Anya Melnikova is saving what time destroys. And, because of the work she does, the residents of Buzuluk have begun taking pride in the place they call home, and their obscure little town is even getting its share of the tourist trade.
Anya came to Buzuluk from Vladivostok in the fall of 1996, wearing a white down jacket. After she got out of the car and was eyeing the mud, the puddles, and the decrepit buildings, her jacket was spattered with black slush and could not be rescued. But only a few years later, Anya was on a rescue mission of her own, to bring Buzuluk’s signature architectural style back from the brink. Little wooden masterpieces with features showcasing the uniquely Russia twist on Art Nouveau were disintegrating all over Buzuluk, but none of the townsfolk seemed to have any idea of what was being lost.
When we meet, in a café, Anya is eager to show off her first tattoo. She recently had the word svoboda (freedom) inked just above her wrist.
“It’s in honor of Grandpa Fyodor,” she tells me. “We buried him not long ago. He was very active all his life, but he drank and was partially paralyzed at the age of 50. Walking was difficult, and being helpless infuriated him. He died in my arms. I’d been wanting to get a tattoo for a long time, but everyone warned me to think how it would look when I was an old woman. Grandpa had a tattoo, though. And watching him during the last months of his life, I realized that the last thing on his 92-year-old mind was what his tattoo looked like. So I went and got one. To me, “freedom” means inner freedom. It speaks of the fact that we have very little time, which makes it job one to live the life we want to live, regardless of what anyone says. So this way, whenever I’m told I should color my gray hairs, get a face lift, stop wasting time on all sorts of nonsense (like my projects), I’ll remember that I’m a free individual and my choices are nobody else’s business.”
Anya spreads a pack of picture postcards across the table, and I find myself admiring photos of Buzuluk’s wooden houses, each more lovely than the one before. The photo credits are Anya’s.
“People were telling me there weren’t even any postcards with iconic scenes of the town for them to mail,” she explains. “I had less work to do while we were self-isolating, so I started rummaging around in the archives and made some postcards. They’ll be sold in our museum and online, and I’ll send some to Orenburg too.”
Anya took most of the photos a long time ago, when she first came down with her bad case of house-saving-itis. But there are a few more recent ones, showing houses so spic and span that they might have been built yesterday. Anya and her volunteers have restored the houses in just a few years.
Before falling in love with Buzuluk, Anya tried to escape it several times.
“My father was in the military, so we lived on post near Vladivostok until I turned three,” she tells me. “But my grandmother was living in a village in Samara Oblast. My mother went there to give birth to me, because the base didn’t have any maternity facilities. As soon as I was born, though, she went back. Then we moved to Vladivostok, where we lived until I was 16. I loved Vladivostok – its air, its ambiance, its proximity to the sea. Because my mother was a librarian, I spent my childhood among books and in the company of her artistic friends – opera singers, musicians, poets. I attended a school for the fine arts and dreamed of being a clothing designer. We’d sometimes go to Orenburg Oblast to visit my mother’s sister in Buzuluk during the summer. I liked the town’s small footprint and its intricately carved building facades. So when my parents decided to move there, I didn’t make a fuss. It wasn’t until we were settled there that I realized it wasn’t all rainbows and lollipops.”
Anya’s family had fled the devastation and poverty they faced in Vladivostok. Life was simpler in Buzuluk because there was family close by. Her father found a job, and Anya attended a local college. And started yearning for Vladivostok.
“I quickly got the feeling that Buzuluk wasn’t the town for me. First, there were the perpetual mud, the puddles. It didn’t have a single storm drain. I longed for the cultural atmosphere that this uncouth little backwater lacked. Here, people talked more about the harvest than about books, yet they loved to dress up to the nines and parade around. Compared to the students whose parents worked in the oil industry, with their lovely, expensive things, I felt like a drab little mouse. It must have taken me eight years or so to develop a sense of belonging.”
In 2000, Anya graduated with honors and left for Samara. She was hired on as a junior architect in a small firm, at 800 rubles a month. Her rented room cost 700 rubles, so her parents helped out. “I worked all the time. We moved the desks together and slept on them, using a pillow we kept at the office, when a project deadline was looming. And then there was the constant prodding. I wondered if this was really how I wanted to live. I quit and signed up for economics courses, with the dream of starting my own business. I worked in plant financial management for a while, and a couple of times I sent large sums of money to the wrong place. I realized I had a problem with numbers and couldn’t work under stress. Then, after wandering aimlessly for a while, I went home to my mom.”
