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Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy
Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.
The history of nostalgia might allow us to look back at modern history not solely searching for newness and technological progress but for unrealized possibilities, unpredictable turns and crossroads.
There is in fact a tradition of critical reflection on the modern condition that incorporates nostalgia, which I will call off-modern. The adverb off confuses our sense of direction; it makes us explore sideshadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress; it allows us to take a detour from the deterministic narrative of twentieth-century history.
As far as nostalgia is concerned, eighteenth-century doctors, failing to uncover its exact locus, recommended seeking help from poets and philosophers
Neither poet nor philosopher, I nevertheless decided to write a history of nostalgia, alternating between critical reflection and storytelling, hoping to grasp the rhythm of longing, its enticements and entrapments. Nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles, so one must face them in order not to become its next victim—or its next victimizer
Nostalgia tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable, materialization of the immaterial. Susan Stewart writes that “nostalgia is the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetitions and denies the repetition’s capacity to define identity
Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition
The study of nostalgia inevitably slows us down. There is, after all, something pleasantly outmoded about the very idea of longing. We long to prolong our time, to make it free, to daydream, against all odds resisting external pressures and flickering computer screens
In the good old days nostalgia was a curable disease, dangerous but not always lethal. Leeches, warm hypnotic emulsions, opium and a return to the Alps usually soothed the symptoms. Purging of the stomach was also recommended, but nothing compared to the return to the motherland believed to be the best remedy for nostalgia
The idea of progress through revolution or industrial development became central to the nineteenth-century culture
am reminded of the early-twentieth-century photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who used still images to capture motion. He worked against the media; instead of making his photographic subjects freeze in a perfect still, he captured them in motion, letting them evade his frame, leaving blurry overexposed shadows on the dark background. Fascinated by the potential of modern technology, Lartigue wanted photography to do what it cannot do, namely, capture motion. Intentional technical failure makes the image at once nostalgic and poetic
Off-modern art and lifestyle explores the hybrids of past and present. Some of the meanings of the adverb off relevant to this discussion include: “aside” and “offstage,” “extending and branching out from,” “somewhat crazy and eccentric” (off-kilter), “absent or away from work or duty,” “off-key,” “offbeat,” occasionally off-color but not offcast
Many off-modernist artists and writers come from places where art, while not marketable, continued to play an important social role and where modernity developed in counterpoint to that of Western Europe and the United States, from Rio de Janeiro to Prague
The off-modernists mediate between modernists and postmodernists, frustrating the scholars. The eccentric adverb off relieves the pressure of being fashionable and the burden of defining oneself as either pre- or postmodern
If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space.
The first category of nostalgics do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth. 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
Tradition in this way is to be restored with a nearly apocalyptic vengeance. The mechanism of this kind of conspiracy theory is based on the inversion of cause and effect and personal pronouns. “We” (the conspiracy theorists) for whatever reason feel insecure in the modern world and find a scapegoat for our misfortunes, somebody different from us whom we don’t like. We project our dislike on them and begin to believe that they dislike us and wish to persecute us
On the pedestal of the Mayakovsky monument, young lovers with tattooed flowers on their naked shoulders sipped Sacred Stream and Baltica
In the Soviet era, “private life” had subversive connotations; it was not merely an escape from public and political life but also a niche where alternative civic consciousness developed. It was in those kitchen-salons of the 1960s, in the crammed rooms of communal apartments, that the dreams of change were first nurtured, long before political opportunities and economic transformations.