Kunichika Michael. Our Native Antiquity. Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism

Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2015. — 344 p. — ISBN 978-1-61811-442-6.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.Note on Translation and Transliteration.Archaic Mirrors.
Elective Antiquities.
The Archaeology of the Stone Babas and the Modernist Inheritance.
«Rough Hewn Statues».
Idols Destroyed, Idols Displaced and the Steppe Denuded.
The Modernist Peregrinations of the Stone Babas.
A Cultural Poetics of the Kurgan.
How to Excavate a Kurgan.
Gnedich, Iliada.
Vantage Points, ca. 1850.
1876—The Grave Becomes a Cradle: Zabelin contra Chaadaev.
Archaeological Defamiliarization.
Steppe Archaism and the Stratification of Time.
Ancient Statues, Ancient Terrors.
Archaic Simplicity.
Primitive Rudeness.
«No Ordinary Stone Woman».
How a Modernist Artifact Is Made: The «Native Antiquity» of the Stone Babas and the Indigenization of Cubism.
The Stone Baba and the Bronze Horseman.
Indigenous Cubism.
Velimir Khlebnikov, Poet of the Stone Babas.
«The Stone Woman» (1919): Modernist Metamorphosis.
The Steppes of Time: «A Night in a Trench».
The Grave of Khlebnikov.
The Landmarks of Time: Burial Mounds, Eurasian Necropolises, and Modernist Form in Boris Pil’niak’s The Naked Year.
Volga «Pompeiis».
Scythianism, 1918.
Modernist Stratigraphy: Uvek, Site of Time.
Modernist Topography: «Loop Station Mar» and the Poetics of Adjacency.
Areas of Deformation.
Dziga Vertov and the Scythian.
Areas of Deformation.
The Shooting Log.
The Archaeology of the Superimpositions.
Archaeology with a Hammer.
Boris Pil’niak’s The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea and the Courage of Farewell.
All That Was Solid Did Not Melt into Air: Persisting Things.
The Fluids of History: Archaeology and Antiquarianism.
The Courage of Farewell: The Return of the Stone Women.
Coda.