Svetlana Boym

is a philologist, anthropologist, prose writer and playwright. She studied Spanish at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute (Leningrad) and is currently Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her most recent book is The Future of Nostalgia (2001). A revised Russian edition of her book Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994) was published in the NZ Library series in 2003.

Articles

On freedom *

A discussion between Svetlana Boym and Boris Groys

Boym and Groys discuss philosophical concepts on freedom to assess how the term is used in its various dimensions – on the state level, in people’s private lives and relating to economic aspects.
Is there such a thing as societal freedom where the state governs and rules most aspects of people’s lives? Are humans, as Sartre proclaimed “doomed to be free”? Does freedom entail an escape from the economic determinism that rules Western civilisations or is it economic activity that sets us free in the first place? Svetlana Boym and Boris Groys discuss.