The Oak and the Larch review by Sophie Pinkham – Are Russia’s forests the key to its identity? | History books

WWhen Sophie Pinkham begins her wonderful book by claiming that “Russia has more trees than stars in our galaxy,” it may seem as if she is merely using a poetic phrase. But the statistic is correct: while the Milky Way is estimated to contain approximately 200 billion stars, Russia has approximately 642 billion trees. Stretching from the Arctic tundra to Central Asia to the Pacific, the Russian forest is vast, grand, and inhospitable. However, while it is a source of potential danger, it is also a place of great beauty and potential riches, providing fur, minerals and rivers brimming with salmon.

Pinkham, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University whose recent book explored the complexities of post-Soviet Ukraine, here charts the spectacle’s impact on the Russian psyche, its mark on history, society and literature. The forest is closely linked to Russian national identity – the country is often symbolically represented as a bear – but attitudes towards it have fluctuated. Different leaders proposed different strategies for extracting value from the land, resulting in cycles of deforestation and tree planting depending on whether the priority was promoting agriculture, building Peter the Great’s imperial fleet, extracting minerals or building hydroelectric dams. Politically, it was a place of resistance and ultra-nationalist rhetoric that glorified the idea of ​​Russian self-sufficiency.

As well as being an ideological battleground, the forest in Russia was often an actual battlefield. From the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus in the 13th century to the current conflict in Ukraine, military success or defeat has often depended on an understanding of the jungle, whether to help track enemy combatants or to avoid detection. During World War II, partisan fighters “found their greatest ally in the woods”: they hid in trees and sabotaged German supply lines, while helping an estimated 25,000 Jews escape into the forest.

As we learned in Richard Powers’s tree-centered novel Overstory, the forest will inevitably end up being defined in part by the people who pass through it. Pinkham provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which writers, poets and artists looked to the forest for meaning: Pushkin’s romantic visions of the mountain communities of the Caucasus; Tolstoy’s forest-inspired epiphanies (upon encountering an oak tree in War and Peace, Prince Andrei realizes “that he must live like a forest—in interconnectedness with all beings around him, giving and taking”); Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic depiction of spectral and almost divine trees. In the mid-nineteenth century, writers and intellectuals devoted themselves to protesting deforestation and serf emancipation, two issues that became closely interconnected.

Colorful characters abound, from environmental activist Andrei Khristoforov, who wore angelic wings and identified himself as a tree, to the Lykovs, members of a religious cult who lived undetected in the taiga for decades, gaining notoriety after their existence was revealed. In 2004, an elderly man in the Novgorod region erected a memorial to potatoes, which saved many Russians from starvation during economic deprivation in the 1990s. Indigenous customs, such as Khanty ceremonies that involve skinning a bear, are told with sensitivity and respect.

Pinker’s prose is terse and precise, becoming most evocative in passages about flora and fauna. Her love for animals is evident in her description of them: “The lynx” is dancing[es] On the edge [a] A motorboat, its tufted ears moving in response to the sounds of the water and the rustling of the trees,” and the wolf cubs “skinny, big-eyed, and innocent… nibbling on leaves and bark and each other.” The forest murmurs, sings, makes music, whispers.

Like Taiga, the structure of the book is rather sprawling. While the arrangement is broadly chronological and geographical, some of the jumps can be jarring, especially in the early sections (lyrical chapter titles such as Tigers Listen to Water Talk do not shed much light on the matter). This is a winding path through the forest, not a straight path. There is sometimes an excess of places and names, although extensive knowledge of Russian history is not a prerequisite. By its very nature, the narrative becomes somewhat repetitive: the forest provides a combination of sustenance and danger, freedom and trap.

Overall, the book makes a compelling case for the forest as a prism through which Russia – including the former Soviet space – and its people can be understood. The climate crisis looms ominously: a 2021 bushfire burned an area twice the size of Ireland. But the forest has a remarkable resilience, whether in the face of war, human intervention or nuclear disaster (in Chernobyl’s “exclusion zone”, natural rewilding occurred, bringing with it bison, lynx, and bears). Pinkham suggests that it may be a mistake to apply a human time frame to this ecosystem; The oak tree can live for over 1,000 years, outlasting any tyrannical race. “Do you know how many Putins there are in our time?” says one activist. “Go into the woods, hide, don’t stick your head out, and wait.”