Sophie Pinkham

A book about the centrality of the forest in Russian culture has won a prestigious British literary award.

The Pushkin House Book Prize was given to Sophie Pinkham's book, The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires.

There are lots of references to trees in Russian literature, from the gnarled oak in Tolstoy's War and Peace to Pushkin's reflections on pines.

But this prize is for the best nonfiction writing on Russia in the English language.

Owen Bennett-Jones asked Sophie Pinkham why she found the theme of Russian forests so interesting that she wanted to write a book about them.

Well, I am a specialist in Russia, some Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union, former Russian imperial territory.

I started thinking back to all of the ways that forests appear in Russian literature.

Right.

Well, all of this helps explain why the winner of this year's, uh, Pushkin House Book Prize has written on the centrality of the forest in Russian culture.

Uh, the author is Sophie Pinkham.

Her book is The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires, and she's professor of practice in the comparative literature department at Cornell University.

So I asked her first why she'd found the theme of Russian forests to be so compelling that she wanted to write a book about it.

They were very important, um, in terms of fur trading, as guides on expeditions, and of course, you know, they suffered terribly like indigenous people in America, in fact, but they also really influenced the course of Russian culture.

Um, oftentimes the Slavic settlers were cutting down forests in order to create farmland, but they were still dependent on it, so there was this very interesting kind of give and take.

And that was Sophie Pinkham, who's the author of The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires.

And that's it for this edition of News Hour.