Vyacheslav Korotkiy – loneliest person
Vyacheslav Krotkiy is a polar explorer, a meteorologist who works at the North Pole. He is the loneliest person on our planet. The last thirty years he traveled on Arctic ships and sometimes stayed in Khodovarikha, the former village on the coast of the Barents Sea, which has become semi-abandoned lighthouse. In the village Vyacheslav regularly took meteorological measurements.
You know, Vyacheslav has a wife, but she lives far away from his main place of work – in Arkhangelsk. The man is 63 years old. He and his wife don’t have children.
Photographer Eugene Arbugaeva, who grew up in the town of Tiksi (Sakha Republic, Russia), visited the polar explorer and took some great pictures of his work and life.
“World of cities seems very strange to him. I thought that Vyacheslav escaped from the world for some reason, a problem or a tragedy. But it is not so. He isn’t lonely here in the tundra. He is always with the wind and the weather, which he is studying,”- says Eugene.
Vyacheslav inspects the lighthouse in the abandoned village Khodovarikha. Some time ago this lighthouse helped people who sailed along the Northern Sea Route.
Korotkiy lives in a wooden house and writes down information about the weather in a special log book. Vyacheslav transmits weather data to another weather station, and then it is sent to Moscow. However, reports on storms or storm winds are delayed for the same reasons. His free time Korotkiy spends making houses of matches. Food and tools are delivered once a year.
Meteorological log book, cloud atlas, and other useful and important books are on Vyacheslav’s desk. Yuri Gagarin’s photo was cut from a newspaper article about his death in 1968.