This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and
semi-autobiographical "snippets of experience" written by Svetlana Boym
in the final period of her life capture her penchant for seamlessly
melding, poetically and dream-like, the intensively personal with the
everyday and the world-historical. They illuminate the formative
conditions for the thinking which she was to develop into her majestic
work on nostalgia.
Importantly, these pieces fill in gaps in understanding the genesis and
scope of her take on the world. For readers both familiar with her work
and for those new to it, The Origins of Nostalgia will enable our own
cultural past as well as that of the former Soviet Union to be viewed in
a different light.