"These lively essays make for the rare collection that is greater
than the sum of its parts. Bookended by a substantive Foreword and
Afterword, they upend the standard 'diagnosis of nostalgia' found
across the former Soviet bloc, refuting the popular conception that
Eastern Europeans are somehow haunted by the past, and illustrating
the repertoire of contemporary post-socialist cultural politics at
its most sophisticated." . Bruce Grant, New York University
Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great
enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social
and especially economic changes did not always result in the
hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread
disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern
Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and
prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a
specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed
communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed
meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a
tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this
volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various
fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact
of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender
differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively
that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the
past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be
recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt
to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new
inequalities of the post-communist era.
Maria Todorova is Professor of History at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Bones of
Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of
Bulgaria's National Hero (2006), Balkan Identities: Nation and
Memory (2004), Imagining the Balkans (1997), Balkan Family
Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in
Ottoman Bulgaria (1993).
Zsuzsa Gille is Associate Professor of Sociology at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of
From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics
of Waste in Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary (2007), and
co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and
Imaginations in a Postmodern World (2000)."
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