Home. An instruction manual

Home. An instruction manual

123 pages

Softcover

Genre: Russian Literature, Sociology, Politics, Essay, Nonfiction
The Saint Petersburg philosopher on the possibility of home in authoritarian states

How can one succeed in loving a homeland that is geographically located in a state like Putin's Russia, and what room for manoeuvre does the individual have when the country of one's homeland successively turns into a tyrant state and finally does not shy away from war? Oxana Timofeeva tells of her three homes in the Soviet Union: where she was born, where her family came from, the very different living conditions in Siberia and Kazakhstan, her first childhood memories in the Kazakh steppes and her school days near the Arctic Circle. Finally, she deals with different concepts of home. She starts with the distinction between small and large homeland taught in Soviet school lessons, deals with the problem of homeland and exile in dictatorial times, rejects the philosophical longing for origins and finally comes to the conclusion: one's own relationship to homeland does not have to be passive, one has a choice. The homeland does not have to result from the past and certainly does not have to be left to a totalitarian regime: it can be reinvented - if one succeeds in bringing it out of the past into the future. There are ways to love it, even if it is by practicing resistance.

German title: Heimat. Eine Gebrauchsanweisung
ISBN: 978-3-7518-0810-1
Publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Publication date: 2022
Print run: 2
Series: punctum Vol. 026

Sample translation

English original text available

Oxana Timofeeva, born in Siberia in 1978, is a professor at the Centre for Philosophy "Stasis" at the European University in Saint Petersburg as well as an author and member of the artist collective Chto delat.