7 Quotes by Svetlana Boym

Nostalgia was diagnosed [as a medical illness] at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body internal and external well-being were treated together...Our progeny well might poeticize depression and see it as a global atmospheric condition, immune to treatment with Prozac.

As for time, it is forever shrinking. Oppressed by multitasking and managerial efficiency, we live under a perpetual time pressure. The disease of this millennium will be called chronophobia or speedomania, and its treatment will be embarrassingly old-fashioned. Contemporary nostalgia is not so much about the past as about vanishing the present.

The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal.

Yet this points to a paradox of institutionalized nostalgia: the stronger the loss, the more it is overcompensated with commemorations, the starker the distance from the past, and the more it is prone to idealizations.

Nostalgia is history without guilt.

In Russia monuments wander around cities in the dark, lose their shoes, fingers, hats, and heads.

This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.