In the summer 2020, walking in Naliboki Forest or under the ancient oaks along the Islach river, I would think: to preserve myself, I need to be in the woods often, preferably daily. With the advent of the coronavirus and related restrictions, domestic tourism in Belarus seemed to have entered a period of prosperity. People appeared to need journeys across Belarus not only for recreation at the permitted "social distance". The more dramatic public life grew, the more one felt the need to communicate with the world, which seemed to be somewhere out there: with natural objects and what we call “monuments”, as if emphasising its existence not in our fast-paced moment, but in a long historical time. We have reconsidered our heritage, trying to find existential resources in it that can support us, to remind us that some things are stable even under the pressure of crises. In search of support, we rediscovered some truths that had seemed to be rigid stamps before: the uniqueness of Belarusian forests, swamps, rivers and lakes. And that they are part of the cultural (not just natural) heritage along with castles and temples as well as the ruins of castles and temples. Forest is comforting, and it gives the opportunity to find new meanings outside the social space or on the border of different (human and non-human) types of sociality.

We see a vivid example of such a love for the forest, which came to be part of our literary mythology, in Belarusian writers Yakub Kolas and Uladzimir Karatkevich, Vasil Bykau and Ales Adamovich (the latter two, thanks to Natallia Adamovich, are present in the photos of the Forest People collection).

The story of how Kolas loved forests, I think, is especially poignant and can acquire new colours in various legends. In any case, it will intertwine the incredible pressure of history and social processes with the desire for freedom and consolation. The place where Kolas found a kid's forest paradise - the vicinity of Albuts and the village of Mikalaieushchyna near Stoubtsy - is closely connected with the lives of his relatives Anton and Yazep Liosik, who were his uncles (the second one, though his uncle, was but a year younger than the folk singer-to-be). The eldest of them, Anton Liosik, a teacher and researcher of the Belarusian language, strongly influenced both Yazep and Kastus (Kanstantsin) Mitskievich. Kolas will later say and write many warm words about his "Uncle Forester''. However, this family line will become unreliable and even banned after the repressions against Yazep Liosik, and the village of Mikalaieushchyna near Stoubtsy, the dense forest around it, the high bank of the Nioman will happen to be beyond the border that divided Western Belarus and the BSSR.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the authorities threaten Kolas with repression, but he avoids it, while maintaining a high status and authority, at the cost of serious psychological trauma, as researchers of his life write (10). The forest on the banks of the Svislach at the confluence with the Balachanka River will be his consolation. There he works and rests with his family in a remote farmstead Vustsie, plans to build a summerhouse in the village of Berazyanka, calls this place a "second home." Yet instead of building a summer house, in 1941 Kolas and his family get evacuated. In 1943, the German executioners burn the forest shelter of Kolas and its inhabitants. They dismantle the Balachanka village into logs. Nevertheless, Kolas, having lost his wife and his son during the war, still goes back to these places, staying in the "new Balachanka", the nearest settlement to the destroyed village. There, despite everything, life goes on, with fishing in the Svislach, legendary mushroom picking with local kids and endless walks. Whatever happens: war, villages burned down, repression, totalitarian censorship or incredible pressure, you need to find a piece of forest and the riverbank. And there save yourself, get your share of freedom, normalcy, loneliness. How many more such stories can be told about Belarusians, writers, artists, and people of all professions?

Perhaps, for our contemporaries as well, the forest in many ways embodies the dream of harmony with something greater than ourselves and our earthly, social processes. Communicating with the forest, we seek to reunite with some ancient force that was once our home. In part, this attitude is related to the ideas of the Romanticism era, when the forest was reinterpreted in terms of originality, majestic savagery and acted with the sea as a heroic element capable of giving a sip from a pure source, associated with the past, understood as a time of concentrated greatness. We see this joining to the romantic meanings of the forest in the many portraits of the collection "People of the Forest", where tastefully dressed girls, couples in love, students in sportswear or writers are photographed against trees or with trees, choosing the forest landscape to be their container of love, friendship, nostalgia, reflection or just recreation as it proves to be the most meaningful and aesthetic landscape.

