Russia has more woodlands than any other country in the world,
and its forests have loomed large in Russian culture and history.
Historical site of protection from invaders but also from state
authority, by the nineteenth century Russia's forests became the
focus of both scientific scrutiny and poetic imaginations. The
forest was imagined as alternately endless and eternal or
alarmingly vulnerable in a rapidly modernizing Russia. For some the
forest constituted an imaginary geography of religious homeland;
for others it was the locus of peasant culture and local knowledge;
for all Russians it was the provider of both material and symbolic
resources. In Heart-Pine Russia, Jane T. Costlow explores the
central place the forest came to hold in a century of intense
seeking for articulations of national and spiritual identity.
Costlow focuses on writers, painters, and scientists who went to
Russia s European forests to observe, to listen, and to create;
increasingly aware of the extent to which woodlands were
threatened, much of their work was imbued with a sense of impending
loss. Costlow s sweep includes canonic literary figures and
blockbuster writers whose romances of epic woodlands nourished
fin-de-siecle opera and painting.
Considering the work of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Korolenko in the
company of scientific foresters and visual artists from Shishkin
and Repin to Nesterov, Costlow uncovers a rich and nuanced cultural
landscape in which the forest is a natural and national resource,
both material and spiritual. A chapter on the essays and aesthetic
of Dmitrii Kaigorodov, a forester and natural historian who wrote
for a broad public at the very end of the imperial era, suggests a
distinctive Russian environmental ethic nurtured by the rich array
of texts and images that Costlow explores. The relationship between
humankind and the natural world that these works portray is complex
and shifting. Visionary and skeptic, optimist and pessimist: all
turn to the northern forest as they plumb what it means to be
Russian. "
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