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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.
List of contents
Acknowledgments 8 Note on Translation and Transliteration 11 Introduction 12 i. Archaic Mirrors 15 ii. Elective Antiquities 19 Chapter One 27 The Archaeology of the Stone Babas and the Modernist Inheritance i. ¿Rough Hewn Statues¿ 34 ii. Idols Destroyed, Idols Displaced, 49 and the Steppe Denuded iii. The Modernist Peregrinations of the Stone Babas 57 Chapter Two 62 A Cultural Poetics of the Kurgan i. How to Excavate a Kurgan 62 ii. Gnedich, Iliada 69 iii. Vantage Points, ca. 1850 80 iv. 1876¿The Grave Becomes a Cradle: 90 Zabelin contra Chaadaev v. Archaeological Defamiliarization 96 vi. Steppe Archaism and the Stratification of Time 100 Chapter Three 107 Ancient Statues, Ancient Terrors i. Archaic Simplicity 110 ii. Primitive Rudeness 120 iii. ¿No Ordinary Stone Woman¿ 128 Chapter Four 139 How a Modernist Artifact Is Made: The ¿Native Antiquity¿ of the Stone Babas and the Indigenization of Cubism i. The Stone Baba and the Bronze Horseman 147 ii. Indigenous Cubism 162 Chapter Five 173 Velimir Khlebnikov, Poet of the Stone Babas i. ¿The Stone Woman¿ (1919): Modernist Metamorphosis 178 ii. The Steppes of Time: ¿A Night in a Trench¿ 190 iii. The Grave of Khlebnikov 201 Chapter Six 204 The Landmarks of Time: Burial Mounds, Eurasian Necropolises, and Modernist Form in Boris Pil¿niak¿s The Naked Year i. Volga ¿Pompeiis¿ 211 ii. Scythianism, 1918 217 iii. Modernist Stratigraphy: Uvek, Site of Time 222 iv. Modernist Topography: ¿Loop Station Mar¿ and the Poetics of Adjacency 234 Chapter Seven 243 Areas of Deformation Part One: Dziga Vertov and the Scythian 243 i. Areas of Deformation 247 ii. The Shooting Log 261 iii. The Archaeology of the Superimpositions 271 iv. Archaeology with a Hammer 275 Part Two: Boris Pil¿niak¿s The Volga Falls 280 to the Caspian Sea and the Courage of Farewell i. All That Was Solid Did Not Melt into Air: 287 Persisting Things ii. The Fluids of History: 291 Archaeology and Antiquarianism iii. The Courage of Farewell: 297 The Return of the Stone Women iv. Coda 307 Bibliography 312 Index 326
About the author
Michael Kunichika (PhD University of California, Berkeley) teaches in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University.
Summary
“‘Our Native Antiquity’: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the
Culture of Russian Modernism is one of those works whose theme seems to lie in plain view, but, until
the appearance of this study, remained unnoticed… It introduces essential
correctives to the history of national-cultural self-consciousness…. the
author’s achievement is outstanding. [It] allows one to present modernism not
only as a revolution of ideas and aesthetic tastes, but as a transformation of
the symbolic ‘habitat,’ with an entire gamut of new sensations accompanying
this radical restructuring of the cultural ecology.” —Boris Gasparov, Ab
Imperio
Ab Imperio
Additional text
“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
