Vladimir Bogoraz, one of the most important ethnographers of Siberia, embarked on his monumental study of the Chukchi people after being exiled in 1889 for his revolutionary activities. In the Kolyma region he and other political dissidents lived alongside Siberian peasants, Cossacks and Chukchi and Even people. Bogoraz barely survived a year-long ethnographic expedition, in 1901, across Kamchatka and northeastern Siberia. Life-threatening danger was once almost a job requirement for anthropologists. By risking their lives journeying into the wilderness and returning to tell the tale, they were reborn as experts. When Bogoraz leapt back into revolution in 1905, his collaborator Franz Boas asked after his overdue chapters on the Chukchi. Bogoraz replied: ‘You will understand that an epoch like this happens only once in many centuries for every state and nation and we feel ourselves torn away with the current even against our will.’ Boas was unsympathetic: ‘If events like the present happen only once in a century, an investigation by Mr Bogoras of the Chukchee happens only once in eternity, and I think you owe it to science to give us the results of your studies.’

Many anthropologists have since eschewed the study of the ‘primitive’ and turned their attention to places closer to home such as hospitals or boardrooms, with gangs and drug users providing the requisite frisson of danger. The French anthropologist Nastassja Martin, who was born in 1986, is a throwback to Bogorazian adventure. While he was concerned with revolution, she is concerned with collapse – of the Soviet Union, of climate systems – and with ancient ways of being that might help us survive the end of the world as we know it. While her predecessor’s career was the product of political exile, Martin’s study of indigenous communities of the Russian and American far north seems to be motivated by alienation from modern society, despair at the status quo – and perhaps by the loss of her father to cancer when she was an adolescent. She ventured into the boreal forest, known in Russian as the taiga, to find the sense of meaning and home that eluded her in France.

Martin first attracted widespread attention for her extraordinary memoir Croire au fauves (2019), published in English as In the Eye of the Wild (2021) in a translation by Sophie Lewis. I read it in one sitting. It recounts Martin’s near-fatal fight with a bear in Kamchatka. She survived by stabbing the animal in the leg with an ice axe, but lost part of her jaw and suffered severe scarring. After a harrowing series of operations in a Russian military hospital and then in France, she returned to Kamchatka as soon as she was physically able. There she rejoined her adopted family of Even people, who had returned to the forest after the collapse of the USSR; the daughter of the family smuggled Martin through a military checkpoint in the trunk of her car.

Back in the forest, an old man, the son of the last shaman in the area, asked what happened to her still-swollen face. Did she have a toothache?

‘No, I met a bear’, she replied.

‘Ah, I see!’ he exclaimed. ‘But bears are very lovely people!’

After Martin’s fight with the bear, Daria, the matriarch of her Even family, told her that she had become a bear-woman. Her dreams were the bear’s dreams, too, and now the Even truly needed her. Martin’s central interest is animism, the worldview in which all entities – from bears to volcanoes – are ascribed with a spirit; she is fascinated by the possibility of communication between humans and other beings. Martin was convinced that the bear’s spirit followed her on her fateful hike up to the Ichinsky volcano. He had been visiting her in dreams; he was waiting for his moment to possess her. Despite the damage to her face, she had the satisfaction of feeling that both Even ontology and the theories of her dissertation adviser, Philippe Descola, another specialist in animism, had been confirmed: she had transcended the ‘discontinuity of forms.’ (A sceptical wildlife biologist I spoke to about Martin’s book rolled her eyes: ‘she woke up a hibernating bear’.) Reflecting on the hours after the attack, her face ‘slicked over with internal tissue, fluid and blood’ as she waits for an army helicopter, she writes: ‘it is a birth, for it is manifestly not a death’.

