Defining nostalgia, as a rule, it is divided into two types:
1. Longing for the homeland, the home of the native.
2. Longing for the once experienced past and now lost.
The meaning of the word nostalgia in Greek means "return of pain." Probably, the second, more general and universal meaning of this feeling is capacious and sufficient, since it determines not only the absence of the past tense, but also the lack of space. This also includes the father's house, and, in general, the homeland. And you can look wider.
What is nostalgia? This can be not only a longing for personally lived time, but also for times in which a person did not live at all. Maybe even from eras that never existed in reality. Through works of art (books, films), one can fall in love with the past so much and be inspired by its spirit that it will be difficult to distinguish what was invented from reality.
If you answer the question of what nostalgia is in one word, then it will be longing. The dictionary of epithets of the Russian language assigns as many as 163 definitions to this concept. It turns out that longing is not only hopeless, but also proud, not only unbearable, but also rebellious, not only hopeless, but also happy, not only poisonous, but also sweet and even bewitching and happy, for example, nostalgia for childhood. A feeling of this type more accurately characterizes the second row of epithets. He has his own special nature. This is proved by the fact that the definition of “longing” is almost identical to the name “boredom”, and language cannot be called nostalgia in this way.
Longing for homeland is a philosophical concept, rather, even a person’s state, which plays a big role in understanding his own destiny, life. From this point of view, what is nostalgia, as not one of the types of reflection that helps a person to understand himself more deeply.
Psychologists attribute this longing not to feelings, but to feelings, sometimes at the subconscious level. And this means that nostalgia forces a person to do a difficult internal work: remember the past, show their intellectual abilities and creative imagination. It is most noticeable in four types of human activity: in art, religion, philosophy and in everyday life.
If you ask the doctor what nostalgia is, the answer will be unequivocal - a disease. Psychiatry is studying this disease. Probably, there is some truth here. N.I. Pirogov, the great Russian doctor, gave examples of death from severe longing for the homeland of Russian soldiers who served abroad. In the old days, soldiers from Switzerland far from their homeland were forbidden to sing and play native tunes and melodies, so as not to arouse in others bouts of mass nostalgia.
The most vivid nostalgia is displayed in various genres of art: music, cinema, painting, sculpture. But, of course, the main carrier of nostalgic motives is literature. There is even a whole literary genre - memoirs. And the diary entries? What is this if not a person’s way to preserve memories of his past, so that later it would be easier to nourish their nostalgia with them.
