On Elizabeth Gilbert & THE SNOW FOREST

I’m doing the thing I didn’t want to do, which is cover a current event on my Substack. I’ve been tempted to do it before, and have entertained the idea of setting up a separate essay section for the purpose, but I successfully resisted the urge until now. But coverage of Elizabeth Gilbert pulling publication of THE SNOW FOREST keeps distracting me from what I’d like to be writing, so I’ve decided to say my piece about it and then I can turn back to the memoir, my attention undivided. (And I’ve set up this new section, called Ephemera, where I might post occasional essays like this in the future, though I have no plans to routinely do so!)

I think a good place to start discussion is with the promotional copy that was on the publisher’s web site until a couple days ago. There was a book announcement on ABC’s Good Morning America; it is archived here.

If you don’t want to click away, though, here is the blurb:

With the same trademark warmth and formidable storytelling talent that her millions of fans love, Gilbert takes readers to the magnificent, magical extremes of the Siberian taiga with THE SNOW FOREST, which comes out from Riverhead Books in February 2024.

Inspired by the incredible true story of a family of religious hermits discovered in remote Siberia in 1978, THE SNOW FOREST takes readers on the dramatic saga of a family who escapes early 20th century Russia for a life in one of the most inhospitable and uninhabited places on earth. One unlikely woman—a scholar and linguist—gets sent to the family’s mountaintop to bridge the chasm between modern existence and their ancient, snow forest life. What she uncovers in that dangerous wilderness will be stranger and more miraculous than anything she had ever expected and will upturn her own quiet life forever.

THE SNOW FOREST is a riveting story about one family’s survival in a remote and beautiful wilderness, and a mystical connection between humans and nature. “I spent the first year of Covid living alone in the middle of nowhere,” Gilbert writes. “I found that the silence and isolation honed my own creative and spiritual capacity, as well as my connection to nature. I found myself ever more fascinated by the idea of what it would be like to spend one’s life absolutely separated from the world. THE SNOW FOREST is for anybody who wants a big, juicy, plot-driven novel with strong female characters and for anybody who wants to escape the modern world and disappear into a mystical landscape.”

One widespread take on this book is that, because it is set in Siberia in the twentieth century and involves an “anti-Soviet” family, it can’t possibly have anything to do with the current Russian war on Ukraine, or the domestic Russian political climate, and that notion is just wrong, in my opinion. My aim in writing this piece is to explain why I think that and why I applaud Gilbert’s decision.

The “incredible true story” that Gilbert based her novel on is that of Karp and Akulina Lykov and their four children. In 1936, Karp took his family deep into the Siberian taiga, on the run from Soviet authorities, who had killed his brother. His family were Old Believers, members of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox religious sect that dates to the 17th century. Thus casting the Lykovs as simply “anti-Soviet” or “noncomformist,” as many internet commentators have done, is problematic because it misses the point that, properly speaking, Old Believers were, for hundreds of years, actually anti-every-Russian government. When Tsar Alexei I and Patriarch Nikon introduced liturgical reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1650s, it produced a schism, known as the Raskol. The Old Believers rejected the changes, broke from the church, formed their own churches and communities, and were to varying degrees persecuted by successive tsarist governments (being an Old Believer was illegal until 1905), and then the Soviet government.

So when Karp Lykov fled, he was not a singular example of resistance to the Soviet regime but part of a centuries-old tradition of Old Believers moving to out-of-the-way spots on the edge of empire to avoid agents of the state. Many such small, isolated communities were formed through the centuries and still exist today (though there is now official rapprochement with the church). The singular element in the Lykov story is, in fact, that he so thoroughly isolated his family, for so long. The family was discovered in 1978, when a group of geologists on a prospecting mission came upon them living in isolation, some 160 miles from the nearest settlement.

There is a fair amount of material available on this story already¹ but I will outline it here briefly. When Karp and Akulina Lykov went to the taiga they had two children, Savin and Natalia, and they eventually had two more, Dmitry and Agafia. The family lived in a filthy, self-constructed shack and wore handmade clothing. They foraged and grew crops but having sufficient food was a constant problem that occasionally grew acute, depending on weather and luck. In 1961, Akulina starved herself to death so there would be enough food for the children.

When the Lykovs began to be regularly visited by outsiders in the 1980s, they eagerly accepted many of the gifts brought to them, such as tools and fabrics, but steadfastly refused to accept any food. The Lykovs would not even share the same space as their visitors during a meal, but physically retreated to eat their own food, i.e., the things they grew and gathered, such as pine nuts. This shunning of “worldy” food probably cost two of the younger Lykovs their lives: Savin and Natalia died in 1981, likely from kidney failure related to their poor diet. Dmitry died of pneumonia the same year. When Karp died in 1988, Agafia was left alone at their homestead.

Many people romanticize the Lykovs (see the comments under YouTube videos for examples) but plenty decidedly do not, and see it as a story of religious extremism and perhaps mental illness. Karp’s view of the the family was extremely patriarchal, for instance, and he forbade Agafia from leaving their homestead to visit family or nearby villages for a very long time. To be clear, many Old Believer families went “to the forest” to get away from Russian or Soviet authorities but the level of isolation and deprivation Karp subjected his family to was extreme even by those standards. The parties that visited the Lykovs over the years documented odd, repetitive behaviors—the Lykovs crossing themselves at the mention of certain words and running to the ikon corner to pray for example—that are frankly hard not to read as OCD-like. Which is all to say that I find this not a wondrous or romantic story, but one that is mostly squalid and sad.

