Svetlana Boym Research Articles

Schoenberg as Strauss

This article examines and contextualizes Arnold Schoenberg’s arrangements of waltzes by Johann Strauss, arguing that they demonstrate how Schoenberg’s music, while radically modern, was at the same time profoundly shaped by nostalgia. This particular type of nostalgia—not simply a longing for a lost past, but rather an act of remembering that is imperfect, a dialectical process that looks backwards even as it participates in constructions of the self that are oriented towards the future—underwrites Schoenberg’s engagement with the past and anxiety about the future. His waltz arrangements, celebrating the pinnacle of Viennese imperial culture, are contemporary with his foray in dodecaphony, and as such curiously anachronistic. But, as I argue here, considering Schoenberg as a nostalgic—via the work of cultural theorists like Svetlana Boym—opens the door to some possible different narratives for music history. Schoenberg’s legacy of “crisis and progress” can thus be challenged, and something like Boym’s “third way” of modernism, with its “lateral possibilities,” can emerge.

Memoria dislocata. Svetlana Boym, Marija Stepanova e la poetica nella Russia post-sovietica

Post-Soviet literature and theoretical reflection constitute an elective place for the elaboration of memory; the reflection of Svetlana Boym (starting exemplary from her work on Nabokov) and the poetic work of Marija Stepanova between poetry, prose and essays are the subject of these notes, which pay particular attention to the dislocation of memory as a reactivation of history in the double emergency of condition specific to the post-memory generation and the erasure of history by the Putin regime.

Nostalgia, authenticity and writing Goth histories: ‘Would you carry the torch...?’1

In 2023, three books were published that professed to be histories of Goth: John Robb’s The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth, Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth and Lol Tolhurst’s Goth: A History. Together, the books and the discussion surrounding them indicate a struggle for meaning around a shared past, occasioning what Svetlana Boym has called ‘reflective nostalgia’, a nostalgia that ‘dwells on the ambivalences of longing and belonging’. This article reflects on the tendency of Goth histories to locate nostalgia in the 1980s, asking what it means to write subcultural history and what histories are sidelined or left untold in such popular revivals. It interrogates the relationship between history-writing and Sarah Thornton’s concept of subcultural capital, identifying the conflicted subject-position of the subcultural historian, who must establish both objectivity and authenticity. It suggests that historical narratives tend to represent Goth as a subculture that is in decline, privileging a masculinized music scene over a feminized adoption of Goth style. Contrasting the works of Robb et al. with Leila Taylor’s memoir Darkly (2019) and Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje’s visual and oral account of the subculture, Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace (2014), the article finds that self-proclaimed Goth ‘histories’ often consolidate subcultural capital in the familiar figures of white male musicians, while marginalizing women, people of colour and a younger generation of subcultural participants.

Nostalgia in Life Writing: Tracing the Uses of Nostalgia in Select Holocaust Trauma Memoirs

The article seeks to develop a theoretical analysis and interpretation of the role of nostalgia in German Holocaust memoirs. The intervention of advertising by appropriating nostalgia into marketing has led to an effacement of ‘algia’ or the pain that nostalgia implicates. The modern perception of nostalgia as a positive emotion has affected the idea of yoking nostalgia to traumatic experiences. The current paper analyses whether nostalgia plays a conspicuous role in the trauma narratives of Holocaust survivors. The paper is divided into three sections: first, an overview of the term ‘nostalgia’ through the ages is attempted to comprehend the problem of attaching nostalgia to trauma narratives. Second, textual analysis of The Boy on the Wooden Box (2013) by Leon Leyson and I will Plant you a Lilac Tree (2005) by Laura Hillman is undertaken to establish the presence of nostalgia in the narratives. Third, the major uses of nostalgia in the select texts are condensed into five categories: nostalgia functions as a tool of Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), relieves survival anxiety, improves resolute decisions, aids in preserving nostalgic objects and operates as an intermediary between individual and collective memories in the primary texts. Svetlana Boym’s binary classification of nostalgia is applied to the texts to provide an insight into the nature of nostalgia invoked. The study concludes that restorative nostalgia disrupts progress but augments the nostalgic individual’s determination to survive and recreate the perfect past. Reflective nostalgia provides the awareness that the past is irrevocable, and that change is inevitable.

