Soviet reflections
Music, nostalgia and personhood among (post-)Soviet immigrants in America
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64166/baanya32תקציר
Drawing on data from Soviet-era folk song festivals in the midwestern United States, this article argues that Soviet nostalgia is a practice directed towards constructions of history as well as personally experienced pasts. The objects of nostalgia at these events are not songs, material goods or even, necessarily, the past. Instead, nostalgia gets expressed for representations of Soviet time and space. At these festivals, people are neither here (America) nor there (the Soviet Union) and are neither Americans nor Soviets. The bounds of an intermediate identity space, “Russian,” get hammered out in the way (post-)Soviet immigrants discuss Americans, Russians and Soviets. Discourse analysis of conversation at and about these festivals illustrates the semiotic mechanisms of nostalgia, speaking to relationships between history and memory, society and the individual, and tradition and change.
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