What I think of the Lykovs is irrelevant, of course, but I am sharing my opinion to make the point that while I cannot know exactly what Gilbert did with this story—and novelists are well within their rights to take what they like from real life and leave the rest—in this case, I think the distance between the “real story” and what Gilbert seems to have done with it is relevant to the controversy. Gilbert’s promo copy uses words such as “mystical,” “ancient,” and “miraculous,” that suggest a, let’s say, very nonrealistic engagement with the Lykov story. Many Ukrainians know of the family and—even if they don’t—recognize the Western tendency to mystify and romanticize the Russian soul rather than take a cold hard look the ideas of religious fundamentalists like the Old Believers.

These ideas are of course absolutely relevant to the current climate in Russia, just as religious fundamentalism is relevant in the current US political climate. Aleksandr Dugin, the ultraconservative philosopher (who has gotten outsize coverage in the West in terms of his alleged proximity to Putin) but whose ideas nevertheless helped create the rationale for this war, was baptized an Old Believer in 1999. Seven years later, he and his acolytes formed the National Bolshevik Front. (I’m frankly not sure whether the group exists under this name anymore, but its anti-gay, anti-West, antisemitic, misogynist, etc., positions have been recombined and taken up by him and various other organizations ever since.) Dugin is considered the spiritual founder of the idea of Russkii Mir (the Russian world), a revanchist justification for empire, centered on the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian language, and Russia’s “unique” history.

The cultural, political, social, and religious views of Old Believers, in other words, are active and influential in Russia as we speak. I am not saying, for those who might deliberately seek to misunderstand me, that all Old Believers are fascists or that all fascists are Old Believers. What I am saying is that Old Believers have a distinct identity and cultural position in Russia and, whether Gilbert intended it or not, by focusing on the Lykovs, she set her story in a specific location amidst ongoing debates about the very nature of Russia itself. These debates are extremely current, alive every day on Russian TV and Telegram.

Notice that there is now a primate of an official body called the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church. This is significant because Old Believers are no longer an illegal religious sect; they have been welcomed back into communion with the official Russian Orthodox Church. In 2017, Putin visited an Old Believer church and an exhibition there, “The Power of Spirit and Loyalty to Tradition.” This is the first time, in over 350 years, that a Russian head of state had any official interaction with this church.

Moreover, the Russian Orthodox Church, as an institution, and particularly in the person of Patriarch Kirill, have been avid supporters of this war. Kirill, as WaPo notes, “has long framed Russian geopolitical challenges [as] a conflict between a conservative, culturally virtuous Russia and a debauched, immoral West.” The fact is that religious Russians tend to promote the most extreme national views, and that their belief in their own religious and cultural superiority vis-a-vis the West and any lands that were once part of the Russian empire, is the ideological basis for this war. It seems clear enough to me that Gilbert’s book was going to shine (an apparently noncritical) spotlight on such ideas.

The idea, by the way, which I’ve seen repeated many times in commentary, that Ukrainians couldn’t possibly “know” or “care” about Gilbert’s book, or “any of this,” it is sometimes alleged, is frankly so blinkered that I hardly know where to start with it. Ukrainians of course understand much better than Americans do the role these ideas have played in the Russian invasion, and indeed the role that literature plays in the Russian cultural imagination.

In reading the criticism of Gilbert’s decision, I have been struck over and over not only by how commenters have brushed past what Ukrainians have said, not bothering to absorb or understand the critique, much less state it fairly, but they have also brushed past what Gilbert herself has said, dismissing her decision in some truly startling and demeaning ways. (See Rebecca Makkai, Kat Rosenfeld, Janet Manley, and Katha Pollit, for example.)

Very few people have even stopped to consider, it seems to me, that Gilbert knows her own goddamned book and therefore knows exactly how it would fit into the current Russian context. I assume, in fact, that it was precisely her immersion in the subject(s) of her novel that allowed her to recognize and process the critique Ukrainians were making, and to act on that feedback. It’s no small thing to stop a publishing train that would have in all likelihood led to another New-York-Times-bestselling novel, after all.

Eat, Pray, Love the movie did over $200 million in worldwide box office while Eat, Pray, Love the novel has sold more than 10 million copies, including in Russian and Ukrainian translations. Gilbert might be American but she is known the world over. Anyone who thinks that Russian propaganda wasn’t going to have a field day with THE SNOW FOREST, centered on Russian Orthodox Old Believers, being splashily published in the West, near the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, hasn’t been paying attention to what is happening in Russia.

But, but, but, many would argue, writers cannot be held responsible for what is made of their books. I understand that argument, and yes, of course, writers have a right to publish. Gilbert could have proceeded, kept her publishing schedule, and dismissed entirely what any Russian or Ukrainian made of it. But she chose not to.

Art is not separate from life or, in this case, death, when a nation and its people are struggling for survival. The context in which Gilbert conceived and wrote the novel fundamentally changed on February 24, 2022 and I don’t think a writer recognizing that fact is an outrage or a tragedy. Books don’t work for all kinds of reasons (usually far less momentous than this), at various stages in their development, and while this one stopped working late in the process, it’s hardly unprecedented.

Gilbert’s net worth and power in the industry allowed her to make a decision to delay publication in a way that would be very difficult for the average author. It is a decision born of privilege, and isn’t responsible use of one’s power and privilege something we need more of? In any case, Gilbert’s explanation that “This isn’t the time for this book,” seems to me a true and complete statement, and all she needed to say.

1. See Mike Dash for Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/.

Journalist Vasily Peskov first chronicled the family in Komsomolskaya Pravda in 1982, and in 1994 published Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family's Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness. The book appears to be out of print but there is a copy on the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/lostintaigaoneru0000pesk.

There have been at least a couple of documentaries made; one by Russia Today, and this, from Vice, available on YouTube.