The writings of Czech-German author Karel Klostermann (1848-1923) continue to shape Czech debates surrounding the administration the Bohemian Forest (Czech: Šumava, German: Böhmerwald) national park today. We are yet to understand how his work influenced contemporary actors, human and otherwise. This paper considers one of his Czech-language works, Ze světa lesních samot (1894), a more-than-human story of social change and modernisation taking place in the forest of Šumava just before the bark beetle outbreak of the 1870s irreversibly altered the woodlands. By contextualising Klostermann’s work and using a cultural- and social-historical approach, this paper assesses the novel’s direct and indirect impact on its two primary actors: the local population and the local landscape.