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List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and semi-autobiographical “snippets of experience” written by Svetlana Boym in the final period of her life capture her penchant for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, The Origins of Nostalgia will enable our own cultural past as well as that of the former Soviet Union to be viewed in a different light.
Foreword
The final unpublished works of the late philosopher, cultural critic and media artist, Svetlana Boym, The Origins of Nostalgia comprises a series of autobiographical reflections which provide unique insights and background to Boym's existing body of work.
Additional text
Eloquent, ironic, and haunting, this suite of Svetlana Boym’s essays is a shifting kaleidoscope of vivid memories, from a Soviet childhood to her ongoing reinventions of herself in America. The Origins of Nostalgia is the culmination of Svetlana Boym’s creative intertwining of her life and her compelling life’s work.
