One of the latest trends in landscape depiction is the effort to deconstruct historical mediations of landscape and recover some sort of direct, or at least ironic, relationship to one's natural surroundings. In the United States, photographers have taken to making fun of the iconic status of famous wilderness views, as with Roger Minick's pictures of tourists at Yosemite or the Grand Canyon wearing representations of the views on their tee shirts or headscarves.1 Others produce lyrical, sweeping black-and-white photographs reminiscent of Ansel Adams, but with massive industrial landscapes as their subject matter. In Russia, a similar impulse to reclaim the immediacy of landscape appears again and again in art and literature, but it takes a very different form. If the dominant and domineering trope about North American scenery is one of untrammeled wilderness, its counterpart in Russia is the profoundly literary quality—both poetic and proudly prosaic—of broad, muted, hazy views of steppe and forest. Cont...