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 <i>Our Native Antiquity</i> 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.