The Svetlana Boym Reader
Svetlana Boym
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, April 19, 2018 – 544 p.
Editor(s): Cristina Vatulescu, Tamar Abramov, Nicole G. Burgoyne, Julia Chadaga, Jacob Emery, Julia Vaingurt
Svetlana Boym was a prolific writer, a charismatic professor, a novelist, and a public intellectual. She was also a fiercely resourceful and reflective immigrant; her most resonant book, The Future of Nostalgia, was deeply rooted in that experience. Even after The Future of Nostalgia carried her fame beyond academic circles, few readers were aware of all of her creative personas. She was simply too prolific, and her work migrated across most people’s disciplinary boundaries-from literary and cultural studies through film, visual, and material culture studies, performance, intermedia, and new media.
The Svetlana Boym Reader presents a comprehensive view of Boym’s singularly creative work in all its aspects. It includes Boym’s classic essays, carefully chosen excerpts from her five books, and journalistic gems. Showcasing her roles both as curator and curated, the reader includes interviews and excerpts from exhibition catalogues as well as samples of intermedial works like Hydrant Immigrants. It also features autobiographical pieces that shed light on the genealogy of her scholarly work and rarities like an excerpt from Boym’s first graduate school essay on Russian literature, complete with marginalia by her mentor Donald Fanger. Last but not least, the reader includes late pieces that Boym did not live to see through publication, as well as transcripts of her memorable last lectures and performances.
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Luminosities: An Introduction Tamar Abramov, Nicole G. Burgoyne, Julia Chadaga, Jacob Emery, Julia Vaingurt, and Cristina Vatulescu
I. The Theater of the Self (1984-1991) Julia Vaingurt (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)
1. Osip Mandel’shtam and the Drama of Writing
2. Petersburg Influenza: Notes on The Egyptian Stamp by Osip Mandel’shtam
3. The Death of the Revolutionary Poet: Vladimir Maiakovskii and Suicide as Literary Fact
4. Marina Tsvetaeva and the Cultural Mask of the Poetess
5. Public Personas and Private Selves of Cultural Critics
II. Living in Common Places and Rethinking What Matters (1992-1995) Julia Chadaga (Macalester College, USA)
6. The Poetics of Banality: Tat’iana Tolstaia, Lana Gogoberidze, and Larisa Zvezdochetova
7. Common Places
8. Paradoxes of Unified Culture: From Stalin’s Fairy-Tale to Molotov’s Lacquer-Box
III. That Historical Emotion (1996-2001) Jacob Emery (Indiana University, USA)
9. On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Ilstallations and Immigrant Homes
10. The Future of Nostalgia
11. Conspiracy Theories and Literary Ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kiš and The Protocols of Zion
12. Kosmos
IV. Freedom, Subjectivity, and the Gulag (2002-2010) Cristina Vatulescu (New York University, USA)
13. My Grandmother’s First Love
14. How Is “Soviet subjectivity” Made?
15. “Banality of Evil,” Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject: Varlam Shalamov and Hannah Arendt
16. Freedom as Co-creation
V. The Off-Modern (2008-2016) Tamar Abramov (Mandel Foundation, Israel)
17. The Off Modern
18. Scenography of Friendship
19. Vernacular Cosmopolitanism: Victor Shklovsky and Osip Mandel’shtam
20. Cryptoarchitecture: Corbusier at 50, A Tour with Svetlana Boym
VI. Afterimages: Svetlana Boym’s Irrepressible Co-creations Cristina Vatulescu (New York University, USA)
21. Touching Writing (Homage to Jacques Derrida, October 8, 2004)
22. Immigrant Hydrants
23. Framing the Family Album
24. Nostalgic Technology
25. Cities in Transit
26. Phantom Limbs
27. Remembering Forgetting: Tale of a Refugee Camp
Sources
Bibliography: Svetlana Boym’s Publications
Index
IMNN 