In Osip Mandel'shtam's Egyptian Stamp (1928), a muttering, terrifying “stone lady” stomps around St. Petersburg. Michael Kunichika's study “Our Native Antiquity” provides a compelling set of concepts that illuminate such puzzling imagery; more broadly, his book addresses the human desire to derive meaning and value from the deep past. Kunichika examines modernist texts from the first three decades of the twentieth century that feature ancient steppe artifacts, focusing on the stone women (kamennye baby) and the kurgans, or burial mounds, that served as their pedestals. Modernists such as Mandel'shtam were fascinated by the stone women of the Eurasian steppe that they saw exhibited in museums and abandoned in courtyards. These statues were “goods to think with” (to borrow from Sherry Turkle's Evocative Objects: Things We Think With); for artists they served as “archaic mirrors” (16) and provided a concrete way to conceive of Russia's unique identity between east and west, primordial and futuristic.

Kunichika deftly merges analysis of cultural texts with discussion of archeological discoveries and debates. He draws upon thinkers from Piotr Chaadaev to Nikolai Berdiaev, Mikhail Bakhtin to Gilles Deleuze. The space of the steppe and the artifacts found there spurred artists to turn “inward into the vast space of Eurasia,” broadening what it meant to be Russian (14–15). While researchers debated the archeological and aesthetic value of the stone babas (here I use Kunichika's term), modernists later embraced this statuary's deviation from classical norms as a cherished precedent (48–49). For Ivan Bunin and other writers, the “primitive crudeness” of the babas evoked a terror whose mystery Kunichika seeks to solve via painting and philosophy. In 1911, poet Sergei Bobrov articulated the notion of “our native antiquity” and promoted stone babas “as models for a new art” (141). Bobrov and painter Natal'ia Goncharova incorporated the babas “into a Cubist genealogy whose roots they transplant from the Seine to the Russian steppe” (164). Boris Pil'niak's novels reveal how, concurrently with the upheavals of revolution and industrialization, archaeology itself “destabilize[d] the ground,” exposing the presence of “archaic strata” within the land (210). Kunichika reads Pil'niak's work as an argument for an alliance between archaeology and industrialization in the face of a militantly future-oriented ideology (306).

This book offers brilliant close readings, whether of a poem by Bobrov that links the stone baba with the Bronze Horseman; a Dziga Vertov film whose superimposition of images evokes temporal layering; or Pil'niak's depiction of a train station adjacent to an archaeological site, a symbol of the Russian people's perpetual nomadism. Kunichika elegantly applies archaeological terms such as stratigraphy and topography to the workings of artistic texts. “Our Native Antiquity” itself excavates a wealth of valuable information and images. We learn that the babas (some sporting phalluses) were so named as a result of the Russification of the Turkic word balbal (“ancestor” or “warrior,” 30); and that archaeologists worked at the new construction sites of the Five-Year Plans, seeking to save artifacts from destruction (247). Painter Nikolai Roerich, trained in archaeology, valued this discipline's “capacity to free us from our ingrained habits of perception” (97), a perspective seeming to anticipate Viktor Shklovskii's ostranenie–making the stone (woman) stony.

Kunichika foregrounds the notion of multiple temporalities; he shows how artists used the babas and kurgans “as archaic counterpoints to contemporary events,” testifying to the persistence of the past (191). The early Soviets had a conflicted attitude toward archeological artifacts, seeing “the obdurate persistence of the past everywhere in the landscape” (287). Kunichika brings to light the irony within technological efforts to erase the past that in fact revealed the physical traces that past. Conservation efforts displaced stone babas from the steppe to urban locales where they served as fuel for countless imaginations. Kunichika's stimulating study likewise will inspire further research. For example, I was struck by recurring references to ancient objects with the power to see in the literary and archaeological texts cited by Kunichika. The concept of “thing power” in Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things can serve as one way to decipher this motif of inanimate vision.

“Our Native Antiquity” makes a valuable contribution to the emergent field of interdisciplinary scholarship scrutinizing the object world, in particular the role of artifacts in literary texts (as in the work of Bill Brown), in the Slavic field and beyond. Even such media spectacles as Vladimir Putin's 2011 scuba dive to “recover” ancient amphorae take on new meaning in light of Kunichika's book, which makes clear that establishing Russia's links with antiquity has long had implications for the nation's sense of self-worth. The past is a renewable resource.