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When Sophie Pinkham opens her fascinating book with the claim that “Russia has more trees than there are stars in our galaxy”, it might seem as though she is merely using a poetic turn of phrase. But the statistic is correct: while the Milky Way is estimated to have roughly 200bn stars, Russia has something in the region of 642bn trees. Stretching from the Arctic tundra to central Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the Russian forest is vast, mighty and inhospitable. Yet while it is a source of potential danger, it is also a place of great beauty and potential riches, providing furs, minerals and rivers overflowing with salmon.
Pinkham, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University whose last book explored the intricacies of post-Soviet Ukraine, here charts the landscape’s influence on the Russian psyche, and its imprint on history, society and literature. The forest is deeply entwined with Russian national identity – the country is often symbolically represented as a bear – yet attitudes towards it have fluctuated. Different leaders have proposed different strategies for extracting value from the land, leading to cycles of deforestation and tree-planting depending on whether the priority was boosting agriculture, building Peter the Great’s imperial fleet, extracting minerals or constructing hydroelectric dams. Politically, it has been a place of resistance and of ultranationalist rhetoric glorifying the idea of Russian self-sufficiency.
As well as being an ideological battleground, the forest in Russia has frequently been a literal one. From the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus to the current conflict in Ukraine, military success or defeat has often depended on an understanding of the forest, whether to aid in tracking enemy combatants or to avoid detection. During the second world war, partisan fighters “found their greatest ally in the forests”: they hid in the trees and sabotaged German supply lines, while helping an estimated 25,000 Jewish people escape into the woods.
As we learned in Richard Powers’ tree-centred novel The Overstory, a forest will inevitably end up being partly defined by the people who pass through it. Pinkham gives a comprehensive account of the ways writers, poets and artists have looked to the forest for meaning: Pushkin’s romanticised visions of mountain societies in the Caucasus; Tolstoy’s forest-inspired epiphanies (on encountering an oak in War and Peace, Prince Andrei “realises that he should live more like a forest – in interconnection with all the beings around him, giving and receiving”); Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic depictions of spectral, quasi-divine trees. In the mid-1800s, writers and intellectuals devoted themselves to protesting deforestation and emancipating the serfs, two causes that became closely interlinked.
Colourful characters abound, from the heavily tattooed environmental activist Andrei Khristoforov, who wore angel wings and self-identified as a tree, to the Lykov family, members of a religious sect who lived undetected in the taiga for decades, gaining notoriety after their existence was revealed. In 2004, an elderly man in Novgorod oblast erected a monument to the potato, which saved many Russians from starvation during the economic deprivation of the 1990s. The customs of indigenous populations, such as the Khanty people’s ceremonies that involve skinning a bear, are recounted sensitively and with respect.
Pinker’s prose is spare, precise, becoming more evocative in passages about flora and fauna. Her love of animals is evident in her descriptions of them: a lynx “danc[es] on the edge of [a] motorboat, his tufted ears moving in response to the sounds of the water and the rustling trees”; wolf cubs are “skinny, big-eyed, and innocent … nibbling leaves and bark and each other”. The forest murmurs, sings, makes music, whispers.
Like the taiga, the book’s structure is somewhat sprawling. While the order 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 don’t shed much light on the matter). This is a meander through the woods, rather than a straight path. There is at times an excess of places and names, though an extensive knowledge of Russian history isn’t a prerequisite. By its nature, the narrative ends up being somewhat repetitive: the forest offers some combination of nourishment and danger, freedom and entrapment.
Overall, the book makes a compelling argument for the forest as a prism through which to understand Russia – including the former Soviet space – and its peoples. The climate crisis looms ominously: a 2021 wildfire burned an area twice the size of Ireland. But the forest is remarkably resilient, whether to war or human interference or nuclear disaster (in the Chornobyl “zone of exclusion”, a natural rewilding has occurred, bringing with it bison, lynx and bears). It may be a mistake, Pinkham suggests, to apply a human timeframe to this ecosystem; an oak can live for more than 1,000 years, outlasting any despotic dynasty. “Do you know how many Putins there have been in our time?” one activist says. “Go into the woods, hide, don’t stick your head out, and wait.”
