Bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert began writing her novel The Snow Forest when she was utterly alone in the early months of the pandemic. Her isolation, she realised, satisfied a deep longing. “What is the farthest away you could go from what we call humanity?” she wondered.
She remembered the extraordinary story of Karp Lykov and his family, who were discovered by geologists in 1978 after surviving for decades, completely cut off from all human contact, in the Siberian taiga. The family were members of an orthodox sect called Old Believers, and fled to the forest in 1936 to escape religious persecution, after Karp’s brother was shot by a Communist patrol. It’s hard to imagine how she could set her novel in any other country — when you lose Russia, you lose the Lykovs’ profound motivation to stay alive and continue practicing their faith.
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