Margalit Fox’s Times
obituary of Svetlana Boym, the Curt Hugo Reisinger professor of Slavic
languages and literatures and comparative literature at Harvard (“Svetlana
Boym, 56, Scholar of Myth and Memory Dies, NYT,
8/22/13) discusses one of her works, The Future of Nostalgia. Fox writes, “Throughout the book, Dr. Boym grappled
with two essential questions. Can a past that has slipped out of reach be
reclaimed by means of nostalgia? Should it ever be?” Fox goes on to elaborate
on two kinds of nostalgia that Boym identifies, "one salubrious” and affording consolation and one dangerous in its attempts to be “restorative.” Fox
quotes Boym about the latter case to the effect that, “This kind of nostalgia
characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which
engage in the anti-modern mythmaking of history by means of a return to
national symbols and myths.” Thus one type of nostalgia for the past might
result in works art like Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity and the other the other
the treatment of historical wounds by the excavation and elevation of the Swastika.
A similar tendency infused the Serbian crusade for ethnic cleansing in Bosnia
and in particular the siege of Sarajevo, a city of both historic and mythic
significance for both Bosnians and Serbs. The same might be said of the
slaughter of Tutsi by Hutus and of Shiites by Sunnis (and the reverse) and of
Armenians by Turks to name only a few modern holocausts. Boym’s
fascinating obit describes a deracinated existence which must have provided the
existential experience for the creation of her theories and her premature
demise only adds a bittersweet ending to a dramatic story of survival in the
Soviet era. The brilliantly oxymoronic title of the book epitomizes the
historical conundrum that Boym explores. And what is fascinating is how unclear
the divide is between the two forms of memory that Boym underscores. At what
point is melancholy turned into militant idealization? When does the reliving
of the past, with its litany of depredations, turn into a crusade against
imagined slights that have no real relation to present reality and life?
