Oak and The Larch

Russia has more trees than there are stars in our galaxy, and the forest lies at the heart of this vast nation’s history and culture. The Oak and the Larch tells the story of the northern Eurasian forests which have, over the centuries, been part of the territories of Chinggis Khan’s Golden Horde, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Mongolia. Ranging from the medieval era to the present, Pinkham draws on literature – from indigenous legends to canonical works by Tolstoy and Turgenev – as well as political history, art, music, and original reportage. As she traces the forest’s role as a wellspring of national identity, a place of shelter, conflict and survival against the odds, Pinkham also shows the threats facing the forests – and what we stand to lose when nature is depleted.

Sophie Pinkham is a writer specialising in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, history and politics. She is Professor of Practice in the Comparative Literature Department at Cornell University. Her story for the Economist 1843, ‘Lost in a Dark Wood’, on migrants in the forest on the Belarusian-Polish border, was awarded a 2023 British Journalism Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, London Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Archaeology, and The Paris Review, among other places. Her first book, Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, was published in 2016.