Lev Tolstoi's masterpiece War and Peace (1865–69) includes a lengthy account of a wolf hunt featuring a party of aristocrats and their borzoi dogs. At the climax of the scene, Count Nikolai Rostov watches in delight as the dogs furiously pin down an old wolf. The fear in the creature's eyes create a rapture for Rostov. Feeling renewed masculine vigor, this instance was “the happiest moment of his life” (1). Decades later, Tolstoi had clearly come to prefer the latter trait of his most famous novel's title with his espousal of pacifism, vegetarianism, and Christian anarchism. A rethinking of the cultural significance of wolf hunting came along with this evolution. In a preface to an essay written by his confidant, Vladimir Chertkov, that denounced wolf hunting as “A Wicked Pastime,” Tolstoi affirmed the sentiment of someone who had abandoned the prowl: “It's wrong to kill animals for amusement” (101). Under this view Rostov's glee at a wolf's demise no longer appears as simply a neutral form of self-fulfillment. Instead, it embodies a type of moral depravity.

Ian Helfant's insightful book shows that the shifting perspective on wolves in Russia during the nineteenth century was not Tolstoi's alone. An important change occurred in Russian culture from an almost uniformly negative view toward wolves and the dangers they posed to a situation where there also existed vibrant counter imaginaries that afforded some moral consideration to the well-being of animals. But this change in perspective was neither complete, nor even dominant. By the end of tsardom and even beyond, most “Russians continued to view wolves as a scourge to be persecuted and, if possible, eliminated” (xvi).

Much of this trajectory mirrors developments elsewhere. Wolf eradication campaigns also occurred in the United States, Europe, and Japan. But the distinctions of Russia's case attract more of Helfant's attention. Unlike some other places, wolves continued to live in the wild and did regularly kill people in Russia in the nineteenth century. This difference in part allowed wolves to play a more profound role in the country's national culture. As Helfant argues, “Russia's wolves were inextricably interwoven with imperial Russians’ views of themselves and their country's place in the world” (138). The savage gaze of the animal “became a crucial symbol and marker of what it meant to be Russian” (136).

Helfant joins a small group of scholars who have been advancing Russian animal studies, producing one of the first sustained monographs in the field. The book joins Henrietta Mondry's study of dogs in Russian culture, an examination of an experimental farm to tame foxes by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, and the call-to-arms collection on Russian animal studies edited by Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson. Helfant's close reading of texts, productive engagement with theory, and interdisciplinary borrowings from ecology and comparative environmental history make the book a mature reflection of this relatively new subfield.

The analysis, though concise, also ranges widely. It proceeds chronologically and thematically, examining numerous works of significant writers of fiction such as Lev Tolstoi, Anton Chekhov, Tatiana Kuzminskaia, and Lidiia Zinov´eva-Annibal, alongside journalistic and legalistic discussions of wolves. A virtue of this approach is that it grounds the analysis of the symbolic in historical developments that allow the reader to truly appreciate the wider resonance of certain literary portrayals.

Helfant begins with an assessment of the aristocratic culture of borzoi hunting in War and Peace and other sources, and how it allowed for the expression of a Russian form of aggressive masculinity. As the practice of borzoi hunting dwindled, it continued to cast a long shadow on Russian wolf culture. The hunting societies of the post-emancipation era, which are the subject of the second chapter, sought to revive wolf elimination measures in the 1860s and onward. The supposed increase in wolf populations became another reflection of Russia's backwardness to reformers who wanted modern professionals to intervene. Another concern of the reform era was rabies. Here Helfant examines the contrasts between Chekhov's and Kuzminskaia's portrayals of outbreaks of wolf-borne rabies in the context of the rise of a vaccine to treat the disease. He shows the importance of anxieties about “bestial madness” inflicting a Russian society in flux (70). Finally, animal protection organizations inaugurated a partial “literary redemption of a feared predator” in the late nineteenth century, as writers grappled more sympathetically with wolf consciousness (97).

To sum, That Savage Gaze is a welcome contribution to human-animal relations in Russian history with important insights about broader cultural phenomena.