Screening of Judith Wechsler's documentary film: Svetlana Boym: Exile and Imagination. 60 min. 2017.

This one hour 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, where she later became the Carl Hugo Reisinger 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. Exuberant, ironic and witty, Boym was a charismatic critic and teacher until her untimely death from cancer, summer of 2015, at age of 56.

The film, distributed by The Museum of Modern Art, NY, was screened at Harvard University in May 2017.

The screening will be followed by a debate on the topicality of S. Boym's work - which took place at the Collège d'études mondiales at A. Nuselovici in 2014 - in relation to the issues of the chair.

With: Judith Wechsler (Tufts U.), Kristian Feigelson (Paris 3), Florence Dumora (Paris 7) and Alexis Nuselovici (University of Aix-Marseille/CEM)