Overview
Sophie Pinkham is a writer, journalist, and critic specializing in Soviet and post-Soviet, socialist and post-socialist culture, history, and politics. Her book The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires will be out in early 2026 with W.W. Norton in the US, William Collins in the UK, and Oorschot in The Netherlands, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar grant. The book is an exploration of the forest’s role in myth, culture, and politics in Russia, with a particular focus on Russia's long imperial history. Pinkham's first book, Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2016, W.W. Norton/William Heinemann) blends reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir.
A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Pinkham writes primarily (though not exclusively) about Russia and Ukraine. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist 1843 Magazine, The New Yorker, New Left Review, The Washington Post, and many other publications. Her Economist 1843 story “Lost in a Dark Wood,” on migrants in the forest on the Belarusian-Polish border, was awarded a 2023 British Journalism Award. The article was also shortlisted for a True Story Award.
Pinkham's academic and teaching interests include literature and film of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet states; memory politics and post-socialism; environmental humanities; poetics of censorship; language politics and translation; Siberia.
Pinkham previously worked in international public health in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, focusing on HIV, drug use, and women’s health. She produced a short documentary, Balka (2010), on women, drugs, and HIV in Ukraine.
Affiliations
Institute for European Studies
Publications
- “The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life,” on Rebecca Charbonneau’s Mixed Signals, The New Yorker
- “The Mysterious Novelist Who Foresaw Putin’s Russia,” on Victor Pelevin, The Guardian—The Long Read, January 2025
- “A Giant Crater in Siberia is Belching Up Russia’s Past,” on the secrets revealed by melting permafrost, New York Times, May 2024
- In conversation with Merve Emre as part of her series “The Critic and Her Publics”
- “Invasion, Day by Day,” on Yevgenia Belorusets’s War Diary, NYRB, December 2023
- “Fireball Over Siberia,” on Andy Bruno’s new history of the Tunguska Event of 1908, NYRB, June 2023
- “Lost in a Dark Wood”: reported feature on migrants crossing the forest on the Belarusian-Polish border, The Economist 1843 Magazine, March 2023
- “Immune to Despair”: on Ukrainian writer and activist Serhiy Zhadan, New York Review of Books, September 2022
- “A Hotter Russia,” on Thane Gustafson’s Klimat, New York Review of Books, June 2022
- “’They’re Willing to Risk Ruining Their Lives’: Putin’s War is Driving Russians Out,” reported guest essay, The New York Times, March 2022
- “What Young Ukrainians Have Lost Overnight,” The New Yorker, March 2022
- “The Freedom of Historical Fiction,” on Russian Formalist critic Yury Tynianov’s novels Young Pushkin, Kuchlya, and The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, New York Review of Books, March 2022
- “Designs for Living,” on Yugoslav architect Svetlana Kana Radević, New York Review of Books, September 2021
- “Yesterday Never Existed,” on Osip Mandelstam, Poetry, July 2021
- HIV in Russia, dir. Yuri Dud’ (review), Slavic Review 80, Issue 2, Summer 2021.
- “Ghosts of Borodino,” on Maria Stepanova, Harper’s, June 2021
- “No More Mother-Saviors,” on Russian feminist poetry by Galina Rymbu, Lida Yusupova, and others, New York Review of Books, April 2021
- “Something Resembling Normal Life,” on North Korean writer Park Nam-nyong’s novel Friend and the North Korean version of socialist realism, New York Review of Books, December 2020
- “Funeral Rites,” on Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, New Left Review/Sidecar, December 2020
- “Nihilism for Oligarchs,” New Left Review 125, Sept-Oct 2020.
- “Realists of the Soviet Fantasy,” on Aleksandr Deineka and Aleksandr Samokhvalov, NYRB, May 2020
- “Blood on the Ice,” on Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, NYRB, December 2019
- “Ukraine’s New Leading Man,” on Volodymyr Zelensky, NYRB, June 2019
- “Vasily Grossman’s Lost Epic,” on Stalingrad, in The New Republic, Aug. 2019
- “Understanding Russia’s War Stories,” The New Republic, September 2017
- “Ukraine’s Underground AIDS-Treatment Railroad,” Foreign Policy, Mar 2017
- “Listening to Ordinary Russians by Drawing Them One by One,” on Victoria Lomasko’s Other Russias, The New Yorker online, February 2017
- “Pure Imagination,” on Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2017
- “Zdesizdat and Discursive Rebellion: The Metropol Affair,” Ulbandus Review Vol. 17, 2016.
- “Teffi’s Memories and the Women of the Russian Revolution,” The New Yorker online, May 2016
- “Letter from Belgorod,” on Victory Day, The Nation, August 2015
- “Prattletraps,” on Sergei Dovlatov’s Pushkin Hills, London Review of Books, May 2015
- “Watching the Ukrainian Oligarchs,” The New Yorker online, April 2015
- “Making Deals in the Paradise of Thieves: Leonid Utesov, Arkadii Severnyi, and Blatnaia Pesnia,” Ulbandus Review Vol. 16, 2014.
- “Sofiya Tolstoy’s Defense,” The New Yorker online, October 2014
- “The Museum of the Revolution,” on Victor Serge, The Nation, November 2013
- “Oligarchs and Graphomaniacs,” on Russia’s Debut Prize, The Nation, April 2013
- Additional publications in 1843 Magazine, BOMB, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The New York Times, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, The Baffler, and the Times Literary Supplement