Geek nostalgia: The reflective and restorative defence of white male geek culture

During recent decades, geek culture has become increasingly visible, and the geek has left the cultural margins, becoming more popular than ever. At the same time, nostalgia has emerged as a central component of geek culture. Framed by a post-structural understanding of gender and race and drawing on cultural theorist Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia, this article explores how and why geeks nostalgically long for a time when they were largely marginalized. We combine readings of Swedish online geek podcasts and YouTube channels with ethnographic visits to geek conferences and pop-cultural “geek fairs,” such as Comic Con and SciFiWorld. We argue that geek nostalgia represents a clinging on to a “constitutive wound,” allowing the geek figure to mobilize masculine victimhood in ways that simultaneously underpin geek privilege and allow the geek to continue operating as a white male gatekeeper of geek culture.

'Recreating Katalin Street': Reenacting a Haunting Past Utopia as Manifestation and Bodily Testimony to Trauma in Magda Szabó's Katalin Street

This article brings into dialogue the work of Cathy Caruth, a founding figure of trauma theory, with that of Svetlana Boym, an authority within scholarship on nostalgia. In doing so, it aims to showcase that the study of traumatic experience can benefit from a theoretical approach in which both of their perspectives are understood to be inherently intertwined. Despite being seemingly very much opposed in terms of their conceptualizations of trauma, their theories, when considered in light of each other, can in fact be said to make up a trauma-spectrum that traces the different, interconnected levels on which trauma operates and manifests itself. Therefore, by considering them part of a spectrum, new ways for analyzing traumatic experience open up that allow for it to not only be understood in terms of an individual acting out, as Caruth argues, but also as the shared performance of a haunting past utopia, as suggested by Boym. Such a spectrum, as I will demonstrate, is especially useful as a theoretical tool for analyzing the workings of trauma within small-scale communities in which there is a uniquely intricate mediation between the individual and the community, the past and the present. This will be further illustrated by a discussion of Magda Szabó’s novel Katalin Street (1969); a work that explores the complex social dynamics that emerge when an intimate community is traumatized during World War II by the murder of one of their own and the subsequent loss of their shared utopia. As a result, those who survive, as a coping mechanism for as well as symptom of their trauma, continue to reenact their idealized past as if the catastrophic event never occurred. As such, Szabó foregrounds how Boym’s nostalgic performance and Caruth’s acting out are often fundamentally interwoven in the creation of a never-ending, paradoxical cycle of remembering through forgetting and forgetting through remembrance. Moreover, by emphasizing the layers of witnessing within the text, Szabó underlines the importance of acknowledging this nostalgic reenactment of the past as a form of testimony in its own right, one that calls for new ways of listening to trauma.

“Whence, Then, Is This Change of Sentiment?”: Homesteading and Restorative Nostalgia in The Woman of Colour

Following the lead of recent inquiries into The Woman of Colour (1808) as a sensibility narrative that fleshed out the unfinished project of abolitionism at around the time when the slave trade was being outlawed in England (1807), this study explores the intermingling between what Svetlana Boym has identified as two distinctly oriented strands of nostalgia, reflective v. restorative, that innervate the title character’s sensibility of (dis)enchantment with her homesteading voyage, as she is transported from her native island into another – partly ancestral yet also foreign and emetic – insular space, from which she eventually tries to expunge herself into a yet-to-be-undertaken voyage of return.

Space Nostalgia in The Old Drift: Memorializing Matha Mwamba, the Afronaut

In the two former Cold War superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, memorializations of the space race serve as sites of nostalgia, fueling feelings of national pride. This paper investigates this in a Zambian context by analyzing how the history of Zambia’s participation in the space race is fictionalized in Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift. The novel creates a fictionalized account of the childhood and adolescence of Zambia's first female Afronaut, Matha Mwamba, filling the silence in the archives regarding the life of this marginalized historical figure. Significantly, Serpell uses the form of the Bildungsroman when reimaging Matha's private history, framing Zambia's period of transition from British colony to independent nation state as one of upheaval and transformation. In mourning the lost future of Zambia's failed space program, the narrative engages in reflective nostalgia as defined by Svetlana Boym. Any narratives of progress are merged with tales of personal hardship. A critically nostalgic approach allows Serpell to illustrate how past visions of the future can serve as inspirations for the present.

