Updated July 24, 2022 798 Author: Dmitry Petrov
Hello, dear readers of the KtoNaNovenkogo.ru blog. Have you ever indulged in melancholy, remembering your past: events that you would like to relive again, friends who left your life long ago?
Or maybe you were sad about a loved one with whom you had not been together for a long time, or places where you were happy?
Such experiences are called nostalgia. Where it comes from, what its essence is, how it is written – “nastalgia” or “nostalgia” – is the topic of today’s article.
What does "nostalgia" mean?
If we define this word, we can say that the term means a memory of something, moreover, a painful one, with an obligatory tinge of sadness and melancholy.
For example, sadness about the Motherland or about childhood. At this moment, a person can remember the past: his home, parents and stories from childhood. He is overwhelmed with a feeling of longing for his native land, and he can indulge in nostalgia.
Many people feel nostalgic. At such a moment, people experience apathy and a certain solitude from the world; they want to be alone with themselves. Also, a group of people can look at old photos or videos and at the same time remember their native land.
It’s easy to get rid of this feeling; you can go to a comedy show, a restaurant, or have dinner with your family. You also need to think about the good that is in the present, and not think about what has gone and is simply unrealistic to return (after all, it is impossible to become small or everyone to return to the USSR).
But it’s difficult to find an antonym for the word “nostalgia.” What could be the opposite of memory - maybe oblivion?
Synonyms
If the reader still doesn’t decide for himself whether “nostalgia” or “nostalgia” is correct, he can always make a knight’s move and replace the word with a synonym. So that he has plenty to choose from, we will provide him with a list of these simple definitions:
- sadness;
- sadness;
- spleen;
- blues;
- melancholy.
Five synonyms are enough. The reader may reproach us for taking liberties, since all the states listed here may not be directly nostalgia. True, but nostalgia is only a special case of melancholy, so analogues of the latter can always replace the object of study. After all, a person more often than not yearns for a specific homeland (here you can even write with a capital letter), he suffers because there is no harmony and justice in the world. In other words, there is a myth about Eden, from which man was expelled when he was seduced by the devil, and there is no return home. That’s why sadness gnaws at us all from time to time.
Examples of use and citations
nostalgia for the past
-
nostalgia
for the present.
Andrey Voznesensky - Nostalgia for the present
“Begovaya”, “Otradnoe”... The joy and running of these places is not mine, not with me. A foreigner, chilled, I look at the snow that was started by someone else's winter.
Bella Akhmadulina - Nostalgia
...When we were crossing the Neva, Pushkin jokingly asked: “Aren’t you taking me to the fortress?” “No,” answered Danzas...
Source
Why are we nostalgic for the past?
Essentially, nostalgia is an emotion . And as often happens, emotions distort reality, events that are happening at the moment or have ever happened. In memories, the line between positive and negative is blurred.
Therefore, we often remember bad events from the past not as terrible as they once seemed (they say that bad things are forgotten, but good things are remembered).
We look at the past as if through rose-colored . Seeing only the good behind us and ignoring the unpleasant moments, we ourselves create the illusion that the happiest time of our lives is in the past, although this is not so.
Psychologists call this phenomenon a self-support mechanism . When a person experiences difficulties in life, he feels bad, he generates pleasant memories, thereby proving to himself that not everything is so nasty and meaningless. This is how we regain faith in ourselves, hope for the best, and more easily experience difficult periods of real life.
Finding the answer
| Question No. 274352 |
Please tell me, is it acceptable to use the word “nostalgia” when we are talking not about longing for one’s homeland, but for some other place, city or country where you have been before?
Russian help desk response
This usage is acceptable. The word nostalgia in modern Russian can be used in the meaning. 'longing for the past' (including places where I have been before). True, in some dictionaries this use is still noted as colloquial.
Russian help desk response
Hello! Please tell me whether it is acceptable in modern Russian to say “nostalgia for the past.” If so, is it allowed to use the word “nostalgia” in this meaning in literary speech? I am asking you for help, because... Different explanatory dictionaries give different interpretations of this word.
Russian help desk response
I don’t know about the others, // but I feel the most severe // not for the past nostalgia - // nostalgia for the present (A. Voznesensky).
Russian help desk response
That's right: nostalgia for something. For example: I don’t know about the others, // but I feel the most severe // not for the past nostalgia - // nostalgia for the present (A. Voznesensky).
Hello! Please tell me which control option is correct: “nostalgic software” or “nostalgic O”?
Russian help desk response
Source
Focus on memory in the service of philological literacy
Do you know who mnemonists are? These are those people who, thanks to various tricks, are able to remember completely unrelated things, for example, consecutive cards in a deck. But in reality, everything is simpler than it seems. They create logical connections that allow them to connect all the cards into a single story. Yes, another thing is that history still needs to be remembered, so you need to have a good memory. Let's try to do the same. Let's write a story and, using associations, remember the spelling of the word.
Let's imagine an old grandfather, who in his youth loved to fight, and he had a steel saber. Our hero has a grandson, but he doesn’t understand Russian well. His parents left for England immediately after his birth. In turn, grandfather, naturally, speaks almost no English, except for those phrases that we all know from school. Despite the language barrier, the grandson loves his grandfather and wants him to be less sad, so he asks him in broken Russian why he is sad, looking out the window all day long. And the patriarch, not knowing how to explain to the child that he is sad for his lost youth, tells him in the same broken English: “No steel,” that is, in a very rough translation: “There is no steel saber, just like my youth.”
We hope that the grandson and grandfather will eventually understand each other, but we only need to remember this wonderful phrase “No steel.” Because it is precisely this that will allow you to avoid mistakes in spelling and solve the dilemma of “nostalgia” or “nostalgia”, since the letters “o” and “a” in this dictionary word are unstressed. If the reader remembers this, there will be no problems with the rest.
