Many studies have drawn comparisons between Russian Modernism and its European counterpart. Martha Kelly's is the first to show that a significant point of difference between them emerges with an understanding of the influence of Russian Orthodoxy on key literary works of the first half of the twentieth century. Kelly contends that it was not just thematically that this influence can be detected, but rather that an entire poetics was shaped by it. Specifically, Russian Orthodoxy held out the possibility of unification of spirit and matter as well as a host of other dichotomies, such as subject and object and the empirical and the irrational. As a means by which this unity might be realized, the artist could produce a work of transformative - and regenerative - power. With careful readings of central texts by Blok, Kuzmin, Tsvetaeva,Akhmatova, and, most unexpectedly, Pasternak, Kelly illustrates the profound impact of religious thinking on the major figures of early twentieth-century Russian and Soviet literature.
