SUMMARY:

In 1919, the archaeologist F. V. Ballod arrives at Uvek, a former city of the Golden Horde, where he conducts excavations of the site and finds artifacts of various peoples located within it. A few days later, the writer Boris Pil’niak also arrives at Uvek, having heard about the excavations, and finds there a model by which to think through the aftermath of the Revolution. Taking this conjunction of archaeological excavation and modernist literary experiment as its departure point, this article considers how archaeology serves as a conceptual and aesthetic resource for Pil’niak’s account of the aftermath and promise of the Revolution in his Naked Year (Golyi god, 1922). Focusing on Pil’niak’s representation of the Uvek excavation and on the recurrent figure of the kurgan, or burial mound, Michael Kunichika proposes to read these episodes as structured by two descriptive modes – modernist stratigraphy and topography – which enable Pil’niak to coordinate the encounter between the deep past and the present day. This close proximity of the archaic and the modern in Naked Year indicates the work’s ascription to the steppe landscape of a spatiotemporal structure far more complex than the commonplace of the steppe as a proverbial void. This structure of the landscape is made legible by Pil’niak’s attendance to archaeology generally and to the archaeology of nomadism in particular. It is this juxtaposition between the deep past and the contemporary situation of Revolution that is central to understanding one of the work’s central questions, namely, “where is the history of the Russian nation?