Anya got a job as a newspaper photographer, using a skill that her father, himself an amateur shutterbug, had taught her when she was young. Friends and family raised their eyebrows, convinced that this was no job for a girl. But that only goaded her, and before long the paper was sending her out on assignments. She was Orenburg Oblast’s only female photographer.
Anya returned to Samara in 2007, intent on making it there this time. She found well-paying work as a layout artist for the business newspaper Delovoy kvartal, but the crisis of 2008 spoiled everything. Back in Buzuluk again, she worked as a research associate and designer in a museum. “I learned I had to scrimp, even on 3,500 rubles a month,” she jokes. “And then there was a husband, then came a son, then divorce.”
“Kolya’s father seems to have found me a challenge,” she says, carefully avoiding giving her ex-husband’s name. “He’s content with what is, but I always wanted more, wanted to spread my wings. Only two months after I’d had Kolya, I left him with his grandmother and went to do some wedding photography out of town. Sometimes I made more than my husband. I always wanted to improve our lives. I wanted to fix things up. And he’d say ‘What for? It’s fine as it is.’ He was all about not taking action when no action need be taken. And I was all about the opposite: How can anyone not take action when there’s action to be taken? I was working three jobs, along with organizing timed photography contests and bride parades. And he simply couldn’t stand it. He wanted a conventional stay-at-home wife, and that’s who he left me for. I spent a long time agonizing over the divorce, because I’d never known he was cheating on me. I went down to 92 pounds and developed some bad hang-ups. Now, of course, I realize it was all for the best. So then it was just me and Kolya, who was three years old at the time, but, as hard as it was, no one would ever again be able to set limits on what I thought and what I wanted to do.”
In 2015, Anya was wandering around the town for days on end, photographing various points of interest for Alexander Trunov’s historical and architectural panorama titled 100 detalei Buzuluka (100 Views of Buzuluk). And that was when the thunderbolt hit.
“The locals were forever saying that Buzuluk was the armpit of the world, that it had nothing to offer. But as I was walking around, surveying its filigreed buildings, I realized how unfair that was, how much beauty there was here. Yes, Buzuluk isn’t the best town in the world, but – armpit? What armpit? Walking somewhere, I’d see that this embellishment had fallen off a door or that stained glass window was gone. Before I could photograph the fire observation tower, they demolished it. There was a lovely little house I was planning to photograph, and it too was torn down. Houses were being covered in siding, their wooden carvings were being stripped off, and panelki (prefabricated residential blocks) were going up everywhere. I was so distraught that our beautiful town was disappearing before our eyes. I had to think of a way to save it. And I realized that attention needed to be drawn to the houses. That people had to be shown that we have them, and they’re incredible.”
Anya began writing long screeds on Buzuluk’s architecture for the local papers, but the houses went right on being demolished. Then she and Trunov compiled a list of celebrities who had been born in, or had visited, Buzuluk and could maybe be persuaded to come back. “We thought that if those celebrities spoke out publicly about how beautiful it is here, about preserving the architecture, people would listen. I wrote to every single one of them, asking them to put our unique Art Nouveau style front and center, to talk it up. The only way the townsfolk would understand the town’s value would be if they heard about it from outside. If a neighbor told them ‘This rocks,’ they wouldn’t believe it. But if a famous dude from somewhere else said the very same thing, him they’d listen to.”
In 2015, Samara came up with the idea of reviving the town’s historical environment by holding a Tom Sawyer Fest. Today similar festivals are put on in dozens of towns and cities across Russia. But Anya Melnikova was among the first to take the plunge and try Tom Sawyer’s ingenious fence-painting ruse in her own town.
“I realized that this festival could change the townsfolks’ attitude toward their heritage. And that if I didn’t do it, no one would. It was a scary thing to commit to, but I plucked up my courage and did it. I had to pick a house, find volunteers and building materials, launch a social media campaign, and organize the work. At worst, we’d strip the paint off a house and repaint it. At best, we’d also reconstruct the missing carvings, repair the porch and, if necessary, the roof, and put up a fence.”
From Anya’s list of preservation-worthy houses in Buzuluk she chose a beautiful 102-year-old gem that was small enough to restore all on her own in case no one wanted any part of her Tom Sawyer Fest.
