Another freedom: the alternative history of an idea

Abstract

"The title of this book speaks clearly of its brave ambition, its invitation to see freedom as an adventure rather than an old acquisition or an empty fantasy. This would be ànother freedom, ' not the one we half-have or the one we keep losing or the one we are always trying to impose on other people. In a series of illuminating readings of texts from ancient Greece and modern Russia, subtle studies of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Arendt, and many other writers and thinkers, Svetlana Boym shows us an array of freedom's most distinguished failures or near-misses, and through those very stumbles she demonstrates what success could mean. P̀erhaps, ' as she says in relation to the famous Òde to Stalin, ' ẁe owe it to Mandelshtam to imagine Sisyphus happy.'" Michael Wood, Princeton University