A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2024, 4: Download.
6 articles tagged with nostalgia were found.
Public defense of doctoral dissertation: Roman Privalov, After Space Utopia: Post-Soviet Russia and Futures in Space (Södertörn University, School of Social Sciences, May 12, 2023), 210 pages. External opponent: Associate Professor Arita Holmberg, Swedish Defence University, Stockholm.
In most post-communist countries after the breakdown of the USSR, memory legislation often aimed at constructing an identity of suffering under Nazism and the totalitarian Soviet regime, which relativized itself according to a cosmopolitan understanding of victimhood centered on the Holocaust memory. Regulations of memory, in this sense, were considered an indicator of democratic transition and an entry ticket to the European Union.
I would like to offer this remnant of a futuristic halo of the Soviet space program as a possible way to comprehend why April 12 never managed to become a full-fledged fantasy world of what Boym terms “restorative nostalgia” like May 9th, and to see which alternative ways to understand nostalgia it may open up.
The growing sector of heritage industry and creative uses of the past in Russia illustrate that, besides the undeniable existence of restorative nostalgia, there are other, more progressive forms of nostalgia that address social change and the protection of heritage sites.
How can the loss of connection with history be experienced and expressed? The relationship with the past is difficult to capture and describe, although at some historic moments the emotional connection with the past becomes pivotal. This article introduces the debates on loss and cultivating the sense of losing the past in modernizing Russia in the late 19th – early 20th century. It contributes to the history of emotions, analyzing the discourse on the disappearance of Russian cultural history cultivated by intellectual and artistic circles around the journals Mir Iskusstva, Starye Gody and Iskusstvo in the late Russian Empire, and tracing distinct voices that problematized the relation to earlier times in Russia and promoted the preservation of Russian cultural and historical monuments. The article concludes that the discourse of losing the connection with Russia’s own past played an important role in forming the discourse and practices of Russian heritage preservation.
The author argues that the equation of culture and natural resources has become a fundamental metaphor of the official patriotic discourse of identity in contemporary Russia. This conceptualization of the past frames nation building and state construction, the “nostalgic modernization”.
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.