Subverting the Restorative Nostalgia of Black Metal: Reading Swiss Band Zeal & Ardor Through an Afropessimistic Lens

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the ways in which Swiss experimental metal band Zeal & Ardor imagine an allohistory, according to which slaves in the American South embraced Satanism to resist white supremacism. Firstly, Svetlana Boym’s reflections on nostalgia are used to argue that Zeal & Ardor reject the restorative nostalgia that infuses black metal, instead generating an off-modern anti-linear temporality permeated with the trauma of slavery. Secondly, Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism is employed to emphasize the homelessness that characterizes the band’s oeuvre. Thirdly, it is claimed that this off-modern turn distinguishes Zeal & Ardor from the futurism of transcendental black metal.

“What a Splendid World We Ruined”: the Precarious Presents and Posthuman Futures of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033

“What a Splendid World We Ruined”: the Precarious Presents and Posthuman Futures of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033

"Uncaptured Life, Lived to the Brim": On the Unpublished Autobiography of Svetlana Boym

"Uncaptured Life, Lived to the Brim": On the Unpublished Autobiography of Svetlana Boym

My Significant Others: Zenita, Susana, Ilanka (Part 2)

The first part of this autobiographical essay by Svetlana Boym was published in the previous issue of the magazine Versus (see: Boym S. My significant others: Zenita, Susana, Ilanka (part 1) // Versus. 2022. Vol. 2. No. 3. P. 126–152).

Moving Images, Static Lives: Interwar Polish Jewish Documentary Films

This article examines two sets of films—those produced by amateur home movie-makers, Polish Jewish immigrants to the United States, on return visits home as well as the Six Cities series produced professionally by Sektor Films—in the context of the larger project of the creation of an image of Polish Jewish life in the interwar period. It uses the concepts of nostalgia delineated by Svetlana Boym to argue that even more than fundraising, the filmmakers intended their documentation to create a nostalgic souvenir for Americanized Jews and their children, a pre-facto memorialization of Polish Jewish life.

Динозавры – персонажи кинематографа как отражение трансформации отношений между наукой и обществом

The author explores the social and cultural implications of dinosaurs as popular cinematic characters. The article shows how dinosaurs gradually become heroes of mass culture. They left paleontological research to enter the wide symbolic space, to visualize and develop themselves in the space of animation. The author provides a brief review of animated series and films with dinosaurs from the first short film in 1914 to the present day, considering the changing roles assigned to these ancient animals. The change in the semantic load of movie hero dinosaurs was analyzed in the context of ongoing events, value transformations and relations between science and society. To understand this connection, the author refers to the ideas of Svetlana Boym and Mario Ricca. Following Boym's ideas, the author considers dinosaurs as "ideal animals for nostalgia" and finds that due to their unique characteristics, the prehistoric era and its inhabitants, dinosaurs form a whole and peaceful human prehistory, filled with the values of friendship, cooperation and love, fueled by appropriate cinematic stories. Thus biology, with its key idea of evolution and the struggle of species for survival, turns into a story with its victories, struggles and dramatic chance in the context of dinosaur filmography. Based on Ricca's ideas, the author considers dinosaurs in the context of the cultural history of animals, which a person turns into metaphorical icons of moral feelings and behavioral habits; the author draws a parallel between medieval bestiaries and modern presentations of ancient lizards. In addition, dinosaur characters are structured as semantic figures, paradoxically uniting the past, present and future of humankind, the prehistoric era and technological progress. In conclusion, the author uses optics of global evolutionism and posthumanism.

A Petrovich Inside of Every New Russian: The Disciplinary Regime of the Capitalist “Vanguard Group” at 1990s Kommersant

AbstractSince 1989, Russia’s “first business newspaper,” Kommersant, worked to cultivate a new kind of collective post‐socialist subject, a “vanguard group” of “New Russians.” How did Kommersant imagine this subject? Who were its antagonists and why, and how would the New Russian triumph over them? This article examines the 1992–93 issues of Kommersant Daily, its glossy monthly supplement Domovoi, and Kommersant’s recurring cartoon character of the post‐Soviet everyman “Petrovich,” drawn by Andrei Bil'zho. Through these examples, I show how the Kommersant team convinced its audience to feel elite superiority over other newly rich Russians, and to feel having morally overcome the brutish egalitarian past shared by the “vanguard class” with its former late Soviet peers among the educated, urbanized masses. I argue that both objectives were achieved through didactic, disciplinary means, integrated both into the messaging of Kommersant and into its style and editorial policies. Moreover, by analyzing Bil'zho’s Petrovich, I conclude that playful, ironic “reflective nostalgia” (Svetlana Boym’s term) vis‐à‐vis the Soviet past was one such disciplinary tool which helped convince New Russians to maintain power at all costs, and thereby prevent the bloody return of neo‐Soviet socialism, which their Petrovich‐like neighbors supposedly desired.

