Svetlana Boym calls it "hypochondria of the heart," the human
ability to mourn the passing of times and events of which they were
never a part to begin with. It's an odd way to look at nostalgia,
which I have always associated with the need to recreate vividly
experiences of one's own past. In THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIA, author
Boym, a professor of Slavic literature at Harvard, explores the
ravages of longings, real or imagined, and what they do to the
human psyche.

A series of essays, THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIA mostly explores the
effects of post-communism on those who grew up with it and those
who have grown up without it. Communism was the absolute fault line
of contemporary history --- and it is the mainstay of Boym's
thesis. She also takes a hard, long look at America's preoccupation
with dinosaurs, an epoch in which none of us here today could say
we participated.

   

More readable than Susan Sontag but still not a walk in the park,
THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIA attempts to blame the lethargic apathy of
contemporary society, its inability to be more productive and less
self-serving in the present, on human desire for something no
longer, or perhaps never, attainable. Modern objectivity is not
something in which Boym has a great deal of faith, and her essays
reflect her veiled conservatism when it comes to the limited
pleasures that nostalgia, particularly this type of unsolicited
nostalgia, bears for present-day millennium dwellers.