Out of Focus: Russia at the Margins by Catriona Kelly (review)

Reviewed by: Out of Focus: Russia at the Margins by Catriona Kelly Valery Vyugin Out of Focus: Russia at the Margins. By Catriona Kelly. Cambridge: Legenda. 2023. xii+343 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–78188–782–0. This book is a study of Russian culture, a topic which many scholars today consider toxic; research in this area inspires strong emotional reactions, for obvious reasons, which threaten the objectivity of scholarship. Although its author, Catriona Kelly, whose career has been entwined with Russian cultural history for half a lifetime, is hardly an uninvolved observer, her unrivalled insider knowledge of the Russian state and way of life allows her to combine her undoubted expertise with a bilateral perspective on contemporary events. (She makes her ethical position clear from the very beginning of this monograph.) Kelly belongs among those uniquely qualified scholars whose opinions cannot be discounted if we are to have any hope of comprehending how Russia's current policies became possible, and how a similar national catastrophe can be avoided in the future. Kelly begins by introducing a vignette from her personal history, explaining this book's preoccupation with themes of marginality. To understand historical process, she argues, not only the most popular, so-called '"magisterial themes"' (here Kelly ironically quotes Soviet cultural planners) in contemporary culture deserve our close attention. Besides these, historians should examine 'peripheral, peculiar, or errant types of subjectivity: the out-of-focus experiences and perceptions of, say, women, émigrés, young people, ethnic minorities' (p. 2). Cleverly, Kelly notes that 'the lives of establishment figures, too, start to blur and acquire a creative oddity if End Page 292 you put them under the same kind of lens' (p. 2). Out of Focus deliberately overlooks well-known figures from Russian politics and culture, including famous political leaders, and where the author does discuss celebrated poets (such as Pushkin or Akhmatova), she dwells on more obscure aspects of their lives and characters. Kelly's pivot towards documenting the tiny details, daily intrigues, and cultural stereotypes dominant among both the Russian elites and ordinary people amounts to a genuinely new and illuminating view on Russian history. In this book she observes, not the tip of the historical iceberg, but the section lurking under the surface. The fourteen chapters are grouped in five sections; some chapters were previously published elsewhere, the earliest of these in 1993. Collectively, they retrace most of Kelly's principal research specializations from the last three decades. Although each section is set in a different epoch with a different set of characters, they all explore how ethical norms are involved in the formation (and, potentially, the rupture) of personal and class identity. The first chapters revisit Russian society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, introducing the practice of so-called 'pedagogical motherhood' (p. 16), the phenomenon of tasking women with responsibility for moral education of the younger generation, especially daughters, and investigating the role of refinement and polite culture in Russian society, with the Imperial court as the 'ultimate bastion of aristocratic conservativism' (p. 42); included is a painstaking case study of the poet Fedor Tiutchev's daughter, who was both a memoirist and a lady-in-waiting. Next Kelly turns to the Soviet era to show how the ideal new Soviet man should undergo regular and severe training of body and spirit, known as zakalivanie. (The Russian word zakal, used in the title of this chapter, is slightly unconventional in this context; a native speaker would refer to zakalka). Other sections note shifts in cultural attitudes, such as culturally specific depictions of animals in fiction; Kelly compares, for instance, Leo Tolstoy's short story Kholstomer (1885) with Anna Sewell's novel Black Beauty (1877). She examines the history of childhood in early Soviet Russia, contrasting the treatment of children then with the provision of children's goods during the final decades of Soviet power. Kelly's analysis of yet another popular Soviet cultural theme, the on-screen spy story, is profound: she revisits the case of the celebrated Soviet TV series The Dead Season (Mertvyi sezon, 1968), directed by Savva Kulish. Out of Focus ends with an intriguing chapter on an episode from...