"Chamberlain's latest book provides a series of fascinating reflections on how German Idealism influenced a range of Russian writers and artists from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. An important theme in Russian cultural discourse that echoed German Idealism was the transformative power of art. Since art encouraged people to see the world differently, it was central to the pursuit of progress, an idea that, for instance, underpinned the Wanderers movement in painting and influenced much of the creativity of the Silver Age. This was not simply a matter of advocating a particular cause. German Idealism offered 'a more subtly negotiated relationship between the human mind and the external world' and 'invited speculation as to a truly perfectible human existence.'. This meant that Western empirical science, on its own, was an insufficient tool for progress. A new theory of knowledge was required, and Chamberlain suggests that: 'The great revolutionary art of 1895-1922, the work of Malevich and Tatlin, and the Symbolist poetry of Blok, and of Velemir Khlebnikov's reinvention .

of language and landscape, was great because it hungered after this radical regeneration of knowledge.' In the hands of Marxism-Leninism, art was conceived as a political instrument, but, as Chamberlain shows, the blending of art and politics in Russian thinking had deeper and complex intellectual roots. Chamberlain provides a great deal of food for thought about how the ideologies and cultural projects that burst forth in the revolution were shaped by longer-term philosophical concerns.".