Framing Mary

The Mother of God in Modern, Revolutionary, and Post-Soviet Russian Culture

Amy Singleton Adams, Vera Shevzov, Amy Singleton Adams, Vera Shevzov

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781609092351
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Russian History

Despite the continued fascination with the Virgin Mary in modern and contemporary times, very little of the resulting scholarship on this topic extends to Russia. Russia's Mary, however, who is virtually unknown in the West, has long played a formative role in Russian society and culture. Framing Mary introduces readers to the cultural life of Mary from the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet era. It examines a broad spectrum of engagements among a variety of people—pilgrims and poets, clergy and laity, politicians and political activists—and the woman they knew as the Bogoroditsa. In this collection of well-integrated and illuminating essays, leading scholars of imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia trace Mary's irrepressible pull and inexhaustible promise from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Focusing in particular on the ways in which both visual and narrative images of Mary frame perceptions of Russian and Soviet space and inform discourse about women and motherhood, these essays explore Mary's rich and complex role in Russia's religion, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and art. Framing Mary will appeal to Russian studies scholars, historians, and general readers interested in religion and Russian culture.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction. At Every Time and In Every Place: The Mother of God in Modern Russian Culture
• Chapter 1. More Numerous Than the Stars in Heaven: An Early Eighteenth-Century Multimedia Compendium of Mariology
• Chapter 2. The Akhtyrka Icon of the Mother of God: A Glimpse of Eighteenth-Century Orthodox Piety on a Southwestern Frontier
• Chapter 3. Pushkin Framing Mary: Blasphemy, Beauty, and National Identity
• Chapter 4. The Mother of God and the Lives of Orthodox Female Religious in Late Imperial Russia
• Chapter 5. The Woman at the Window: Gorky’s Revolutionary Madonna
• Chapter 6. Marina Tsvetaeva’s Images of the Mother of God in the Context of Russian Cultural Developments in the 1910s–1920s
• Chapter 7. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s 1918 in Petrograd (The Petrograd Madonna) and the Meaning of Mary in 1920
• Chapter 8. Our Mother of Paris: The “Creative Renewal” of Orthodox Mariology in the Russian Emigration, 1920s–1930s
• Chapter 9. The Madonna Painter: Pimen Maksimovich Sofronov and Marian Iconography (1898–1973)
• Chapter 10. The Marian Ideal in the Works of Tatiana Goricheva and the Mariia Journals
• Chapter 11. Following in Mary’s Footsteps: Marian Apparitions and Pilgrimage in Contemporary Russia
• Chapter 12. On the Field of Battle: The Marian Face of Post-Soviet Russia
• Afterword. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
• Glossary
• Contributors
• Index