Generations of Belarusians share the same experience - the desire to "be in the woods", to include oneself in this multitude of living objects connected by communication networks. The collection "People of the Forest" helped us to collect and re-actualize the images of the forest that Belarusians have preserved in photos, documenting their daily lives. Personal and collective portraits with trees, moments of work and rest - each plot shows us a way of interacting with the forest, its flora and fauna, revealing in all who photograph and who are photographed, a special attitude to the forest, which changes during the twentieth century, but in its core each time reveals the high value, the significance of this relationship.

Looking at the collection, you think that if not all Belarusians are "forest people", then there are many. And the forest is one of the most important sense-creating centres for their life and self-understanding. Perhaps even for the definition of the concepts of happiness, freedom and beauty? I take this assumption as a working hypothesis, thinking about the Belarusian forest as a cultural landscape, considering it not only as an independent ecosystem, but as a cultural object filled with meanings, values and symbols, which also includes people who change it, use its resources, love it and sing it. Forest has its own history, mythology and visual appearance, which has changed along with the generations of Belarusians living in interaction with it.

But harmony with nature certainly remains a moment of utopia, a dream. In the photos of the collection "People of the Forest" there are many heroes, shot not in work, military or sports clothes, but in urban costumes and dresses, sometimes festive ones. The authors of the pictures use a camera to capture the moment of cathartic contact with the forest landscape as a place of power. This harmony has the character of an aesthetic gesture; it is a utopian act and an act of art - the art of fitting oneself into a composition where one finds one's place in the forest among trees and other plants, thus expressing love for it. But, of course, after the photo shoot, both the author of the photo and the models often leave the forest, because it is a place for a pleasant walk, not a long-term work or even life. Perhaps, we are so worried about the forest because we are no longer its true owners - hunters and gatherers who once lived in the woods as natives.

We are driven out of the forest, as if out of paradise, through civilization, through centuries of development of agriculture, animal breeding, industrialization and urbanisation, which were impossible without the depletion of the forest of its vast resources. Nevertheless, continuing to exhaust it today, we return to the forest with a dream of harmony, only on the rights of guests, not the residents.

The forest for the guest is an environment full of meanings, a place of events and meetings. The forest is a subject of communication that stimulates in the person who has entered it, forms of activity and thinking, unusual for an urban or even a rural resident. One of the definitions of the forest connects it with the dominant type of plants of which it consists: "The forest is an ecological system, a biogeocenosis in which trees are the main form" (15). It is obvious that in the forest, many essences of a vegetable and animal origin coexist, but trees are the chief one... Trees - "many trees” - that's what we meet in the woods first of all. We meet a form of life that is radically different from us.

Forest is a society created by trees.

Not only metaphorically, but literally a forest is a special form of social order based on trees and other beings that enter into mutually beneficial relationships with trees. Botanists call it the wood wide web, a network in which tree roots, fungi, and bacteria transport nutrients and information (19). Thus, a forest is another society which we so often flee into, away from ours, apparently feeling that the social life of the trees has turned out better.

“One tree is not a forest yet, it cannot create an equal local climate, it is vulnerable to wind and weather. And together the trees create an ecosystem that softens heat and frost, retains moisture well and greatly increases humidity. In this environment, the trees are well protected and live to a ripe old age. To come to this, you need to save the community at all costs. If each tree cared only for itself, few would live to old age. Permanent deaths would leave many gaps in the forest canopy and let the wind in, from which other trees would fall. The summer heat would penetrate to the soil and dry it out. As a result, everyone would suffer" (4) - writes German forest researcher Peter Wohlleben. There is a relevant scientific discipline that studies the relationship (methods of communication and mutual support) between plants - phytosociology.

