[The Guardian] The big picture: memories of a rural Russia untouched by time

The big picture: memories of a rural Russia untouched by time

In revisiting the village where she spent her childhood summers, photographer Nadia Sablin was able to capture the essence of a place untroubled by modernity

The photographer Nadia Sablin left her home in St Petersburg in 1992 when she was 12 years old and moved with her family to the US. Sixteen years later, she returned to the city she grew up in, and to the village of Alekhovschina, where she had spent her childhood summers with her aunts. That six-hour rural ride to an older Russia, and to the house her grandfather had built, returned Sablin to the magic of her past. “The house smelled of pine cones burning in the samovar and my aunty’s blintzes.”

Over the following decade, she returned to Alekhovschina every summer, entranced in particular by the children of families who lived there, who played in the same rivers and forests that she had done, like characters in a half-remembered fairytale. Sablin’s pictures from the village, collected in a new book, Years Like Water, capture that return. They view a world that has hardly been touched by modernity, through a child’s eyes, the child she had been.

Years Like Water by Nadia Sablin is published by Dewi Lewis (£35). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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