Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the forms, uses and functions of nostalgia in the case of written narratives of Karelian evacuees about their return visits to their home places in Russian Karelia.

Paper long abstract:

After the Second World War, Finland ceded areas of Karelia to the Soviet Union. The Finns living in the ceded Karelia were evacuated and resettled to the Finnish side of the new border. After the war, most of the ceded areas in Karelia remained closed to outsiders until the latter half of the 1980s. Eventually the collapse of the Soviet Union made tourism and visits to Karelia possible on a larger scale. Since then, thousands of evacuees have visited their former home regions every summer and tourism to ceded Karelia can be seen as a form of roots-tourism. Nostalgia - the bitter-sweet longing for a place and time in the past- is an eminent driving force behind roots-tourism. This paper analyses written narratives of Karelian evacuees about their return visits to their home places in Russian Karelia. It concentrates discussion on the forms, uses and functions of nostalgia in these narratives. It analyzes the descriptions of meeting the changed home place in the present time of the trip and examines the reminiscences about the very same place as it used to be in the past. I suggest that nostalgia is more than a perspective toward the time-places of the past: nostalgia is also a cultural script affecting how the home and life in the past are described and remembered. Nostalgia is ultimately a strategy that is used in order to create and maintain a comprehensible relationship with the present place.