"Our Native Antiquity"

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.

""Our Native Antiquity" gives us by far the most detailed, insightful and distinctive picture we have of the instability of 'modernity' within Russian culture ca. 1890-1930, as efforts to recuperate a 'native antiquity' got caught up in a paradoxical web of national ideology, cultural influence from Europe and beyond, and the ironies of historical self-consciousness as such. Highlights include the stunning linkages Michael Kunichika draws between archeology and writers as diverse as Tolstoy, Bunin and Khlebnikov; the illuminating connections established between 'Golden Age' Russian poetry and modernist work (particularly in the reimagining of the Bronze Horseman through the Stone Woman); convincing speculations on the links between the primitivist/archeological explorations of Russian modernists and their European counterparts (like Picasso); and the truly brilliant investigation of Pil'niak's musings on historical continuity in a time of historical catastrophe. Kunichika’s study will take its place among the most important works we have on both Russian modernism and on questions of periodization and form.", "An engrossing, tightly conceptualized study at the intersection of several disciplines: literary, painterly, cinematic aesthetics; archaeology and anthropology; cultural and political history. Michael Kunichika makes a remarkable contribution to interdisciplinary research of modern Russian culture. His book is in the tradition of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, with the focus however on the poetry of Russian symbolism, the idiosyncratic futurism of Velimir Khlebnikov, the films of Dziga Vertov and the prose of the ill-fated Boris Pil'niak. His discourse analyses and the stimulating readings of the imagery of the burial mounds and statuary of the Eurasian steppe are exemplary.", “Kunichika’s book will be of great interest to Slavic scholars from different fields. It makes an important contribution to the existing scholarship on Russian modernism and offers a sophisticated model of a well-balanced interdisciplinary study.” —Natalia Dame, Slavic and East European Journal

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