Remembering: Dersu Uzala

Remembering: Works that explore kinship with the living world is a blog series that looks at books, films, and other media that invite us to see humans not as separate from nature, but as participants within a shared living world.

In this post we look at Dersu Uzala, a memoir by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, first published in 1923, about a Siberian hunter whose way of life reveals the taiga not as wilderness to survive, but as a living world to know and belong within.

Dersu Uzala begins as a journey into the wilderness, yet it gently unsettles one of the most familiar stories we tell about nature. The Siberian taiga is not an enemy to be conquered, a backdrop for adventure, or a refuge from civilization. Through Dersu’s eyes, it becomes a living community whose languages can be learned through attention and care. He reads wind, snow, birds, rivers, and animal tracks with the same attentiveness others give to books, and his survival depends not on mastering the land but on belonging within it. In a culture that often imagines humanity as separate from or opposed to nature, Dersu Uzala offers another possibility: we are not visitors to the living world, but participants in it.

Po Ussuriiskomu kraiu. Dersu Uzala (book-russian)

Dersu Uzala, opens a new window (book-english)

Dersú Uzalá, opens a new window (book-spanish)

Dersou Ouzala, opens a new window (book-french)

Dersu Uzala (film/movie)

• Dersu Uzala, opens a new window, directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1975, brings Arsenyev’s memoir to life through expansive natural cinematography and a deliberately unhurried pace that allows landscapes, weather, and silence to carry as much weight as dialogue. Much of the film unfolds in long, observational sequences that emphasize presence over plot, drawing the viewer into the rhythms of the taiga itself. Rather than illustrating ideas about nature, it immerses us in lived experience, where human movement, light, season, and terrain are inseparable parts of the same unfolding world.