Between Nostalgia and Self-Hatred: The Problem of Identity in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl

Drawing on theoretical works by Stuart E. Rosenberg, Sander L. Gilman and Svetlana Boym, the article reconsiders Cynthia Ozick’s diptych The Shawl as an instance of narrative that problematizes the notion of Jewishness in the twentieth century in the USA and pre-WW II Poland. It is argued that the key concepts of nostalgia and self-hatred offer a new perspective on the interpretation of a text that for almost forty years has been treated as a staple work in the cannon of American Holocaust fiction.

Transculinary Practices of Transmigrants in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls”, “Family Dining” and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You

In the present transnational world populated with transmigrants, food and foodways have assumed a new, hybrid role. In the process of transformation of transmigrant cultural identity of which food and foodways are a central element, the production and consumption of food that is often the result of Svetlana Boym’s reflective nostalgia, may act as a bridge between the homeland and the host land as a material means for maintaining ties with the home country. However, while transmigrant food can assume an inclusive function in their exilic lives, it might also deepen migrants’ sense of displacement and trauma and other them further. The article explores how transmigrants in Hemon’s “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls”, “Family Dining” and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You experience food and foodways and what role culinary practices assume in the process of constructing their new, fluid and flexible hybrid identities in Homi Bhabha’s liminal Third Space.

Anxious Dynamics of Exile and the Ambivalence of Arab American Identity in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent: Critical Reflections and Contemplations

Abstract Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent is an Arab American literary piece of fiction that symbolizes the remarkable emergence of this kind of literature in the early years of the twenty-first century. The social and political atmosphere in the USA after 9/11 ushered in the rise of this ethnic literature to worldwide prominence. In addition to the desire to challenge the multi-faceted oppression that Arab Americans confront in the USA – gender-related, sexual, racial, and ethnic – the literary canon of Arab American writers also discuss the experiences of exile and displacement that Arabs go through when settling in the USA and how such experiences affect their sense of authenticity. As such, this paper examines the politics of exile as projected in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent, taking the co-protagonist Han as a prototype of Arab exiles living in the USA. In addition to employing critical and analytical approaches to the novel, this paper relies on a socio-cultural conceptual framework based on perspectives of prominent critics such as Edward Said, Avtar Brah, and Svetlana Boym, to name a few. This paper argues that the politics of exile – such as nostalgia, memory, and displacement – make Arab American identity more convoluted and interlaced with the dilemma of authenticity, featuring feelings of estrangement, loneliness, and homesickness.

IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY IN THE RUINS OF THE PROJECT OF OFF-MODERNITY

Along with innumerable attempts to define the paradigmatic changes at the turn of the 20th /21st centuries, it is worth considering the concept off-modernity, proposed by the culture researcher Svetlana Boym who mentions the essential signs of the age: nostalgia, a search for identity in the ruins of modernity and understanding of the footprints left by the influence of time and various contingencies. The concept of off- modernity allows us to pay attention to such phenomena as the so-called identity of error, nostalgia, ruins or migrant. The paper explores the possibilities of the formation of these identity modes in Western European cultural space at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of 21st century. The paper also deals with the case of Latvia in the context of the formation of post-Soviet identity. By making use of the view point of the theory of off-modernity proposed by Boym, the paper evaluates the models of interpretation of past experience for the purposes of self-definition today with an aim to create a framework for analysis of various actual social-political and cultural conflicts in the Western world.

“Golden hour”: Nostalgia and the demise of the Muslim urban space in Twilight in Delhi and Sunlight on a Broken Column

ABSTRACT This article explores how changing cityscapes of (post)colonial urban transition contribute to the creation of nostalgic longing in Twilight in Delhi and Sunlight on a Broken Column. Drawing from recent scholarship, it focuses on the memorialization of space and compares the ways in which narrative memory frames the perception of urbanization in both texts. Further, this study also examines the cultural location of this nostalgia and articulates the categorization of a specific Muslim nostalgia, which comes from the recognition of the anticipated political and social exclusion of the community in contemporary India. The article analyses the impact of the transformation of the city with colonization and decolonization on Muslims, as narrated in both texts. Borrowing from Svetlana Boym’s twin concepts of reflective and restorative nostalgia as analytical frameworks, a close reading reveals significantly contrasting literary perspectives when it comes to narrating the flux between modernity and tradition within the Indo Muslim imagination.