From Ancient Bows to Soviet Arrows: Archery in Russian and Soviet Literature

I grew up amongst books, although never knowing for sure whether it was a blessing or a burden.

In those days, you didn’t choose what you read. You took what was given, what was printed, what had survived the censors, the years, the hands of older brothers and cousins who had passed their battered copies down until the pages smelled of school satchels and unwashed wool. These were not delicate things. Soviet books were built like Soviet buildings—sturdy, practical, meant to last long after their authors had turned to dust. And yet, inside those thick, yellowed pages, if you knew where to look, there were worlds that stretched far beyond the five-year plans and the speeches of Party Congresses.

I don’t know when I first saw an archer in literature, but I know that when I did, something stirred in me. Not because I longed to loose arrows into the sky—not in those days, not in that place—but because a bow is a different kind of weapon. It is older than the machines of war, older than iron itself, perhaps older than words. A bow does not belong to the battlefield alone. It belongs to the hunter, the wanderer, the one who waits. And maybe that is why, despite everything, archers lingered in our books, even as our heroes took up rifles instead.

The first ones were the bogatyrs, the legendary warriors of byliny, those folk epics passed down in whispers and song before they were ever set to paper. Ilya Muromets, the strongest of them all, carried a bow across his broad back, though he seldom needed it—his fists and his mace did most of the work. Dobrynya Nikitich, more refined, more courtly, used his when diplomacy failed. But the one who fascinated me was Alyosha Popovich, the trickster, the smallest and wiliest of the three. He was no giant, no invincible knight, just a clever man with quick hands and a sharp tongue. And when he did fight, it wasn’t with brute force, he fought with a bow, sending arrows before his enemies managed to raise their swords. Arguably, he was the closest thing to Robin Hood – not an outlaw, but an adventurer by chance, the kind of man who knew that words wound, but arrows killed.

But those were myths, and I was born into a country that prided itself on having outgrown myths. We were told we did not need fairy tales anymore. We had history, we had ideology, we had science. And yet, the bow remained. It lingered in the forests, in the hands of hunters who knew the land better than the bureaucrats who drew its borders. And it remained in books, if you knew where to find it.

Arcady Gaidar, the writer of childhoods, understood that discipline was the heart of every great action. Timur and His Squad—how we read it, how we played it! In the courtyards, in the schoolyards, pretending we were Timur, organizing our own secret societies of justice. There were no bows in that story, but there could have been. It was a book about precision, about readiness, about boys who were trained to be men before their time. If they had needed to shoot, they would not have wasted bullets. They would have used a bow, silent, careful, sure. Gaidar, who had once been a child soldier himself, understood the necessity of steady hands.

Then came the Siberian writers. Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, who wrote of hunters and gold prospectors, of men who lived by the land rather than by laws written in distant cities. His books smelled of pine sap and cold river water, of musk deer and the silence of the taiga. In Privalov’s Millions, the bow appears not as a relic but as a tool, something a man uses when a gun would be too loud, too crude. And Vsevolod Ivanov, whose adventure stories roamed across the eastern edges of the empire, where the indigenous peoples—the Nanai, the Evenki—still knew the old ways, still bent their bows in the hunting grounds their ancestors had walked for centuries. In his Tales of the Amur, the bow is more than a weapon. It is a language, a way of moving through the world, a knowledge passed down in the quiet spaces between words.

The further east you went in Soviet literature, the more the bow survived. In the novels of Chingiz Aitmatov, that master of the Kyrgyz steppe, it was not always the modern world that won. White Ship, Farewell, Gulsary!, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years—his pages are filled with men who live at the border of eras, who carry the traditions of their fathers even as the Soviet machine rolls forward. And in the stories of Mikola Khvylovy, in the desperate, haunted pages of Ukrainian literature between the wars, archery did not appear as folklore but as survival. A makeshift bow carved from Carpathian trees, taken when the bullets had run out.

And then came the war. There is always a war. They called it the Great Patriotic War. We read about the partisans, the forest ghosts who kept the flame of resistance alive. In books and in life, they turned into legends. And legends should always remain practical. Weapons are loud. Weapons require cartridges.

A bow, when needed, could be made from what was at hand. There were stories, true stories, of Soviet partisans fashioning bows in the deep woods when ammunition ran out. It was not a weapon of choice, but a weapon of necessity. And necessity, in war, is all that matters.

I read these books not as a scholar, not as a critic, but as a child, as a boy who sat in cold classrooms where the walls were lined with portraits of men whose names we had to memorize. But I did not remember them. I remembered the stories instead. And even now, when I hold those books again, their pages foxed with age, their spines creased by hands that turned them long before mine, I remember not just the words but the feeling of them. The feeling of something older than ideology, something that no party, no government, no decree could erase.

It is a strange thing to grow up in a country that no longer exists. To have memories of a childhood built on books that were written with certainty, books that believed in a future that never came. But literature, real literature, does not disappear just because the flag has changed. The stories remain, the hunters remain, the archers remain. The boy in the red Pioneer scarf, the Kyrgyz herdsman, the Evenki tracker, the partisan in the woods—none of them are gone. Yet there they are, unmoved between the pages of the books, bows drawn. All you have to do is lean forward to hear the twang of the string and the whizz of the arrow flying through the air.

Maybe that’s why (thanks to this constant presence) I still think about the books I read as a child. Even now, when I’m 50. Because the bow – in a sense – goes far beyond the physical sphere of the object, becoming pure energy – an act of faith. And faith makes us all better.