Martin’s first book, Les âmes sauvages (2016), based on the doctoral dissertation she completed at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, was about the Gwich’in people of Alaska. Like the historian Bathsheba Demuth, whose Floating Coast (2019) examines the environmental histories of the Russian and American sides of the Bering Strait, Martin was drawn to comparing the experiences of those who had once lived in similar ways, but whose fates and identities permanently diverged depending on where they found themselves. (The Gwich’in, like the Inuit, Iñupiat and Yupik, had a taste of both sides, becoming American overnight in 1867, when Russia sold Alaska.) Martin writes explicitly about following ‘in the footsteps of my predecessors in 1897’: Boas, Bogoraz and other members of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, sponsored by Morris Jesup, an American industrialist and president of the American Museum of Natural History. Then as now, studies that traversed the Bering Strait promised to transcend the east-west divide, discovering commonalities that long predate the distinctions between autocracy and democracy, ‘the West’ and Asia, capitalism and communism.

For the setting of her Russian case study, Martin chose the subarctic volcanic peninsula of Kamchatka. She had heard about Daria’s family’s return to the forest, and she felt herself irresistibly drawn to a story that seemed to confirm her dream of ‘a past world reborn from its own ashes in response to a great crisis’. A Gwich’in interlocutor had once told her, ‘If an actual crisis were to happen, we Gwich’in would go back to live in the forest’. Daria’s family seemed like a fulfilment of this promise.

In her third book, East of Dreams (À l’est des rêves, 2022), published last month by New York Review Books in an elegant new translation by Sophie Lewis, Martin gives us a much more detailed picture of this Even family. The book doubles as an anthropological manifesto for the age of climate crisis. Putting her own spin on the French fondness for ‘collapsology’, Martin draws an intriguing analogy between the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of once-stable ecosystems due to climate change. In her formulation, when the USSR fell, the lights went out and the spirits came back. Could the climate crisis prompt us to call in the spirits to help us cope with a new natural order? For Martin, collapse sometimes seems almost desirable – as in the strains of collapsology that take a morbid pleasure in the disappearance of the corrupt status quo that pushed us over the precipice.

On her first trip to Kamchatka, Martin was depressed by the spectacle of Russia’s institutionalization of indigenous culture – the museums of native dress, the ‘sacred’ dances performed for tourists. The distillation of whole cultures into colourful garments and charming rituals is familiar from, say, the American Museum of Natural History, despite recent efforts to adopt a less objectifying approach. But it has a specific valence in Russia as a legacy of Soviet nationalities policy, in which every people and nation of the Soviet Union – from Ukrainian to Kazakh to Even to Chukchi – was to have its characteristic festive garb, its national songs and its national poet. In a place like Ukraine, the poet was easily available in the form of the liberated serf turned national bard Taras Shevchenko. For the hunter-fisher-gatherers or herders of Siberia, the poet had to be found among people who had only recently become literate thanks to Soviet educational efforts – which involved snatching children from their families, sending them to boarding schools and beating them for speaking their native languages. Today there is no need for an Even bard to recite verses about the triumph of Communism, but touristic performances and the production of handmade tchotchkes remain a way of entertaining visitors and earning money while ‘conserving’ traditions and asserting a secularized, depoliticized version of identity through culture. For Martin, this conservation is meaningless, even nihilistic, as it retains the forms of tradition while divorcing them from the context that gave them meaning.

Daria’s family appealed to Martin because they took the opposite approach. Having returned to the forest, they eschewed native costumes and performances for outsiders. They abandoned reindeer herding, whose collectivization in the Soviet period severed the intimate ties between individual herders and their reindeer; the fall of the USSR and the sudden disappearance of the state structures on which the Even had come to depend further compromised pastoralism. Unlike their ancestors, Daria and her family are hunter-fisher-gatherers, moving backwards on the traditional ladder of development.

