Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Edvard Munch, Ivan Shishkin and Albert Bierstadt. Russia in the years after 1917, told in fragments: a provincial town, wolves, a monastery turned into offices, peasants who understand the revolution as weather. Pilniak was Boris Vogau, of German descent, whose elliptical prose made him one of the leading Soviet writers of the twenties; he was shot in 1938 after a closed trial lasting some twenty minutes. These stories are what the revolution looked like from the forest. Fifty-eight plates by painters including Edvard Munch and Ivan Shishkin carry the forest, snow and provincial towns that give these stories their weather.