc cu atât mai mult parcurgerea celor 400 de pagini ale sale.
Recenzia completa aici: http://iuliacampeanu.onezone.ro/the-f...
Recenzia completa aici: http://iuliacampeanu.onezone.ro/the-f...
March 22, 2021
If I could only read one book in my lifetime, this would be the one. Suddenly, everything I have ever known, thought and felt makes sense.
This is a brilliant study of the phenomenon of nostalgia and, in large part, the human condition altogether.
This is a brilliant study of the phenomenon of nostalgia and, in large part, the human condition altogether.
February 20, 2012
Absolutely brilliant.
April 7, 2020
Interesting theoretical work but too reflexively/automatically antagonistic towards popular culture.
April 23, 2020
Unless you're very interested in Russian history I'd take a pass on this book, other than the marvelous introduction.
December 6, 2020
Like the ideas of restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia, but somewhat vague on a few ideas in the book. Enjoyed it.
January 25, 2024
Beginning her discourse on nostalgia, Boym divides the experience/state/response/emotion into two types, restorative and reflective. Essentially, restorative nostalgia operates in a reactionary sort of way, imposing an imagined ideology of the past and incorporating it into monumental expressions of that past. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is small and individual in scale, often a pastiche of past or imagined past experiences, and geared towards a more creative future, especially as it values "irony," "fun," "play," and "experimentation." Of course, putting that last string of words in quotation marks violates Boym's claims in a substantial way. For she is adamant in declaring that nostalgia is attached to modernity and modernization as it is a response to that condition and not a foray into postmodernism. The problem is that her descriptions of course amount to all the ingredients of the postmodern experience. She is caught in this divide and it shows even in how she expresses the form and content of the book.
For The Future of Nostalgia is itself a pastiche. Following its somewhat theoretical introduction, it moves on to the author's experiences in Moscow and St. Petersburg. She writes in 2000 and is looking back over the events since 1989. These chapters in Russia combine a practical guide to the "errors" of restorative nostalgia along with being a fascinating bit of travel writing. Next she moves to Berlin, where the commentary moves more toward architectural criticism, in particular regarding the situation of Jewish monuments and restorations. A trip into Central Europe focuses on film criticism, especially on emigre filmmakers.
Her next sections then explore works she considers reflective, including literary criticism of the works of Nobokov and Brodsky and art criticism of Kabakov's installations. Over the three you can see a morphing into postmodern concerns and forms. These are Boym's preferred expressions of nostalgia, especially as it effects immigrants and people who escaped the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, of whom Boym of course is one. "Exilic" (I like that word) experiences combine with fear and desire of nostalgia to keep those it "afflicts" in a borderland or transitory state, from which they can never escape. It is both a prod for genius and a poison for despair.
I like Boym's writing style. And I especially enjoyed her use of tangible objects and texts to illustrate her theoretical notions. It's absolutely enlightening. The book does become more severe as goes along, however, perhaps because the author describes a situation which really can't last. And it didn't. That chaotic, relatively free world of Central and Eastern Europe of the 1990s today looks like a closed down carnival turned into a tent show of doctrinaire political authoritarianism. Boym herself died in 2015, but had enough insight I think to acknowledge how things would turn out. Her few references to Putin indicate she had the measure of the man and what he would bring. And so he did. The post-communist Eastern Europe of 30 to 35 years ago that Boym describes simply vanished. In its place? Perhaps a new set of inspirations for nostalgia as it should have been.
For The Future of Nostalgia is itself a pastiche. Following its somewhat theoretical introduction, it moves on to the author's experiences in Moscow and St. Petersburg. She writes in 2000 and is looking back over the events since 1989. These chapters in Russia combine a practical guide to the "errors" of restorative nostalgia along with being a fascinating bit of travel writing. Next she moves to Berlin, where the commentary moves more toward architectural criticism, in particular regarding the situation of Jewish monuments and restorations. A trip into Central Europe focuses on film criticism, especially on emigre filmmakers.
Her next sections then explore works she considers reflective, including literary criticism of the works of Nobokov and Brodsky and art criticism of Kabakov's installations. Over the three you can see a morphing into postmodern concerns and forms. These are Boym's preferred expressions of nostalgia, especially as it effects immigrants and people who escaped the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, of whom Boym of course is one. "Exilic" (I like that word) experiences combine with fear and desire of nostalgia to keep those it "afflicts" in a borderland or transitory state, from which they can never escape. It is both a prod for genius and a poison for despair.
I like Boym's writing style. And I especially enjoyed her use of tangible objects and texts to illustrate her theoretical notions. It's absolutely enlightening. The book does become more severe as goes along, however, perhaps because the author describes a situation which really can't last. And it didn't. That chaotic, relatively free world of Central and Eastern Europe of the 1990s today looks like a closed down carnival turned into a tent show of doctrinaire political authoritarianism. Boym herself died in 2015, but had enough insight I think to acknowledge how things would turn out. Her few references to Putin indicate she had the measure of the man and what he would bring. And so he did. The post-communist Eastern Europe of 30 to 35 years ago that Boym describes simply vanished. In its place? Perhaps a new set of inspirations for nostalgia as it should have been.
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