The Virgin Mary, the Madonna, or, as she is more often called in the Orthodox tradition, Mother of God or Theotokos, constitutes an overwhelmingly rich theme in Russian tradition. This is demonstrated in Framing Mary The Mother of God in Modern, Revolutionary, and Post-Soviet Russian Culture, which consists of twelve chapters encompassing a broad spectrum of Marian thematics in Russian culture.

The book emphasizes the “many meanings” of Mary and highlights her role in a series of classical oppositions concerning the relation between religion and culture in Russia in terms of east and west, tradition and renewal, Russia and the Soviet Union, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, devotion and blasphemy. The volume demonstrates that the Mother of God is a contact zone between all these oppositions and at the same time substantiates the epithet “bridge” given to her in the Akathistos hymn, one of the most beloved poetic texts in the Orthodox Church.

Three contributions deal with literature. Sarah Pratt's chapter on Aleksandr Pushkin focuses on western influence and the contrast between devotion and blasphemy in his rendering of the Marian theme. His Mary is marked by beauty and sexual potential but also by his rebellion against church and state (87).

Alexandra Smith's important chapter on Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry risks losing its focus on the Marian theme and becoming a more general study of Tsvetaeva's poetry. One wishes she had developed more fully her analysis of the relationship between “Poems about Moscow” and the “Unexpected Joy” Mother of God icon, with its double framing showing a sinner praying before an icon of Mary.

The chapter on Maksim Gor΄kii concerns his use of the frame (alluding to the title to the volume) and his mixing of Marian motifs with depictions of living women characters as a part of his God-building project. Amy Singleton Adams concludes her contribution: “For Gorky, such frameless, living icons reify the tenets of God-building that meld spiritual and material worlds” (133). This observation could also serve to summarize much of Marian thematics during the years around the 1917 revolution.

Elena N. Boeck's chapter presents a huge early eighteenth-century compendium of stories containing the miraculous appearances of the Mother of God in Russia and all over the world. Boeck demonstrates that Orthodox and Catholic materials are intertwined without any obvious problems for the compiler.

The evolution of a Marian cult connected to specific icons and sites are the theme in some of the chapters. The development of the kanavka, the dry moat, in the Diveeevo Convent, for example, shows the interaction between the policy of the church, the state, and popular religion in the creation of the narratives about this procession way around the famous monastery. Stella Rock's chapter is revealing for understanding the development of Marian devotion from the nineteenth century to the present. As Vera Shevzov aptly notes in the introduction, there exists in Russia a “laity-driven Marian subculture within Orthodoxy (14). This subculture is a salient theme in Framing Mary.”

Popular adoration of God's Mother is also demonstrated in the development of devotion to the Akhtyrka Mother of God icon discussed in Christine D. Worobec's chapter. The negotiation between the Holy Synod and popular worship in developing veneration of the icon is an illustrative example of the practices used to develop a devotional site. In her chapter on Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Wendy Salmond discusses the continuity in his art from his icon painting to his socialist realistic period, showing that he uses the same icon-like style when depicting God's Mother or a red commissar. Salmond notes that he painted his last Madonna the same year–1924–as his first work on Lenin, Lenin in his Coffin.

Natalia Ermolaev compares in her chapter three views on Mariology in the Russian emigration in Paris. Presenting Sergei Bulgakov's Sophiology and contrasting it to Nikolai Berdiaev's philosophizing on the Virgin, she shows that both authors are utterly abstruse, poetic, and outdated in a new feminist world. She finds intriguing similarities in the anti-procreative ideas of Nikolai Fedorov and Berdiaev. Her contribution ends with a discussion of Skobtsova's views summarized beautifully as “Skobtsova stresses that all human beings—female and male—are essentially bound to both Christ and Mary and must engage both” (201). Ermolaev might also have noted that in the 1930s Bulgakov was threatened with excommunication by both the church inside the Soviet Union and the church in exile for the Marian implications of his teaching and his suggestion that the Divine Wisdom is a fourth hypostasis of the Trinity. The discussion was intense and feelings ran high in this dispute.

Elizabeth Skomp's chapter on Tatiana Goricheva, Leningrad feminism, and the samizdat journal Maria shows how deeply the views on the woman question expressed in the journal were influenced by the Soviet context. Exposing the differences between the participants’ outlooks, Skomp makes clear why the group fell apart after the emigration. The last chapter by Vera Shevzov deals with Mary in post-Soviet Russia and the use of her image for its emotional impact on women's attitudes toward childbearing and birthing (288). The church brought the relic of the Virgin Mary's belt to Russia for its thaumaturgical power to remedy childlessness.

Many Orthodox theologians deny the existence of an Orthodox Mariology, claiming that it is a more Catholic notion. In a more general meaning of the word Russian Orthodox Mariology is the theme of the book. I would have liked to see chapters on, for example, the poet Maximillian Voloshin or on Pasternak, more about the role of Theotokos in the later and very rich Orthodox hymnography, which is cursorily mentioned many times in the volume. The book, however, is already rich, even sometimes overly so, although somewhat fragmentary. All in all, however, it is a successful attempt to describe the cult and use in recent Russian culture of the Mother of God, she who, according to the Akathistos hymn, is “The Container of the Uncontainable.”