Nostalgic Journeys in Post-Soviet Cinema: Towards a Lost Home?

Abstract

The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov offers possibly the best introduction to a discussion of nostalgia and its meaning in Russian culture. His major plays The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) deal with the melancholy of the characters as they face the passing of one age and the arrival of new times; they long for the past and fear the future, lapsing into inertia in the present. The longing articulated by Masha, Irina and Olga in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters is a longing for another place, Moscow, where they were born and raised; but the location Moscow encapsulates the longing to return to a happy past, to their childhood when father and mother were still alive and they led a more interesting life than their present, dull existence in provincial Russia. The sisters are nostalgic about the past, associating it with a place that exists only in their imagination. The longing for another time rather than another place explains the sisters’ lack of action in the present: they have moved, or ‘migrated’, from the capital to the provinces, and a return is impossible because of the temporal rather than the geographical distance. As the cultural historian Svetlana Boym has argued: 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 and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. […] nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. (2001: xiii, xv)