"Our Native Antiquity": Archaeology and Aesthetics 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,