Nostalgia as a Weak Utopia for Europe

Abstract

Nostalghia is a film from the “other Europe” made by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1983 well before the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) but at a highly significant moment in the evolution of the events that would eventually culminate in the Moscow coup in 1991. The work marks a shift from the “stagnation” of the late 1960s to the early 1980s, toward a transitional period characterized by the new winds of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”). These two new factors did indeed awaken a lethargic society under the charismatic guidance of the last Party Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was elected in 1985. The singularity of the film lies in the fact that it stands as a historical utopia, one that bespeaks a reconfiguration of a Europe yet to exist but being mobilized by the revived European movement as it was emerging with the end of the Cold War.