“Three women lived there: a grandmother, her daughter, and her granddaughter. The grandmother had a small pension, and the daughter worked a factory job that brought in only a modest income. They had loans to pay… I realized that they’d never be able to fund the repairs on their own. I fibbed to them, saying that I was from the Monuments Preservation Society, because explaining the Tom Sawyer Fest would have been too complicated. They were ecstatic to hear that someone was going to paint their house for free. Later, they did what they could to help, making sure we were fed. We became friends.”
Then Anya went to the mayor for permission to hold the festival. “We had a program called ‘Gifts to the Town.’ So I decided that a refurbished house would be an excellent gift for the town. The big boss liked the idea. He gave me 5,000 rubles out of his own pocket for brushes and found a construction office to provide scaffolding. A company called Gorod Masterov (Craftsman City) helped with primer and paint. Next, I created a festival group on the social media site VKontakte and wrote to people I knew. Anya Pereguda, a friend of mine who never turns down a chance to party, signed on immediately. My buddy Yaroslav Brusentsov did too. And the three of us went to work.”
“Buzuluk had never seen anything like this,” Anya went on. “All the local media outlets and online communities were writing about it, and people reached out to lend a hand. We got calls asking what help we needed. Someone came to sand down walls, someone else provided transportation. An old guy called to tell us that he couldn’t work anymore but he could sharpen our tools. And he’d bring his little grinding machine and sharpen them for free. One time, a boy who was walking by asked what we were doing and if he could help. Just like in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. A school invited me to come and talk about 100 Views of Buzuluk, so I gave a shout-out to the Tom Sawyer Fest as well. And on a weekend eight of those kids showed up at our worksite with their teacher to help out. The teacher later told me that our festival was the highlight of her summer. Anya Pereguda put on concerts in the yard of our project house to attract attention to the festival, and that’s where we took donations for the repairs and did some recruiting. We were a class act and it was the best fun.”
That summer taught Anya – our Anya – a lot. She had a crash course in cleaning a house exterior with a wire brush, standing on a scaffold without shaking in her shoes, and figuring out paints and primers. But what mattered most was that the work helped her get it together after the divorce. Her life was finally full of meaning and color again.
Buoyed by that first summer’s results (the house was unrecognizable by the end: not only had it been painted, but the roof had been repaired and missing wooden decorations had been restored), the following year Anya took a stab at a more challenging building. She had no reason to think that everything would be different this time.
The owners of that next house gave permission for the work to be done but didn’t want to help. Anya Pereguda got married and went on maternity leave. Yaroslav left Buzuluk. Volunteers were less than enthusiastic. Our Anya was alone.
“People may well have been played out and sick of it,” she says. “I had almost no helpers – a couple of people or no one at all. How could I wire-brush a huge house on my own? I decided to get a handle on more serious tools – an angle grinder and a sander. My friends said I was a girl and girls couldn’t manage an angle grinder, but that just set me off. I was bound and determined to smash the stereotypes.”
When Anya first laid hands on one of those grinders, she made the mistake of running it at too high a speed. It got away from her, and she almost fell off the scaffold. Which scared her so much she just sat on the ground and burst into tears. Then she picked up her familiar old chisel and brush, and went back to work.
“I spent days and days up there on that scaffold, running myself ragged. I grabbed up the grinder again, but I was afraid of it, and it wasn’t cooperating. So I turned it off and started bawling. I kept writing all over the place that I needed helpers, but no one came. I was dreadfully sorry for myself. Always grimy, covered in dust, spattered with paint, and dressed in baggy clothes, and my hands were scaly and rough. I remember standing on the scaffold and seeing some girls nearby, smoking in their pretty dresses and spiked heels. And for some reason, I was ashamed of looking like a day laborer. So I went to L’Etoile and bought make-up on my credit card, just so I could feel like a woman again.”
Anya gradually mastered the daunting angle grinder. She learned to run it at sedate speeds and also to handle the sander. And she became proficient with her hand drill and her rotary tool. But the house wasn’t giving up so easily. The higher she climbed, the more the paint thickened. She was really afraid that she wouldn’t be finished before fall, and one day she even went to the job site with a fever.