The otherness of the tree worries us not only because it is, unlike us, a plant. It is not only its relative immobility and special way of feeding, reproduction, growth and seasonal transformations that we experience as another being. Its way of living is also related to a different scale in space and time. The lifespan of an oak or a pine is 300-500 years, of a birch - 120 years, which is many times longer than the time by which a person usually measures his own life. For example, in the Belavezhskaya Pushcha, the average age of 58% of trees is more than 100 years (20). The same “wall of trees” that meets us in the forest partly consists of creatures that grew up before we were born and have a chance (without human intervention) to continue to exist after us. The sacralization of mighty old trees as witnesses to centuries of history stems in part from respect for this secret life in a different temporality. In addition, trees are able to "incorporate" time, increasing not only upwards but also in width, with annual cyclicity increasing the layers of bark, or rather thickening the trunk by building a special layer - cambium (8)

A huge old tree, the thickness of which is proportional to its age, is a prototype of the mythological world tree. It connects the earth, where its roots go, with the sky, where the branches of its crown are lost and which gives shelter to a variety of creatures - from snakes and birds to gods and heroes. Wisdom, even omniscience, is attributed to the long-lived tree - an oak or an ash-tree. Meeting with such a tree is an occasion to communicate with a sense of reverence, a request for something important, a request to share energy. Or the opportunity to guess, fantasise about what happened in the world of people during the life of the old plant. A frequent plot in the collection "People of the Forest" is hugs with trees as dear friends or a composition in which the characters seem to be "hiding" in a network of branches of powerful tree-defenders. The desire to get closer to a tree tactilely through hugs or penetration up a tree into its crown is a gesture of claiming and inscribing oneself in a “tree house,” which evokes vague memories of a past life when tree crowns were real shelters from predators and enemies.

Walking in the woods, however, we enjoy noticing and observing different trees, not only unusually old and powerful. Due to the uniqueness of the crown of each plant, the distinctive shape and colour of the leaves, the features of buds or flowers, each tree has its own unique image and character. And a person, dealing with woods economically or professionally, will name even more criteria: for example, in a household paradigm a birch tree is a dirty tree, as it produces a lot of pollen, and birch firewood smokes a chimney strongly, giving the fire chamber a lot of soot and a smoke. An oak tree in this regard is a dangerous tree as it gives such strong heat that it can heat a stove up to the occurrence of cracks, to "break" it.

In summary, trees are creatures with their own characters, which depend largely on the optics of the person who comes in contact with them. A birch or a willow are associated with female images. A beech, an ash or an oak in folklore are creatures with a masculine character. In different cultures, the lexical gender of tree names is variable, and it is not about the fact that it is possible to "attribute" a gender to different species of trees, but about how personal and how full of character they are for a person communicating with the forest, what important partners in forming the meanings, associations, and images they are.

A wonderful example of how one personalises and attributes powerful subjectivity to trees is a poem by a mythical Welsh bard Taliesin called "The Battle of the Trees", which was included in the collection of the XIII century "The Book of Taliesin". In it, Lord Gwydion gathers an army of trees (from raspberries to oaks, from rowan to yew) so that they oppose the disgusting monsters that attack his land.

Needless to say, all the trees and shrubs mentioned bravely fight, each in its own way and according to its own character, and win, thus laying the foundation for the New World (3). The motif of animate trees going to battle (ents) later appears in Tolkien, and the personalization of trees is found in countless folklore and literary works.

And again, the forest is a community. Hence, we can say that from region to region these communities differ not only ecologically but also on the level of signs and meanings. The key character of the Scandinavian forest is ash, in the German forest it is beech (6) and oak, in the Belarusian one it is probably oak, pine and birch. Even the etymology of the word "forest" in the Slavic languages is associated with the meanings of shoots, foliage (7), which corresponds to the visual image of a mixed forest with its abundance of deciduous trees.

The space set by the main creatures of the forest, trees, is non-Euclidean. In it, the trunks of pine trees, shooting up, close the space in the sky above your head, and the fact that there are no easy ways in the forest is epitomised by a folk wisdom with its universal explanation of wandering in an unfamiliar forest: "Lyasun [the woodland spirit] leads astray". The height of the tree today is often estimated in the number of floors, and this says a lot about our perspective of the townspeople, the inhabitants of high-rises. Imagine the optics of a resident of an ordinary village house who lives before the era of urbanisation, on top of that, in flat Belarus. For him, an adult pine is in itself a standard of height, because its height "to the sky" and its top visually touches nothing but the sun, the stars. (This perspective is very accurately conveyed in many works of M. Ciurlionis, for example, in the 1907 painting "The Forest"). And there is an innumerable set of such standards of height - "the forest stands a wall" and itself becomes the name for a high, dense, bulky set of subjects: "forest of pipes", "forest of hands", "forest of masts" and so on.

