Svetlana Boym Exile and Imagination

This documentary film is about the life and work of Svetlana Boym literary and cultural critic media artist novelist and playwright In 1980 age 21 Svetlana left the USSR for the US unable to pursue studies at the Leningrad university because of the Jewish quota After graduate studies at Boston University and Harvard she became the Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard A brilliant writer of ambitious scope and great imagination combining personal memoir with philosophical essay and historical analysis she explored motifs of exile nostalgia the diasporic imagination and different forms of freedom in Pushkin Dostoevsky Nabokov Mandelstahm Akhmatova Brodsky and many others in a total of six books with two more about to appear