Overview

Russia's forests account for nearly one-fifth of the world's wooded lands. The Oak and the Larch is the first-ever English-language exploration of this vast expanse--a dazzling environmental history of Russia that offers an urgent new understanding of the nature of Russian power, and of Russia's ideas of itself. Award-winning scholar Sophie Pinkham's magisterial account spans centuries, revealing how forests have nourished ancient Siberian indigenous societies, defended medieval Slavic settlements from Mongol invasion, and served as both an essential natural resource and a potent cultural symbol for Russia in all its incarnations. By examining the country from the forest's perspective, Pinkham pushes far beyond the contemporary political environment in Russia. She draws on literature, history, and art to connect the expanse of the Russian wilderness and the nature of Russian culture, with indelible portraits of the diverse figures who have inhabited and celebrated these forests. She confronts the forest's role in Russia's long history of imperial conquest, and in resistance to this conquest. The Oak and the Larch offers a vision of Russia rarely seen in the west, as a land defined by its wilderness, shaped by its encounters with the frontier, and--much like our own--ultimately beholden to nature's whim.

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Sophie Pinkham is a professor at Cornell University and a former NEH Public Scholar. Her writing on Russia and Ukraine has appeared in the New York Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, New Yorker, and Harper's. She lives in Ithaca, New York. Abigail Reno is an experienced actor, voiceover artist, and audiobook narrator who has recorded over sixty titles. She enjoys narrating all genres but especially loves how historical fiction, fantasy, and retellings of classic mythology and folklore transport listeners to another place and time. A native of Northern California, she currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.

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