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' 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." —Julia Bekman Chadaga, Slavic Review

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"'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