Introduction: Snippets of Experience Ron Roberts 1. Cosmos in the Girls’ Washroom 2. Children, We’ve Been Deceived! 3. The Secret Life of a Communal Apartment Neighbor 4. Tearing Away (with an Introduction by Natal’ya Strugach) 5. Sasha, Misha, Napoleon and Josephine (circa 1992) 6. Replace the Irreplaceable! A Tale of Immigrant Objects 7. My Significant Others: Zenita, Susana, Ilanka Index

Poetic and analytical by turns, Svetlana Boym’s charismatic energy lives in every page of these brilliant autobiographical writings. They chart her post Sputnik Leningrad childhood in one of the Soviet ideologically imposed communal apartments, with its multiple partitions, at once prohibiting privacy and striving for it, to her departure from Russia aged twenty. Ambivalent about Soviet communality and the American dream, the work is a profound meditation on the psychic shock of an ever unfinished emigrant life. She is doubly alien, estranged from Soviet Russia and a ‘foreign-insider’, resident and non-resident, in Boston. Nostalgia, here lyrically explored, is a leitmotif of her work. Broken bones, a shattered porcelain cup, become emblems in an émigré’s narrative of belonging, unbelonging, and longing.

The final unpublished works of the late philosopher, cultural critic and media artist, Svetlana Boym, The Origins of Nostalgia comprises a series of autobiographical reflections which provide unique insights and background to Boym's existing body of work.