Our Native Antiquity ─ Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism

For Russian modernists in search of a past, there were many antiquities of different provenances and varying degrees of prestige from which to choose: Greece or Rome; Byzantium or Egypt. The modernists central to "Our Native Antiquity" located their antiquity in the Eurasian steppes, where they found objects and sites long denigrated as archaeological curiosities. The book follows the exemplary careers of two objects—the so-called “Stone Women” and the kurgan, or burial mound—and the attention paid to them by Russian and Soviet archaeologists, writers, artists, and filmmakers, for whom these artifacts served as resources for modernist art and letters and as arenas for a contest between vying conceptions of Russian art, culture, and history.

Michael Kunichika (PhD University of California, Berkeley) teaches in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University.