Then, as now, Anya does remote layout work. She has a few regular clients, but the pay is modest at best. Even with active assistance from partners, she often needed ready cash, which wasn’t always simple to find. She used her credit card to buy building materials, and paid the delivery fees the same way. Sometimes she was overwhelmed with despair and wanted to give up, but then came the little miracles that lifted her spirits. One time a man walking by stopped to ask some questions. He left but was soon back with a cappuccino for her. Another time, a journalist from Samara came to Buzuluk. She interviewed Anya and returned a few days later to help with the sanding and to give her two chisels. “After something like that, how can you not believe in people, believe that everything is possible?” Anya wonders. “At some point, I wrote on my social media page that I was dreaming of a sander, and a man I didn’t know wrote that he had one he could give me. It was like that all the time: just when you’re thoroughly depressed, just when you least expect it, support comes. It’s such a blast to make something beautiful. And to do it all with your own two hands. Seeing the town being transformed is a great cure for exhaustion.”
But by the end of that summer, Anya was on her last legs. On top of the physical work, there was the coordination, the PR, the interaction with her partners. And Kolya.
She had no one to leave her son with, so she brought him to the worksite. And although he spent his time there watching cartoons on a tablet or playing with other children, she fretted about being a bad mother.
“There was a persistent sense of guilt over not spending time with my kid, over dragging him to the job site. One time the grass on the site was being cut, and Kolya ended up in the hospital with an asthma attack. He was five at the time. It was his first attack, and I didn’t even know he had asthma. A while after his release, he was back there again, this time with a rotavirus infection. I was with him in the hospital, but sometimes I had to run off, because the work wasn’t getting done… And I’d be racing from the hospital to the site and wondering what kind of mother I was. ‘I’m the reason he’s sick,’ I’d think, ‘and just look at me!’”
Kolya’s nine now. He’s often sick, worst of all in summer, when both the flowers and his asthma are in full bloom. Anya lays out the lion’s share of her small income on his medications and tries to spend every free minute with him. Kolya understands and approves of what his mother is doing. He even says, “I want to do the same as you and save the world.” Flustered, Anya tells him that she’s not saving the world, not by a long shot. But Kolya’s sure that his mother is Wonder Woman. “A long time ago he learned one of my go-to lines when I’m being interviewed, that I’m busy rescuing the historical heritage. And when anyone asks him what his mom does, that’s what he tells them,” she laughs. “I sometimes feel sheepish in front of his classmates’ parents, because from where the man in the street stands, I’m not playing with a full deck. It’s bizarre to do anything for free. And a woman on a scaffold brandishing an angle grinder is way beyond the pale. How can I explain to them how much I get in return – the knowledge, the skills, the faith in myself? But by now I’ve pretty much learned not to stress over what other people think of me.”
After the Tom Sawyer Fest’s difficult second season, Anya was all of a sudden widely known in very narrow circles. A French newspaper ran a piece on the Buzuluk festival, and a letter came from a Frenchman who wanted to volunteer in Buzuluk the following year. Journalists and architecture buffs showed up, as did people from a museum in Samara dedicated to Art Nouveau in architecture, and then a busload of tourists from Kazan. People were coming all that way just to see Buzuluk’s Art Nouveau houses. Anya started leading tours and came up with an entire program of activities that included not only walks around the town but also, for example, trips to the nearby national park, which boasts a stand of pine trees that is unique in the world.
Meanwhile, she was being inspired to continue her restoration work, come what may, by changes that almost magically started happening all around her.
“Andrey Kochetkov [A founding father of the Tom Sawyer Fest] once told me about the broken window effect,” she says. “If you see a pile of trash and then toss a candy wrapper onto it, in time it’ll turn into a dump site. Or maybe you see a broken window in an abandoned house, so you break another, and gradually the house is destroyed. But what we have here is the broken window effect in reverse.”
A man who lived not far from a house that Anya had restored ordered blueprints and schematics, and redid his home in Art Nouveau style. He put up a beautiful fence and made an asphalt sidewalk – not only in front of his house but outside his neighbor’s too. “Who’d have thought we’d ever see a Russian expanding the horizons of his responsibility and caring about how other people live?” Anya laughs.
The grandmother whose home the volunteers had restored during the first Sawyer season spruced up the area surrounding it, putting in flowers and a chestnut tree. After seeing that, other people planted flowers around their homes too. Then the neighbors across the street painted their own house. “The place has changed a lot,” Anya tells me. “It turns out that people gravitate toward beauty and want to live in beauty. They simply have to be shown that it’s doable.
“One of our partners, a firm called Interyer (Interior Design) bought a historic property. There had been plans to clear the site and make it into a parking lot, but Interyer decided to preserve the building. They restored it and rented out all the floor space. The townsfolk are grateful, because they can see what it used to be and what it’s become. There’s even a storm drain now, which is only the second one in the whole town. Shortly after that, a bakery and creamery opened there, and the Kiselyov restaurant, named in honor of the merchant who used to own the building. Then the same guy bought another building close by, restored it and rented it out too. And once he called me to say that he wanted to buy a historic single-family home to fix up and live in. ‘Find me something!’ he said. And as I was listening to him, I was thinking, ‘The samsara – the Wheel of Life – is really turning now.’
