The end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th signaled a religious turn in Russian literature and culture, especially in relation to the Orthodox Christian tradition. The backdrop to this turn was the Russian Religious philosophers, the attempts to reconcile the intelligentsia and the clergy in the Religious-Philosophical Meetings, as well as a renewed interest in icon painting. The writers were not, however, keen participants in the liturgical life of the time, and their relation to the official church overall was negative or skeptical at best.

This unique role of the Christian tradition in Russian Modernism is the subject of Martha M.F. Kelly's book, Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic. Much has already been researched and written on the subject, but the author takes an overarching view on the subject while at the same time narrowing in on four important poets: Aleksandr Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak. The texts of these poets are analyzed, applying on one hand the liturgical tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church, and on the other key concepts from Orthodox (or general Christian) theology, such as incarnation, theosis, epiphanies, transfiguration and the notion of Sophia so widely beloved by the religious philosophers of the time. Another idea pursued throughout the book is the theme of embodiment in different forms, which unites most of these concepts. Kelly is extremely well read in the field.

Kelly's study demonstrates convincingly the importance of the liturgical tradition and all these theological concepts to an understanding of Russian Modernism. A problem with the book is that all these concepts are quite broad in their scope, and especially challenging to apply outside of Russian Orthodox theology per se. Although Kelly does at one point allude to this by mentioning “orthodoxies” in plural, it does little to alleviate the difficulty for the reader to grasp the importance of so many ideas and their relation to the analyzed texts, as much as to one another. What is proved, however, is that their use is often aesthetic, and in one way or another the writers are changing or distorting the original meaning of these ideas. Kelly writes, for example, about the transdisfiguration rather than transfiguration in Pasternak's use of Orthodox motifs. Likewise, the theme of Sophia is demonstrated to have been eroticized and morphed from its original meaning.

The use of liturgical material is highly relevant. A great amount of liturgical texts are used in the practice. Therefore, it might have been useful for the study to differentiate between well-known texts, often known by heart, and the corpus of the texts as a whole. This distinction would have strengthened some of the arguments put forth in the book. Kuzmin defines his poetry as “cheerful akafisty” in that he understands it within the context of a very popular liturgical genre. Taking this fact more into consideration rather than only mentioning it would bolster the arguments presented herein as well. Akhmatova's use of the hymn “Ne rydai mne mat'” would have been even more interesting if noted that it is sung during the Good Friday service and then once more just before the Easter service at midnight. Likewise, Akmatova's mentioning of the closed church and the singing of Cherubic hymn is accorded even more significance by readers if they understand that it is used in the liturgy when the royal doors open for the great entrance with bread and wine.

The chapter on Kuzmin is important for the presentation of archival material. The mixture of Sophianic and homoerotic motifs are revealing for the understanding of the quoted poems. A motif found in many of the poets of the time is the burning bush, which seems important for its Marian and Sophian implications. Many apt observations about “Poem without a Hero” by Akhmatova are presented, but the theme of the womb followed in the poem would have needed more arguments to be convincing.

Unorthodox Beauty contains many, or rather too many, interesting analyses of the very strong, original, and unexpected role played by Orthodoxy in Russian Modernism. The book would have benefited from being more concentrated and hewing closer to the actual texts, and if some of the excursus would have been left out.