On Sale: Mar 28, 2002
Page Count: 432 pages
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN-13: 9780465007080

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$29.99 CAD

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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.

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“A remarkable book… brilliant.”
New York Times
“Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia is a massive, sophisticated and brilliant study… a rewarding cross-genre book.”
Globe and Mail
“Serious students of modern culture will find no better book for explaining why a society increasingly dependent upon globalized hyperspace is also a society awash in nostalgia.”
Booklist
“Erudite and witty, fact-filled and deeply-felt, this moving meditation on the vicissitudes of time, loss and longing will provoke us to think anew about the ambiguities of our collective sensibility and the perennial needs of the individual soul.”
Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation
“Svetlana Boym’s brilliant, witty, ironic, penetrating dissection of ‘nostalgia,’ in all its manifestations – nationalist, diasporic, exilic, literary, personal – is, above all, deeply moving. In casting a cool but tender eye on the contradictions of everyday existence today, this is a unique book.”
Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox
“Dazzling erudition, sexy narrative drive, and an elegant aesthetic sensibility make The Future of Nostalgia a work of profound insight and intellectual excitement… an indispensable book for anyone trying to make sense of the twentieth century.”
Larry Wolff, author of Inventing Eastern Europe

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Svetlana Boym

About the Author

Svetlana Boym was a writer and Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard. She is the author of Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia and Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, as well as of short stories, plays, and a novel.

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About the Author Svetlana Boym was a writer and Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard. She is the author of Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia and Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, as well as of short stories, plays, and a novel.

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Svetlana Boym

About the Author