Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2014 University of Southern California Boo.

Overview

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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9780801450594

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Reviews

In this beautifully written and researched volume, Jane T. Coslow takes us on a journey into the forests of European Russia through the eyes of the nineteenth-century literary figures, naturalists, and painters who walked its floors and thought deeply about the land they walked on....I cannot overstate the value of this book for literary and cultural historians, environmentalists, and for anyone interested in how research and personal narrative can be elegantly woven together. Costlow's work succeeds in laying out for us how Russia s European forests have served as icons of national identity. It also urges us to sit up and take notice of our failure to be proper stewards of the land on which we live. Adele Barker, Slavic Review (Winter 2013)

<p> Through this loving rediscovery of Russia's 'nineteenth-century forests' as they presented themselves to the imagination and understanding of nineteenth-century writers Jane T. Costlow helps us perceive the particularities of our own relationships to nature. She guides us into a symbolic landscape where even the most pristine woodlands are not 'wild, ' but inhabited by layers of memory and meaning. The struggle to really see and hear the life of Russia's forests both omnipresent and embattled, as contemporaries were beginning to perceive infuses Costlow's story with many lyrical moments, where through the eyes of a searching author we can walk through 'Heart-Pine Russia, ' and contemplate its mysteries, joys and sorrows. Costlow's expert reading of this tradition and careful reconstruction of it presents a model for future environmental readings of Russia's literary 'Golden Age.' John Randolph, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism

<p> Heart-Pine Russia makes an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century Russian culture. Jane T. Costlow restores important figures such as Mel'nikov, Korolenko, and Nesterov to the cultural mosaic in an imaginative and subtle way. -Abbott Gleason, Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History Emeritus, Brown University, author of A Liberal Education

Author Information

Jane T. Costlow is Clark Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College. She is the author of Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev and coeditor of The Other Animals: Situating the Non-Human in Russian Culture and History and Representations of the Body and Sexuality in Russian Culture.

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