Forest of Spirits

Andrzej Dybczak has been travelling to Siberia for more than twenty years. He knows the local languages, understands the rhythms of life of the forest peoples, and is one of the very few Polish reporters who enter these worlds not as a tourist but as a long-term observer. Forest of Spirits is the latest — and perhaps deepest — instalment in his Siberian project.

The book immerses the reader in a reality where the boundary between the living and the dead, between human and animal, between the forest and the beyond, is fluid and uncertain. Dybczak describes the Evenki — a nomadic Siberian people for whom the taiga is not a geographical space but a living organism inhabited by spirits: ancestors, animals, plants, rivers. Shamanism is not folklore or exoticism here — it is a way of understanding the world and coping with its darkness.

The author weaves several narrative strands together: the personal — he describes his own journeys, encounters, and wanderings; the documentary — he reconstructs the lives of specific people, families, and communities; and the philosophical — he asks what happens to a culture when its memory is stored not in books but in stories, songs, and a relationship with the forest. What remains when the witnesses are gone?

Forest of Spirits is reportage written with patience and humility, without Eurocentric arrogance, without exoticisation. Dybczak does not explain the Siberian world through Polish categories — he allows it to exist on its own terms, inviting the reader to accompany rather than observe.