Svetlana Boym (1959–2015)

What is the “real Russia”? What is the relationship between national dreams and kitsch, between political and artistic utopia and everyday existence? Commonplaces of daily living would be perfect clues for those seeking to understand a culture. But all who write big books on Russian life confess their failure to get properly inside Russia, to understand its “doublespeak.”

Svetlana Boym is a unique guide. A member of the last Soviet Generation, the Russian equivalent of our Generation show more X, she grew up in Leningrad and has lived in the West for the past thirteen years. Her book provides a view of Russia that is historically informed, replete with unexpected detail, and everywhere stamped with authority. Alternating analysis with personal accounts of Russian life, Boym conveys the foreignness of Russia and examines its peculiar conceptions of private life and common good, of Culture and Trash, of sincerity and banality. Armed with a Dictionary of Untranslatable Terms, we step around Uncle Fedia asleep in the hall, surrounded by a puddle of urine, and enter the Communal Apartment, the central exhibit of the book. It is the ruin of the communal utopia and a unique institution of Soviet daily life; a model Soviet home and a breeding ground for grassroots informants. Here, privacy is forbidden; here the inhabitants defiantly treasure their bits of “domestic trash,” targets of ideological campaigns for the transformation (perestroika) of everyday life.

Against the Russian and Soviet myths of national destiny, the trivial, the ordinary, even the trashy, take on a utopian dimension. Boym studies Russian culture in a broad sense of the word; she ranges from nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual thought to art and popular culture. With her we go walking in Moscow and Leningrad, eavesdrop on domestic life, and discover jokes, films, and TV programs. Boym then reflects on the 1991 coup that marked the end of the Soviet Union and evoked fin-de-siècle apocalyptic visions. The book ends with a poignant reflection on the nature of communal utopia and nostalgia, on homesickness and the sickness of being home. show less

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 show more 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.
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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.
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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. show less

There's something I can't yet identify about the way Boym approached her subjects and writing about them that's absolutely fascinating. Guess I'll just have to keep reading her work and try to find the right words for it all...

This book documents 80 artworks and projects by New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) from 2002-2012. The collective executes a wide spectrum of projects, ranging from full-scale curatorial works to discrete objects such as prints.'