Details

Subject(s)

• Russian literature—19th century—History and criticism [Browse]
• Forests in literature—History—Social aspects—19th century [Browse]
• Forests and forestry—History—19th century [Browse]
• National characteristics, Russian [Browse]
• Russia—Civilization—1801-1917 [Browse]

Summary note

"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-siècle 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"--Publisher's Web site.

Notes

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Language note

English

Contents

• Walking into the woodland with Turgenev
• Heart-pine Russia : Melʹnikov-Pecherskii and the sacred geographies of the woods
• Geographies of loss : the "forest question" in 19th century Russia
• Jumping in : Vladimir Korolenko and the civic/environmental imagination
• Beyond the shattered image : Mikhail Nesterov's epiphanic woodlands
• Measurement, poetry and the pedagogy of place : Dmitrii Kaigorodov and the Russian forest.

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Other title(s)

Heart-Pine Russia

ISBN

0-8014-5059-4

Hdl

• 2027/heb32604

Statement on language in description

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