The future of nostalgia

by Svetlana Boym

"Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? What happens to Old World memories in a New World order? Do we even know what we are nostalgic for?". "Combining philosophical essay, aesthetic analysis and personal memoir, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia, national myths and the personal stories of exiles. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin, explores the imagined homelands of writers and artists like Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky and Ilya Kabakov and examines the souvenir collections of ordinary immigrants. In short, Boym has written a new kind 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."--BOOK JACKET.