L'avenir d'une nostalgie

Svetlana Boym (1959-2015) was born in the Soviet Union and is the author of an important, unfinished body of work. The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001) blends personal memory, philosophical prose and historical analysis. In a style that allies her own experience of exile and her Jewish identity with her fight for freedom, Boym penned some ten works, including a novel and a play. A professor at Harvard, she explored the spaces of collective nostalgia, interweaving notions of national biography with those of the construction of the self. Developing the idea of nostalgia in an aesthetic and modern perspective, Boym guides us through the ruins and the reconstructed post-Communist cities (Berlin, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Prague) that have become the mirrors of other exiled writers' nostalgia: "Nostalgia (from nostos-return home, and algia-longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss." Boym’s affective geography reveals the signs of the time.