Shamans, once a feature of Even life, have died out, at least in Daria’s region. (Other anthropologists have documented the resurgence of shamanism since the fall of the USSR.) The last shaman Daria knew died in the 1970s. Now, with no spiritual mediator, Daria cultivates her own lucid dreams as a means of communication with animals and, through animals, with the elements. (Other members of the family seem to envy her oneiric gifts.) Animals and plants are highly attuned to changes in weather; it is often their behaviour that indicates to humans that a storm is coming. By communicating with animals in dreams, Daria learns not only where to go fishing the next day, but also what the weather holds in store. Martin argues that this ‘heterarchical dreaming’ is more resilient – able to survive, for instance, the arrival of a political regime intent on the eradication of shamans.

The return to lucid dreaming, Martin writes, is linked to the desire to reinvent a way of living that relies on ‘practical and frequent interactions with the creatures living in their particular community’. Daria’s family wish to ‘restore dialogue with the beings and creatures that mattered to them as peers, a dialogue left in limbo half a century earlier’. For Martin, climate breakdown requires us to abandon the illusion that humans can exist separately from other beings, and to learn to understand what animals and plants can tell us. Animists like Daria could guide us to a new understanding of the interdependence of all natural phenomena, including storms, floods and fires. As Martin puts it, ‘I take this resurgence of instability to be a starting point for the renewal of an intriguing kind of existential creativity’. Or as Daria says, more simply, ‘You have to try to dream with [the animals] to understand what they’re doing and where they’re going . . . to find out what we are going to do!’

Daria’s mother, Memme, the keeper of memories, dies on the morning after Martin’s first arrival. In the forest funeral, Memme’s head faces eastward in a coffin ‘that smells of fresh sap’. Daria looks towards the rising sun as she throws into the fire a little food and then a needle, thread, a thimble and a pair of glasses: everything Memme might need on her journey. This is a temporary goodbye, because the Even believe that Memme will soon be back. ‘Tomorrow you will return as another’, Daria murmurs. ‘Tomorrow, you can orient yourself once more’. It is a beautiful image, and Martin compares it favourably to the funeral for her father in France: the sealed lacquered coffin, the church organ, and the sense that ‘modern society is sick with distance’, unable to cope with death. In her devotion to Daria, one senses a longing for a second mother, one who truly understands and accepts her – unlike Martin’s biological mother, who is loving but unable to comprehend her daughter’s strange choices, leaving Martin feeling like a disappointment. Daria’s nuclear family is Martin’s tiny utopia. ‘In the East’, Martin writes, ‘there is still a sun that rises and eyes are opening onto another world: there is an awakening’.

Martin’s yearning for family, her intense desire to believe and the fairytale quality of her narrative give her writing its seductive power, but these qualities sometimes trump analytical rigour. After traversing the river to visit Daria’s family for the first time, she declares that she has crossed a ‘frontier flowing peacefully between two worlds that knew nothing of each other’. This has a nice ring, but the overstatement is glaring. All of her protagonists speak Russian, have been educated in Russian schools, and move between the forest and regional settlements and towns. Daria’s daughter married a Russian-Ukrainian soldier named Yaroslav. The forest dwellers are fond of Édith Piaf and Joe Dassin. Perhaps Martin means that the forest itself knows nothing of the urban world; but the forest has already been contaminated by the by-products of regional mining, not to mention the microplastics that have now permeated every corner of the earth.

East of Dreams often displays a strange naivety. Martin is puzzled that the Kamchatkan indigenous peoples speak openly about their spiritual practices but remain almost completely silent on questions of politics. East of Dreams’s nine-page bibliography includes only a handful of works about Russia. There is bountiful anthropological theory (Bruno Latour is a touchstone), but obviously relevant historical texts such as Yuri Slezkine’s Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (1994) are missing. One wonders if Martin needed to read more about the Soviet history of institutionalizing bastardized versions of ‘national traditions’ while voiding them of religious content, or about Soviet censorship, or the ritualistic quality of late Soviet speech, or the ever-increasing dangers of political speech in Russia since the crackdown that followed the 2011–13 protest movement. Indigenous defenders of Russia’s forests have been among those who have had to choose between leaving the country and falling silent.

