This essay examines how the forest is described and its ideological connotations in three works of fiction from the Soviet period, Andrei Platonov’s short story "Among Animals and Plants", Leonid Leonov’s novella
The Russian Forest and Valentin Rasputin’s novel Farewell to Matyora.
The aim is to determine the relationship between the depiction of the forests in the three texts from Soviet period and the nationalistic, slavophile, understanding of the Russian forest that appears in Russian culture in the middle of 19
th century.
The study shows that the forest in Platonov’s work, while not being slavophile, shares some features, especially visual, with the slavophile forest. Rasputin’s forest is slavophile, while Leonov’s forest, though being nationalistic, is not.