The Russian Forest

The Russian Forest embodies all the most characteristic features of its author's style and manner. In this novel, which reads like a kaleidoscope of the twentieth-century Russian scene, the author emerges with consummate versatility as artist, philosopher, and citizen. The plot is a simple one, based on the complex relationship between the girl Polya and her father Vikhrov, a professor of forestry, but the events which form the novel's background are described with an epic sweep charged with social meaning. We find here half a century of Russian life, the Great Patriotic War, the harsh clash of scientists, a maturing new generation, different life patterns, the timber merchant Knishev, who went through Russia's forests with the axe, leaving a trail of wanton destruction, the half-crazy landowner lady cheated by Knishev, Colonel Chandvetsky of the secret political police, and last but not least Professor Vikhrov's principal opponent, the mealy-mouth time-server flirting with liberalism - Gratsiansky. And all these, one way or another, are linked with the life of the novel's central character and his family, and ultimately with the history of the Russian forest, which Leonov treats as something inseparable from the history of the Russian S! tate itself.

The Russian forest here is a symbol of the national life. Embodied in the idea of self-perpetuation, it becomes a criterion of the Soviet man's moral purity, his patriotism and heroic stature at a calamitous time in his country's history.