Martin is attuned to souls and dreams, but squeamish about material realities. She admits that for years she chose to ignore the fact that the forest Even had a steady supply of flour, sugar, tea, petrol, spare machine parts and cigarettes, despite their struggle to obtain enough money to pay for them. She is perplexed by the resistance of Daria’s son Ivan and his cousin when she insists on accompanying them on a fishing trip one day. The reason soon becomes clear: she watches them catch a huge number of salmon, slice out all the roe for sale on the black market and leave the bodies on the forest floor to rot. The fish heads do not point east; there is no ceremony to honour their souls. Ivan and his cousin need cash. The fact that the Even routinely hide or lie about their fishing and hunting to the authorities, which impose unrealistically low hunting quotas, comes as a revelation to Martin, even though the navigation of corrupt bureaucracy and unfollowable rules is a fixture of contemporary Russian life, as it was of Soviet life and of imperial Russian life before it. It is painful to watch her question Ivan and the other men until they grudgingly admit that they lied on their paperwork, or that the area’s animals are disappearing thanks to uncontrolled poaching – including their own. One sometimes feels, to use a Russian phrase, that Martin has ‘discovered America’, noting with amazement what has long been obvious to others.

Ivan is betrayed by his black-market contact in town who reports him to the police for poaching. But the betrayal brings redemption. Daria interprets Ivan’s arrest as punishment for his disrespect for the fish. ‘I’ve decided to stop doing that, however hard things get’, Ivan later tells Martin. ‘They [i.e., the fish] showed me the limit, and I want to be able to go on living with them in the forest’. For Martin, this is proof that animism enforces limits to exploitation of the non-human world. If everyone were animist, we would have stopped overhunting, overfishing, overconsuming and polluting long ago.

The infinitely wise Daria, with her telepathic dreams, reminded me of another indigenous literary character: Dersu Uzala, the forest-dwelling guide who was immortalized, in semi-fictional form, by the naturalist and surveyor Vladimir Arsenyev. His book Dersu Uzala (1923) was the iconic frontier adventure of the Russian and Soviet 20^th century, inspiring generations of outdoorsy children. Akira Kurosawa, another devotee, filmed it in the 1970s. Like Arsenyev’s Dersu – the selfless master tracker who saves him from death countless times thanks to his almost supernatural understanding of the natural world – Daria is an endangered species, the last guardian of her people’s wisdom. Like Dersu, she is unfailingly loving and generous to the outsider in her care. In the taiga, Martin, like Arsenyev, returns to a near-infantile state, dependent on her native provider to keep her alive. Dersu dies at the end of Arsenyev’s story, killed for a new rifle Arsenyev gave him. Unable to survive in the rapidly modernizing world, he is buried in a forest that soon disappears in turn, replaced by a settlement to serve the new railway line that Arsenyev’s surveying (and Dersu’s protection) made possible. For Martin, Daria embodies an inspiring mode of survival in the face of catastrophic climate change. Her passionate rendering of this vision is often compelling. But the reader, sadly, does not share her optimism about the resilience of Even ontology.

Early in East of Dreams, Martin is appalled when Ivan announces that he would gladly fight for his country. This becomes a gruesome reality in the epilogue, when Martin tells us that Ivan has disappeared into the battlefields of Ukraine. (As of June, he does not appear on the lists of casualties.) Uncomprehending and desperate to dissuade him, she asks why he volunteered. He answers only, ‘It’s necessary’. In her agonized dissection of his choice, she never mentions the possibility that he did it for the money – a common motivation among Russia’s poor and ethnic minorities, who are disproportionately well-represented in its armed forces. Lucid dreams can’t buy flour, petrol or a working outboard motor.

Read on: Sophie Pinkham, ‘Nihilism for Oligarchs’, NLR 125.