Yuri Leving has written a lucid and thought-provoking book about writers as visual artists and visual artists engaging with verbal craft—a book that deconventionalizes the divide between the visual and the verbal. The volume offers a series of case studies, each examining a dialectical and complex relationship between the visual and the verbal in Russophone culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the introduction, Leving lays out a conceptual roadmap for the chapters that follow. The book consists of three parts: Part 1, “A Revolution of Imagery/An Evolution of Images,” Part 2, “Literature—Cinema/Novel—Screen,” and Part 3, “A Return to the Visual/A Self-Reflecting Gaze.” Leving opens his book with an introduction titled “Revolutionary Knots,” perhaps a playful nod to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's knots-novels about twentieth-century Russian history. Many of the articles included in this Russian language volume appeared first as stand-alone publications or presentations in English.

In the opening chapter, Leving examines Russian symbolist and early Soviet poets’ fascination with technological innovation, namely the capabilities of exploring the underwater world using new diving technology. Chapter 2 examines the ways in which Soviet avant-garde artists tried to reconcile their aesthetics with the state-run culture industry. Leving uses Alisa Poret's illustrations for propaganda books targeting children as his case study. In the final chapter of Part One, the author examines various filmic approaches to the key scene of Anna Karenina's suicide. Leving contends that the famous scene embodies what he wittily calls “eye-deology of trauma” (169).

Part Two opens with an essay exploring how Vladimir Nabokov, in his novels and communications with Edmund Wilson, engaged Sergei Eisenstein's artistic persona as well as his films. Nabokov apparently resented Eisenstein's “flawed talent”—the director who, in the writer's opinion, manipulated historical material to serve his artistic vision (217). Even worse from Nabokov's point of view, Eisenstein equipped Soviet ideologues with visual language to articulate their version of history that never was (217–18). In Chapter 5, “Between Hollywood and Russian Birch Tree,” Leving examines the evolving cover designs of Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita. He pays special attention to perestroika and post-Soviet editions of the novel in Russia, a fascinating story about various strategies to market the previously-banned novel as a commodity. The essay about Aleksei Balabanov and Nabokov concludes Part Two and opens with a claim that sometimes the unfulfilled projects suggest more about the artists than those that were successfully completed. Leving analyzes in great detail Balabanov's failed attempt to obtain the rights for the screen adaptation and produce the film based on Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark. As Balabanov noted in one of his interviews, he considered this novel “the most cinematographic work in Russian literature” (293). The account is especially valuable since Leving was involved in negotiations between the STV Film Company and Dmitri Nabokov, the executor of his father's literary estate.

Part Three examines visual poetry of another kind, ranging from high culture to the advent of the selfie. In Chapter 7, Leving discusses Joseph Brodsky as a Soviet and American moviegoer and cinephile, investigating how the poet used the motion picture as inspiration for his writing. The final section of the article analyzes Brodsky's encounters with Andrei Tarkovskii and the poet's reception of his films. In Chapter 8, Leving examines Brodsky's fascination with Pablo Picasso's art, specifically the role of his art in Brodsky's artistic output in the context of Soviet and American periods of the poet's work. Having provided a broad context from Picasso's place in the Thaw era to the artist's role in the US art scene and market, Leving focuses on the analysis of Brodsky's plans to contribute to Edward Hirsch's 1994 book, Transforming Vision: Writers in Art. Brodsky planned to contribute a piece on Picasso's art but did not manage to write it. Eventually Hirsch used Wallace Stevens’s poem on Picasso's Old Guitarist, which Leving speculates might have been done on Brodsky's advice. In the concluding essay, Leving examines the genre of the selfie and contends that this new cultural form blurs borders between production and dissemination, aesthetic gesture and marketing strategy. Instead of discussing it in the familiar context of new digital technologies, the author frames the aesthetics of the selfie in the context of the classical European self-portrait.

A Revolution of the Visible is a highly informative and accessible study of dialogues between visual and verbal arts in Russian culture. Leving is uniquely equipped to write about twentieth-century avant-garde illustration, Tarkovskii's cinema, Nabokov's prose, or the aesthetics of the selfie. A true erudite, he masterfully crosses media and disciplinary boundaries to produce cogent and at times provocative observations and conclusions. A must read for anybody interested in the key turning points (“knots”) in modern and postmodern Russian culture.