Nostalgia gustului: Exiluri în Gastroland. Studiu de caz – Sanda Nițescu și Anya von Bremzen

Rezumat

Regardless of the reason for the separation from one’s homeland, the food and the collective gastronomic act, the taste, the smell, and the social practices of food in one’s country shall forever remain an object of nostalgia and melancholy for an expat; this fact does not attract a kind of selective memory – expatriates have clear and definite reasons for leaving – but rather a certain emotional attachment impossible to deny or forget. The aim of the present work is to show how two exiled writers – one from Romania and the other from Russia – have built a literary and cultural universe irremediably linked to native culinary practices, how nostalgia and longing bring together ample processes of recollection and dissociation – at the same time –, how the choice of a certain narrative genre inspires the detection of memories and their transmission in the form of complex cultural references. Anya von Bremzen and Sanda Nițescu are both deeply connected to the gastronomic culture of their country of origin, and the volumes that reiterate this connection are, ultimately, processes of cultural and emotional reconnection with a physically inaccessible space.