Preface

This article constitutes the preface to a collection of articles that I co-edited with Laura Salmon and that treat the feeling of 'nostalgia' on the margins of Russian culture. The writers and artists considered herein all operate on the periphery of a dominant imperial, Soviet, or Post-Soviet cultural system, from which vantage point they look ‘inward’ towards a central core with various degrees of longing. In their artistic production, these authors contend with a form of nostalgia that is not simply produced by the passage of time (as in maturation, aging, regret for a bygone childhood), but also by the recognition of and meditation on their own marginal status – the result of factors ranging from gender, ethnicity, and religion, to politics, imprisonment, emigration or other varieties of existential isolation. Indeed, the works analyzed here were born of musings on the experience of social or psychological marginalization: for these authors, sentiments of longing give rise to reflection as well as to concrete texts that grapple with or embody the resulting feeling of nostalgia in various ways.