What the Pine Trees See

A powerful and poetic Soviet saga spanning six generations’ thirst for life and search for truth.

In 1936, Yuri celebrates his fifth birthday in Leningrad without knowing that at the end of the summer, his world will fall apart: his parents will be imprisoned by the Black Ravens. The boy has to move away from his safe home in St. Petersburg and is expatriated to distant Uzbekistan with his older sister and grandparents.

Yuri grows up with a stigma, the Child of an Enemy of the Nation. As a young man, he makes his way from sunny Uzbekistan through the immense country of USSR, back to cold Leningrad where he learns that the enemy of the homeland is left without a chance. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yuri emigrates with his own family to Finland. Gradually the shocking truth about his parents’ fate is revealed, while those in power on the other side of the boarder try to rewrite history. Is history repeating itself?

Publishing information

Year of publication

2020

Page count

245

Original title

Mitä männyt näkevät

Original language

Finnish

Original publisher

Atena Kustannus

About the author

Anna Soudakova (b. 1983) was born in St. Petersburg into a family of artists. At the age of 8, she moved to Turku, Finland, with her parents. Soudakova has loved books and writing since her school years. To her, it is magic how sounds are combined to words and words to stories. Soudakova is a teacher of French, Russia and Finnish as a second language.

Author page

Reviews

"Soudakova has written a shockingly great six-generation novel. Even the description of life in the Soviet Union is powerful, but in the end, the work redeems its place as a strong speech against the falsification of history. What the Pines Trees See will go a long way when this year's best novels are awarded. It is an amazingly skilled firstborn in terms of content and linguistics."

Kai Hirvasnoro - Kansan Uutiset

"An impressive, delicate work from the gloomy chapter of history."

Viva

"A nuanced story of one family and at the same time a still image of the Soviet machinery. (...) The novel is full of visual, downright cinematic snapshots of both summer and winter in Petrozavodsk."

Turun Sanomat

"A rare, beautiful testimony to the importance of family ties, as well as the importance of memories and a person’s right to their own story. Soudakova's work is a valuable addition to Finnish literature. The cruelty of power, the fragility of one’s own dusthouse, and the thirst for life that still resides in it go hand in hand in an episodic narrative. The pine trees see extreme horror but also almost touch the sky."

Antti Majander - Helsingin Sanomat