Over the past century, the study of modernism has often vacillated between two extremes: the focused examination of a relatively insular group of canonical writers and artists and the seemingly boundless interrogation of all that constitutes modernity. Reframing Russian Modernism confronts the two prerogatives suggested by these approaches—the need for depth and breadth in reading modernism—by producing a “multidimensional ‘portrait’” (6) of the movement. While striving for “synthesizing a vision of Russian modernist culture” (6), the volume gives ample weight to both micro and macroscopic views of the texts and contexts of Russian modernism. The nine essays of Reframing Russian Modernism are divided into four sections: Concepts in Flux, Aesthetics and Pragmatics, Science and Medicine, and Religion and Spirituality. More than thematic headings, these section designations broadcast the scope and context of the volume and suggest its methodologies, its serious investment in placing modernism's “encounters with other social practices at the center” (7). The volume's breadth is a consequence of the well-structured diversity of these categories, a reflection of the potential for Russian modernist studies to be as capacious as its European counterpart.

While the first section contains just one essay, Leonid Livak's exploration of “The Terminological Labyrinth of Russian Modernist Studies,” the notions of instability and flux that Livak introduces serve as a crucial model for the rest of the book. In fulfilling a definitional function, the essay embraces the comparative, imported, and domesticated nature of Russian modernism through a deep dive into “the functional utility of modernism's protean terminology” (24). By emphasizing the diversity, chaos, and messiness of the ways modernism was discussed and classified, by both its practitioners and later Soviet and western scholars, Livak charts a course for the open-ended and amorphous approach that gives the following essays their sweeping scope.

The three essays grouped together under the rubric “Aesthetics and Pragmatics” do justice to both halves of the label by nimbly balancing text and context. Judith Kalb shows the expanded temporal and geographical purview of Russian modernism through Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's use of classical themes. This is a continuation of the larger trend of mediated reception of western ideas and cultures that also allows Russian modernists to “redeem and renew” the classical past (56). Irina Shevelenko performs a similar act of expansion by focusing on the intersection of aesthetic and political discourse. Her presentation of modernist language, especially embodied in the writings of Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Remizov, and Sergei Gorodetskii, links notions of Slavic identity with linguistic innovations that reframe and destabilize language in ways that are both retrospective and generative. Shevelenko highlights a semantic disruption that is mirrored by the conceptual interventions discussed in Thomas Seifrid's essay on modernist use of ritual. The mystery plays and puppet shows that Seifrid examines as points of intersection of physical geography and absolute or ideal perspectives add nuance to our understanding of the modernists’ complex relationship to realism and the real. As with the other essays, Seifrid's act of reframing comes as an expansion of modernism's purview.

While these three essays afford ample attention to literary works in fleshing out notable elements of a more broadly-framed modernist worldview, the following sections more explicitly draw our attention to significant ideas and figures outside of the text or work of art. David Bethea draws a line from the mid-nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophers to modernist religious philosophers to Vladimir Nabokov's twentieth-century novels using the reception and application of Darwin's theories as a connective thread. Evgenii Bershtein also utilizes a milestone of western scientific discourse, Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, to illuminate modernist culture. Bershtein shows how, by affording more prominence to discussions of sexuality, this work “helped move the reconsideration of human sexuality to the center of modernist creative imagination and to the fore of Russian modernism's social-reformist agenda” (164). A similar merging of aesthetics, social context, and scientific thought informs Arkadii Blumbaum's unflinching account of some Russian modernists’ tendency to echo or embrace antisemitism. His careful examination of Aleksandr Blok's essays and personal writing places the poet at the epicenter of the era's biases and inextricably links elements of modernism's cultural discourse with the growing shadow of notions of Aryan superiority. The three essays of this section leave no doubt that without incorporating developments in contemporary science and medicine into our scholarly framework, modernist literature is incomprehensible. The final section of the collection pulls us even somewhat farther from the text and reminds us of modernism's seminal interest in world building. Thomas Tabatowski taps into modernism's syncretic and eclectic religious culture by situating and closely reading From the Invisible Book by the singular poet and thinker Aleksandr Dobroliubov. J. Alexander Ogden tracks the spread of yoga throughout Europe and Russia as a practice and belief system that both fueled and complemented a modernist epistemology, as demonstrated in the lived experience of Lev Tolstoi and the works of Andrei Belyi.

Reframing Russian Modernism offers a primer to contemporary scholarship on Russian modernism while serving as an example of the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives for modernist studies. Many of these essays echo work that the authors have published elsewhere (often in full-length monographs) giving some of the volume a ring of familiarity. But it is a familiarity that also serves as a premonition of enticing new lines of inquiry. This forward-thinking volume is certain to sow the seeds for a wealth of new scholarship on modernism.