‘A towering achievement’ MERVE EMRE

NYT Best New Books of 2026

A majestic cultural and environmental history that reveals how forests have made – and resisted – Russia’s many empires.

From the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Steppes of Central Asia, 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.

Inspired by the majestic oak, which towers over the country’s western heartland, and the hardy Siberian larch, an emblem of survival in the east, 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, from the days of the tsars to the Soviets to Putin’s Federation.

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: the legendary Indigenous guide Dersu Uzala, giants of literature like Tolstoy and Chekhov, political thinkers like Kropotkin and even Stalin. She confronts the forest’s role in Russia’s long history of imperial conquest, and in resistance to this conquest.

Gorgeously written and surprising at every turn, 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.

‘Strikingly original … a clever way to retell Russian history from a new and revealing perspective’

The Times

‘Fascinating… 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’

Guardian

'An expansive, often absorbing study of the role of the wilderness in the Russian imagination … Pinkham is at her sharpest when examining the Soviet era and its aftermath… There is some striking nature writing here — Pinkham’s reporting on self-taught wolf researchers who live in pristine isolation near the Russian-Finnish border is especially vivid'

New York Times

'To tell Russia's story through its forests, from the ent-like leshy of medieval folklore to the way Ukraine's forests became bastions of defence against Putin's invasion, is a glorious act of imagination, and Sophie Pinkham's wonderful book is packed with insight to match'

Mark Galeotti, author of A Short History of Russia

'For Sophie Pinkham, Russia’s forests contain everything: animals and spirits, legends and fairytales, seeds of the world’s greatest novels, whole histories of political repression and revolution, and hope for a radically post-national future. The Oak and the Larch is a towering achievement, a work of remarkable synthesis and sensitive storytelling'

Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers

'Perceptive, wide-ranging, and gracefully written, The Oak and the Larch is a momentous chronicle of Russia’s vast and vital woodlands and their agency in a human history that touches us all. The lessons we follow from this sylvan past– and this book– will determine our future on Earth'

Jack E. Davis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf

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.