The back cover of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia claims that Boym has “achieved nothing less than [identifying] a new area of inquiry, a new typology, the identification of a new aesthetic: the study of nostalgia.” We have all been trained to ignore the back cover’s of paperbacks, of course, but at times it does seem that Boym has such grand ambitions, and they do much to mar what otherwise might have been a compelling work.
Boym spends much time trying to reinterpret history, particularly 20th century European history, through the lens of nostalgia, the longing for one’s home. Her style is aggravating. She jumps from topic to topic, failing to pursue her interesting thoughts and introducing many irrelevant details along the way. She is certainly an erudite author, but this is erudition as tedium, as she name drops with abandon but fails to connect the dots between her many references. Sections end abruptly, as if they were more vignettes that parts of a well-reasoned argument. For all her grand ambitions, she never truly provides the reader with a thesis, something to grab onto. Rather, this book reads more like creative non-fiction with footnotes.
With those criticisms in mind, I will say that some of her thoughts do coalesce at specific points, especially near the end when she starts discussing the ethics of nostalgia, in particular with regard to the writing of Vladimir Nabokov. We associate nostalgia with immigrants and exiles, but in the past century so many exiles were in their condition because of particularly nostalgic regimes – Nazism and Stalinism in particular. Thus, for Nabokov, the sentimentality of nostalgia was not just aesthetically distasteful (as it was for exile Milan Kundera), but unethical. Kitsch, or poshlost, reeks of totalitarianism. Boym goes on to contrast this sentiment with the lived realities of so many Russian immigrants who populate their homes with souvenirs, both from the old world and the new. Boym notes that “yard sales and trash play an important role in the émigré topography of America.” For these immigrants, kitsch and nostalgia are ways of dealing with present circumstances, rather than reactionary attempts to reclaim the past.
In the end, Boym never really delves into these debates enough to resolve them. She is most surefooted when focusing on the authors she knows best – Nabokov, for example – and limiting herself to one cogent argument. Unfortunately, for most of The Future of Nostalgia, she prefers to range through the entire history of western culture, art, literature, architecture. The result can only be momentarily interesting, and scattered.