The meaning of the word "nostalgia"
[From Greek νόστος - returning home and 'άλγος - pain, suffering]
Source (printed version):
Dictionary of the Russian language: In 4 volumes / RAS, Institute of Linguistics.
research; Ed. A. P. Evgenieva. — 4th ed., erased. - M.: Rus. language; Polygraph resources, 1999; (electronic version):
Fundamental electronic library
Probably the first written description of nostalgic experiences is contained in Homer's epic The Odyssey. However, the term itself was invented by the Swiss physician Johann Hofer in 1688. For a long time, nostalgia was considered a disease (this is how it is interpreted in V. I. Dahl’s “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”). Philosophy, psychology and sociology became interested in nostalgia only in the first half of the 20th century. Developing the ideas of Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim's student Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s posed the problem of the social conditioning of memory and put forward the thesis that memories are not a reproduction, but a reconstruction of a person's previous experience. It follows from this that memories, including nostalgic ones, do not exactly reproduce the course of past events, but include subjective assessments and errors of the one who remembers. This is the paradox of nostalgia: people yearn even for terrible periods of the past.
The question of which events are better remembered: those associated with positive or negative emotions is debatable. P.P. Blonsky in his work “Memory and Thinking” came to the conclusion that the unpleasant is remembered the longest. Most other authors came to the opposite conclusions. Thus, a study of a specific type of memory conducted by V.V. Nurkova showed that “in a neutral situation of life memories, preference is given to positive events, which reflects the individual selectivity of autobiographical memory (the exception is only two out of 60 people).”
E.V. Novikov, studying the attitude towards nostalgia in various cultures and in the history of philosophy, came to the conclusion that, with some exceptions, nostalgia is assessed positively in them. According to A. A. Guseinov, “many of the great moralists drew ideals from the past, believing that there remained a golden age there. According to their ideas, humanity is moving backwards. They saw the main sign of degradation in the fact that people are increasingly giving preference to material interests over moral duties. They sought to stop the destructive, from their point of view, process of confusion of criteria.”
Speaking about the ethical meaning of nostalgia, about its role in a person’s making moral decisions, E. V. Novikov classifies it as a type of moral reflection, but believes that, contrary to popular belief, the moral consequences of nostalgia are ambiguous. For example, Karl Jaspers described cases of murder of children by young provincial nannies who got rid of their charges in the hope that after this they would be able to return to their homeland, since there would be no one to babysit.
In general, according to E.V. Novikov, nostalgia plays a positive role in the life of a person and society: it contributes to the affirmation of the identity of a person’s “I”, strengthens the connection with the early stages of his life, with his “roots”, forms moral ideals, preserves the moral values of the past and ensures the continuity of traditions, “reconciles” the past with the present in the public consciousness, stabilizes relations between opponents in a dispute (“making them related” to each other through a common past), “breaks” communication barriers between people, and so on.
nostalgia
1. book. painful longing for their homeland, for their native land, for connection with home ◆ Nostalgia
, they begin to promise that they will come to Moscow or St. Petersburg next summer, although many of them have not been to their homeland for six years and are not bored at all. A. Shubin, “The Path to Prosperity”, 2000 (quote from NKR)
2. decompression painful longing for the past ◆ In this combination of words there was something school-everyday and publicly accessible, while the short “physicist” contained nostalgia
at the time when this profession was still held in high esteem. Nikolai Dezhnev, “In concert performance”, 1993 (quote from NKRYA)
Making the Word Map better together
Hello!
My name is Lampobot, I am a computer program that helps you make Word Maps. I can count perfectly, but I still don’t understand very well how your world works. Help me figure it out! Thank you!
I will definitely learn to distinguish widely used words from highly specialized ones.
How clear is the meaning of the word headmaster
(noun):
Source
Nastolgia or nostalgia, which is spelled correctly
Far from their homeland, many people miss their home; this feeling is called nostalgia. The word has Greek roots and translated from Greek means “return to one’s homeland”, as well as “pain”. It is also used in a broader sense, when a person yearns for something irrevocable. But not everyone knows how to spell it correctly, since the word is not of Slavic origin.
“Nostalgia”: what does the word mean?
As we said above, it literally means “homecoming” and “pain.” Today it is used in several cases - if a person misses the past or someone, as well as his homeland.
Nostalgia is much more than just a memory, it is a feeling. This word refers to a vague, positive emotion that we feel when we think about pleasant memories from the past. Reminiscence is behavior that reflects your past. And nostalgia is an emotional response that is caused by a memory.
How often do we feel nostalgic? According to data, each of us experiences it approximately 1-2 times a week (this can be triggered by a familiar smell, photograph, music, etc.).
Research shows that this feeling is most common among young people under the age of 25.
What is nostalgia:
Nostalgia can arise not only when longing for one’s homeland, but also when a person misses the best moments of life, the past. For some, it manifests itself in the form of a temporary change in mood, and for people with a sensitive psyche it is accompanied by symptoms such as depression, insomnia, tearfulness, and lack of appetite.
Is there a recipe for boredom?
Of course, it’s also simple: the present should be more interesting than the past. A person should be an arrow piercing space and time, flying towards his goals, dreams and desires. True, this is easier to write than to execute. Some people are helped in this sense by rational tricks, which boil down to the understanding that melancholy is unreasonable. But a person, like almost any living system, is subject to periods, so sometimes we feel good, sometimes we feel bad, but on average we feel fine, if not, then we change something. No one is constantly able to experience nostalgia or melancholy; this is an extremely painful state in order to receive joy and a charge of vigor from it.
