Between a Harmless Game and a Bittersweet Disease: Forms of Nostalgia in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe

This thesis focuses on novels, essays, films, and popular culture miscellanea representative of Central and Eastern Europe, in the attempt to explain how nostalgia developed in this area since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe has undergone a major - and, for many, unsettling - historical shift, thus, perhaps not surprisingly, nostalgia for the former communist regime does not lack in popularity. Due to the region’s turbulent past cum present, millions of Eastern Europeans have migrated westward; homesickness is only one of the feelings they share. The region is also a cauldron for far-right ideologies, which carry their own nostalgias. Obviously non-exhaustive, this dissertation takes on a series of study cases representative of two fundamental forms of nostalgia: personal and collective. I am examining two essential aspects that define each form of nostalgia: firstly, nostalgia’s relationship with suffering; and, secondly, nostalgia’s ability to be toxic or useful. Among the authors discussed below are Andrei Tarkovsky, Milan Kundera, Mircea Cărtărescu, Filip and Matei Florian, Cezar Paul Bădescu, Gabriela Adameșteanu, Wolfgang Becker, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Dan Puric. This study emphasizes nostalgia’s complexity, which is not only given by its various forms but also by its fluidity. Personal and collective nostalgias often overlap, childhood nostalgia is enhanced by nostalgia for a place, and harmful nostalgia may prove useful sometimes. The map drawn here, which places nostalgias along personal and collective, painful and bittersweet, and temporal and spatial lines, offers a better understanding of how nostalgia unfolds nowadays, when migration, political extremism, and populism are on the rise