To embark on making an art house movie under Brezhnev, the author shows with the clarity and insight of someone who spent years on studying the Lenfilm studio papers, was tantamount to submitting one's creative will to a variety of whims and whips—institutional and ideological. Every chapter in Kelly's book devoted to this or that art film reads like a perilous journey that ends in a miraculous survival.
Catriona Kelly is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford and a leading historian of Russian culture and society. She is the author of numerous books on Russian modernism, gender history, the history of childhood, national identity, and the recent history of Leningrad/St Petersburg, some of which have been translated into Russian.