Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic by Martha M. F. Kelly

Abstract

Religion & Literature 202 two” (179). To accept Emerson’s politics without its metaphysical base is to undercut the source of its power. Noticeably in the last third of the book, once he has had the opportunity to establish Emerson’s first principle, Urbas becomes more open to consider postmodern interpretations as long as we read Emerson’s skepticism against his metaphysical background: “Emerson’s skeptical moments, in any case, were just that—moments” (164, italics in original). Only then can we properly assess something of a “relative shift” that occurs in Emerson’s writings: “it is difficult to imagine the early Emerson writing ‘Experience,’ ‘Montaigne,’ or ‘Fate’” (156, italics in original). But the shift is nevertheless “along the causal continuum of mind and world,” sliding “the cursor a few notches towards the objective end of the scale, laying greater stress on being and the pre-existing causal order” (168). Those of us who have benefitted greatly from Cavell’s work can find some relief when Urbas concludes we need both sides “To do justice to the full complexity of Emerson’s thought” (206). Questions remain about how individuals or societies align themselves with an impersonal Transcendental Cause and what might get in the way of proper alignment—questions that might require us to hold onto Cavell or Richard Poirier and others after all. But such questions are best asked with a careful consideration of the historical context that nourished Emerson ’s skepticism and optimism both. To the latter end Urbas offers his own important contribution to keep Emerson’s metaphysical and religious relevance alive. Tae Sung California Baptist University Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic Martha M. F. Kelly Northwestern University Press, 2016. xvi + 285 pp. $120 cloth, $39.95 paperback. In this book, Martha M. F. Kelly explores the ways in which Russian modernists appropriated Orthodox traditions to construct an aesthetics of transfiguration and new models of religious practice. She focuses on poetry , devoting separate chapters to Alexander Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova as well as one brief “excursus” each to Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam, respectively. These six poets all rose to prominence during the last two decades of Tsarist Russia, and they BOOK REVIEWS 203 remain canonical figures in what is commonly referred to as the Silver Age of Russian poetry (ca. 1890–1921). As Kelly notes, these poets were not religious artists in any conventional sense. Pasternak, for example, began to attend Russian Orthodox services regularly after World War II, and Kuzmin’s lifelong spiritual quest involved extensive reading of Eastern Christian texts, including hymns, service books, and devotional literature. Yet in their poetry and nonfiction both writers—no less than their contemporaries—depart substantially from the theology and ethics of the official Russian Orthodox Church. Despite their diverging styles and religious commitments, the poets that Kelly examines all shared with other modernist artists and thinkers a collective striving for new aesthetic forms that could unify flesh and spirit and effect a broad transformation of Russian society. This collective task had its origins in Russia’s reception of Friedrich Nietzsche and especially in the sophiology of religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, and its pursuit involved a widespread appropriation of Orthodox artistic and liturgical traditions for often radically unorthodox ends. Kelly concludes her study with an examination of Olga Sedakova, a contemporary writer who draws on Orthodox liturgy and modernist literary traditions in both her poetry and scholarship. In perhaps her most provocative thesis, Kelly argues that “Russian modernism was a religious movement of a unique kind” (5). In the first chapter, Kelly analyzes Blok’s early poetry, including his 1904 poem cycle Verses on the Most Beautiful Lady, a fundamental text in the transition from Solovyov’s fin-de-siècle figure of the Divine Sophia, with its focus on the Spirit, to a much broader “theurgic” or “sophianic task” in which modernist poets aimed to transfigure the material world. This sophianic task updated the Orthodox notion of theosis—that is, the deification of the body—through a new aesthetics responsive to the demands of modernity. In the case of Blok, Kelly reexamines his equivocal incarnations of Sophia in light of...