Kurt Andersen and the writer Svetlana Boym explore how artists worked in the Soviet Union and what it means to them and to us today.
Svetlana Boym is a Harvard professor of Slavic and Contemporary Literature, and the author of The Future of Nostalgia. The book traces nostalgia from its medical diagnosis in 17th-century Switzerland through a modern “global epidemic of longing,” looking at the sentiment in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, and the homes of immigrants in the United States. Her other books include Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia and the text of Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age, a book of photographs by Adam Bartos. Boym left the Soviet Union in 1981.