Trees in the forest control the spatial orientation not only vertically but also horizontally. Unlike the processed patch of the field where the work of laws of perspective is visually perceived, marking space by "milestones" of trees is arbitrary. All paths - bypasses, they need to be laid between trees, bushes, thickets - where objects freely located in space allow a person to pass or his gaze to penetrate. Bizarre forest paths are trajectories that appear in space, as if unfamiliar with the coordinate system, with its parallels and perpendiculars. However, here allegedly operates the theory of the field with its forces of attraction and repulsion.

Orientation in space without pre-paved roads, according to one's own, personal landmarks or the eternal path of the sun across the sky, search activities (finding mushrooms, herbs, berries), a sense of being hidden among the surrounding trees - an experience opposite to plain farsightedness and "being visible from everywhere". With this not “being-visible-from-everywhere” there comes a feeling of sudden freedom, even if it is manifested only in feeling temporarily invisible and uncontrollable.

Moreover, of course, the forest is a powerful image that is reflected in language and visual imagination and which communicates a certain invisible and incomprehensible essence, greater than "visible" and even larger than can be imagined. It is not for nothing that expressions such as "I do not see trees behind the forest" or "this topic for me is a dark forest" reflect its very important property - to be a certain mass that qualitatively exceeds any actual number of trees, shrubs, herbs, animals and other components.

Forest is a certain principle of coexistence of everything that is in it, and this explains how, already in folklore, there is a clear mark of the intuitive feeling of its subjectivity, embodied in the image of Lyasun [a woodland spirit]. Today, philosophers who develop the concept of vitalist materialism (2) come to conclusions that were obvious to the authors of folk legends: natural ensembles (e.g. forest, river, field) set a special kind of relationship between material and animate essence that are "inside" them, and have the property of "carrying out effects". And one seems to sense some purpose and presence of the "actor" behind those effects. Quasi-agents, as Jane Bennett calls them, pondering the issue along with Latour, Guattari, and Deleuze, are any essences capable of changing another essence, a source of action that may lack brain, consciousness, will, and the ability to set goals. Often such powerful figures become an ensemble of material and living beings (ecologists will say - an ecosystem, but for philosophers-vitalist materialists even this term contains not enough "agency", that is ability to create events which would not occur without unplanned changes in system), which aspires to an almost anthropomorphic consciousness and even a will of its own.

The forest ensemble embodies one of the most popular characters of folklore - Lyasun (8), and he has more names than other spirits and mythical creatures, because the fear of saying the name of the spirit and thus disrespecting him forced the ancients to use or invent every time a new name for him. He is also the central character of a special genre of oral folk art - "bylichak" - stories about a personal encounter with an evil force.

Lyasun is a literal embodiment of the forest in a single phyto-anthropomorphic creature. It can be embodied in a particular tree or shrub - pine, spruce, birch; can be a bunch of moss, leaves or mushrooms. In addition, it can combine plant and animal traits, organs and limbs (arms-branches), can be covered with moss instead of hair and so on. We can say that Lyasun as the owner or spirit of the forest is an imaginary subjectivity embodied in a biological form that combines human, animal and plant. He seems to bodily embody a combination of creatures included into the forest biogeocenosis.

In alternative versions, Lyasun is related to the devil and even sometimes breaks down into many devils, which are certainly hostile to man and are able to deceive him or pity him, show treasure or rob. The main motive here is the otherworldliness of the forest and its owners and inhabitants, the understanding of man as a guest. The dialectic of the images of the good Lyasun and Lyasun as an insidious master reflects the respect and fear of man for the space of the forest, which combines the familiar, understandable, desirable and dangerous, unknown, wild.

Finding shelter under the oaks near Baravikoushchyna, I think that the image of the oaks that witnessed those events helps me as well not to lose my memory.

Text: L.M.

Photos: Veha Archive