I could remember, readily enough, some of the loneliness of those first months of my own, when both war and the Russians had differed so from my expectations. This fellow looked just the figure for high romantic pictures. He had, doubtless, seen Russia in the colours of the pleasant superficial books of travel that have of late, in England, been so popular, books that see in the Russian a blessed sort of Idiot unable to read or write but vitally conscious of God, and in Russia a land of snow, ikons, mushrooms and pilgrims.
“The Dark Forest” by a British novelist, critic and playwright of the first half of the twentieth century Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, was published in 1916. During the First World War the author worked in Russia for the Red Cross; the experience of these years underlay his two novels, “The Secret City” (1919) and this one. The book offers the author’s impressions of Russia of the early twentieth century.
The range of Walpole’s genres included historical and adventure novels, mystical and “gothic” ones, most known being “The Green Mirror” (1919).