Svetlana Boym - The Svetlana Boym Reader

THE SVETLANA BOYM READER

THE SVETLANA BOYM READER

Edited by
Cristina Vatulescu,
Tamar Abramov,
Nicole G. Burgoyne,
Julia Chadaga, Jacob Emery
and Julia Vaingurt

Contents

Headnote by Julia Vaingurt

Headnote by Julia Chadaga

Headnote by Jacob Emery

Headnote by Cristina Vatulescu

Headnote by Tamar Abramov

Headnote by Cristina Vatulescu

Frontispiece: Svetlana Boym in front of her old apartment, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1989

The editors would like to extend their heartfelt thanks to Musa and Yuri Goldberg and David Damrosch. Donald Fanger, Masha Gessen, Haaris Naqvi, William Mills Todd III, Giuliana Bruno, and Dana Villa provided greatly appreciated support along the way. This book stands as a testimony to what Svetlana Boym has taught us and been to us.

The following organizations kindly agreed to republication of Boyms work: Basic Books, Cabinet Magazine, Duke University Press, Fordham University Press, Harvard University Press, John Hopkins University Press, M. E. Sharpe Press of the Taylor & Francis Group, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton University Press, Stanford University Press, The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, University of Chicago Press, and Tablet Magazine. An acknowledgment of each essay and excerpt is provided on the sources page at the end of this book.

Svetlana Boym in front of her old apartment, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1989.

In her 2010 essay The Scenography of Friendship, Svetlana Boym wrote that friendship is not about having everything illuminated or obscured, but about conspiring and playing with shadows. Its goal is not enlightenment but luminosity. Her shorthand definition of friendship, which prefers a community of occasional lucidity and honesty to the heroic quest for the blinding truth, invites us to join her in a cozy conspiracy of the intellect. Where many of the most influential strands of cultural studies have positioned themselves as adversaries of enlightenment, tirelessly exposing its blind spots and failures, Boym offers a homely, overlooked alternative, unfolding under the star of a playful rather than a cynical ironythe light of a kitchen lamp rather than the austere X-ray machine of the solitary philosophical mind. Her imaginary community emphasizes the peaks and troughs of an ongoing conversation rather than the implacable sequence of formal argument. Here the brilliant aperu mixes with the obscure, half-forgotten textures of everyday life; the metaphysical insight communicates with the intimate memories of the individual and the tattered commonplaces of the decaying Soviet sphere.

Boyms implied critique of enlightenment and its intractable adversaries is embedded in a vision of creative community that is a poetics and an ethics at once, a collective participation in the making of life that looks back to the riot of historical possibilities shooting off of the main trunk of the twentieth century and looks forward to an ironic cosmopolitanism. True to form, this political and aesthetic vision of friendshipa humane and open-ended alternative to other, more totalitarian versions of utopiais also a set of allusions to her life and work. The opposition of enlightenment, not to darkness but to the near-synonym luminosity, is typical of her attraction to phenomena that are just a little bit off, most famously in her diagnosis of the off-modernthe alternative . Luminosity suggests the warm glow that suffuses not only a cocreated community of comfort, amusement, and perception, but also the artificial lights of technological utopias and the nocturnal, Nabokovian insects that huddle round them; it suggests her efforts to liven up her own little corner in the dreary last days of the Soviet Union, but also the kitschy canopy of stars and moons that presides over the appealing, if thoroughly moth-eaten, glory of the Soviet space race. It suggests her practice as a photographer, an artist of light and shadow. It suggests Svetlana Boym herself, whose name means light, svet , in Russian.