A Review of Irina Sandomirskaia, Past discontinuous: fragmenty restavratsii [Past Discontinuous: Fragments of Restauration]. Moscow: NLO, 2022, 520 pp.

Abstract

This book review offers an interpretation of Irina Sandomirskaia’s monograph, which explores the practices of preserving and restoring historical and cultural heritage in global, Soviet, and Russian contexts. The book traces the emergence of heritage as a key category and an object of modernity and its transformations throughout the twentieth century, as well as the specific forms of heritage preservation and restoration that were circulating in the Russian Empire and the USSR. Sandomirskaia analyses heritage preservation and restoration as forms of radical modernism aimed at shaping a society in which heritage objects serve to cultivate rational civic consciousness. The book under review makes a significant contribution to critical heritage studies.