If one were to dream up a book that contextualized Russian modernist literature within rhetorics of nationalism, Irina Shevelenko's book Modernizm kak arkhaizm might well be it. In five chapters Shevelenko guides her reader from the turn of the twentieth century to the period of the First World War and the 1917 revolutions. She guides us not merely through these tumultuous decades, but also through a stunning array of art media and art-critical genres: from the Russian expositions at the Paris World's Fair of 1900, to the Abramtsevo artists’ colony, the modernist journal Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), Sergei Diaghilev's “Russian Seasons” and the writings of Aleskei Remizov and Sergei Gorodetskii, the musical experiments of Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, to the reconsideration of icons as aesthetic objects and the ways Russian avant-garde artists appropriated this tradition. In all these spheres the author addresses how Russian artists, critics and thinkers sought to advance Russia's nation-building project, and how competing models of an “aesthetic nationalism” reflected Russia's unique path to national identity.

Shevelenko's book makes important contributions to the study of Russian modernism. First, she analyzes discussions of nationalism and art in Russian periodicals and other genres, most of them not belletristic. She comes from a philological background, with an important tome on modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and, as she notes in her introduction, her methodological approach “resides primarily in the territory of textual analysis” (19). She inspires confidence in her conclusions through precise readings of a wide range of journal articles, editorial statements, exhibition catalogues, manifestoes, and letters. In fact, many of these documents are generously excerpted, making the volume a kind of sourcebook. As she notes, she makes these “secondary” materials primary. Additionally, her work enriches our picture of Russian modernist periodical culture, complementing recent work by Jonathan Stone (The Institutions of Russian Modernism, 2017) and others.

Second, Shevelenko grounds her analysis of these texts in their historical context, providing an important picture of how Russian modernists sought to shape their socio-cultural situation, believing that art and ideas could change the world. Shevelenko indicates that in some ways they were not wrong. Her story crosses back and forth between France and Russia, underscoring the impetus to construct a Russian national aesthetic and rhetoric that would answer other European models. She sets up her narrative within post-Emancipation efforts to conceptualize and realize a “homogenized” national culture through painting, literature, and other arts, but early on she addresses visual and spatial tensions between presenting Russia as empire or as nation at the Paris World's Fair. From this point on the relationship between nation and empire serves as the main drama of the book, as Russians seek to balance the Europe-inspired national-building impulse with geographical, political, and historical exigencies. We find in Mir iskusstva a distinct preference for the “national” model and for individualized artistic expressions of the folk element, along with disdain for government-generated versions of a national aesthetic (the “Russian style,” which flourished under Alexander III). But after Russia's military loss to Japan and the 1905 Revolution, modernists began gravitating toward an expansive, nearly imperial view of the Russian national idea as a universal idea. Inspired especially by the ideas of Viacheslav Ivanov, writers, critics, composers, painters, and art-world figures like Diaghilev sought to embody—in competing ways—a national “synthesis” of folk and elite, old and new that would actualize this universalizing (that is, messianic) Russian idea, especially as Europe exploded into the First World War and Russia catapulted into revolution.

Shevelenko is faithful to her stated focus on critical discourse and ideas. Indeed, the central protagonists of her project turn out to be Alexandre Benois and Viacheslav Ivanov, most centrally in their capacities as critics and thinkers rather than as artists. In this sense (and perhaps in this sense alone) the project feels unrepresentative of the spirit of Russian modernism, which was all about embodiment, and specifically about the ways that bodies resist, upset, and outstrip mental constructs. Shevelenko's exploration of the stakes of the “barbaric,” “primitive,” and “wild” for Russian composers, Futurists, and others provides wonderful framing; and yet in a post-Euclidean, post-Nietzschean, post-Freudian world, the frames are precisely what artists were rupturing.

But this is a quibble with a book that every student of Russian modernism and of theories of nationhood should read. Shevelenko has brilliantly succeeded in revealing the rich and vibrant life of ideas and public discourse centered on nationalism and aesthetics in late imperial and pre-revolutionary Russia.