What does the forest mean in Russia? This panel discussion will explore the centrality of the forest in Russian culture, from the starting point of Sophie Pinkham’s shortlisted book The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires.
The Oak and the Larch tells a multifaceted history that moves from Stone Age Siberia to today’s Russia. One thread running through the book is the forest’s place in culture – from folklore to film, from Tolstoy to Shalamov. The forest is a prism through which to explore questions about society and power; it is a symbol of tradition, identity, and life itself.
Pinkham will be joined by Director of Pushkin House, Elena Sudakova, who will reflect on the forest in contemporary art – particularly the concept of the “inner forest” (внутренний лес) – and artist Ruth Maclennan, whose most recent short film, A Forest Tale, depicts a small community in the taiga forests around Arkhangelsk. The panel will be moderated by poet, translator and judge of this year’s Book Prize Sasha Dugdale, and will also include a screening of A Forest Tale.
This event is part of the Pushkin House Book Prize Festival. Festival Passes are now on sale, which offer priority access to all events. Book early and take advantage of our early-bird offer until 15 August.
Sophie Pinkham is a writer specialising in Soviet and post-Soviet, socialist and post-socialist culture, history and politics. She is Professor of Practice in the Comparative Literature Department at Cornell University. Pinkham is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post and The Times Literary Supplement, among many other places. Her first book, Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Cornerstone, 2016), is a dynamic account of contemporary Ukrainian life, and her second book is The Oak and the Larch (William Collins, 2026), shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2026.
Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her translations have won PEN Awards and been shortlisted for the International Booker, the James Tait Black Prize and Warwick Prize for Women’s Writing amongst others. Her translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory won the MLA Lois Roth Award and was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2022. Dugdale’s translations of new writing for theatre have been widely produced, including stagings by the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Public Theater in New York. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former editor of the international magazine Modern Poetry in Translation.
Ruth Maclennan is an artist and researcher whose work includes films, photographs, performances and writing. She has made films in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Arctic Russia. Many of her films and photographs explore how the climate emergency has affected and altered experiences of place and landscape – both for the inhabitants, and as representation. A Forest Tale (2022, FVU/Arctic Art Institute) was shot in the boreal forests of Arctic Russia and shown at Pushkin House in 2023. Treeline (2021, FVU/Forestry England) was selected by the Whitechapel Gallery for Artists’ Film International and toured internationally. Anarcadia (2010, FVU/John Hansard Gallery) was shot in Kazakhstan and toured in the UK and at international film festivals. She has contributed to publications including Ice Humanities: Living, Thinking and Working with a Melting World (Manchester University Press). She is currently Research Associate at Scott Polar Institute, Cambridge University, and also teaches Moving Image at Central Saint Martins and Open College of the Arts.
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