“Next, his friend bought a historic building and wanted to cover it with siding. But my new sidekick persuaded him to restore it instead. Then one of their acquaintances bought and restored the vacant Pioneers Club… and that wasn’t cheap. Another fearless fellow bought the old pump house, wanting to turn it into a children’s center with playgrounds, a workshop, and a restaurant, all for the kids. I helped him draw up the plans that the architects are now wrestling with. Somebody else opened a store in a neighborhood of single-family residences and even set up a rack for people to park their bicycles in, which is unheard of out here in the boonies. The town has a decent hotel now, and coffee shops. All told, a chain reaction has been triggered, and I’m happy, because this is just what I wanted.”
Anya prefers to call the reverse broken window effect “the Tom Sawyer effect.” And she has another story, about the time she decided to test it out, not in the town center but in the courtyard of the unremarkable high rise that is her home.
“There was a strip of empty land near my building. I made up my mind to try a social experiment there, by planting flowers and watching the residents’ reaction. I’m no expert on flowers, and my plantings were a crooked mess. But everybody else who lived there was a gardener at heart, and as they walked past, you could see the steam coming out of their ears. The upshot was that people came out, dug the whole thing up, and planted new flowers, a cedar, and a thuja tree. It was a lovely landscaping job – very cool and done the right way. I’m so glad, because my experiment worked. Next thing you know, the residents in the neighboring building started sprucing up their strip of land too. And then I couldn’t stop myself from planting flowers near the dumpster. I’d pass it as I was taking Kolya to kindergarten, and every day I’d have to see those discarded toilets and bags of garbage, and wonder if I would be walking past that crap for the rest of my life. I planted the dumpster flowers crooked too, but people were delighted at how lovely it looked. A garden city, they called it. Now the residents are asking the management to move the dumpster somewhere else.”
As the third year rolled around, Anya decided to take on only houses whose inhabitants had a personal interest in the restoration and who were prepared to assist as best they could. That was when a friend asked her to loan some scaffolding to a man who wanted to restore his own house. Instead, Anya went all in. The crew was comprised of Anya and her volunteers and the homeowner’s friends, and the house was transformed in a month. After that, an ambulance driver who also had dreams of revamping his home approached her, and she was glad to help out there too.
“There are property owners who love their homes but lack the funds,” she told me. “You want to help people like that, and they’re pleasant to work with. That driver has three children. He works an ambulance shift, gets a few hours of sleep, then goes to another station and is on duty for another 24 hours. He’s terribly tired, and there’s no way he could swing his own repairs. And there’s a typical retiree living in another apartment in the same building. Neither she nor the driver has the money or the time to restore the building themselves. How could I not help them, when I have the means to? Every year our partners give us more resources that I can’t allow to go to waste. We painted the house façade, replaced the outside embellishments, did the windows, leveled the verandah, and installed a new door. The work spilled over into 2020, but we’ll soon be finished with the stem wall.”
Next year, Anya wants to help complete the restoration of a terem, a highly ornate little gingerbread house that is home to an elderly lady whose husband built it after the war.
“Imagine this,” she says. “Her husband lost his arm in the war, but he built that house with one arm! He did all the carving himself. Then he died, and the old lady was left on her own. As the years went by, the place started to show its age. She went into the old man’s workshop and taught herself how to carve wood. And she’s making carvings for the house as we speak. How could we possibly not pitch in? We’ve already replaced her gate, and later we’ll be painting her house 15 different colors.”
Anya’s involvement with houses also extends to Buzuluk’s social media footprint. She has launched a group called “Buzuluk. Detali” on VKontakte where she posts historical facts about the town, describes things to see in and around Buzuluk, and offers snippets of architectural news.
“I surveyed the group’s subscribers,” she says, “and a lot of them responded that they’d like to take pride in Buzuluk but didn’t know how. So I started giving them pointers. People thank me for ‘opening their eyes to the town,’ which is a great motivator. I’m alerted through the group when anything useful is being thrown out, and I scrape together the money to hire a van and go pick it up. Recently, for example, we brought back some truly elegant pieces of trim that a local café has called dibs on. They want to use it to make a piece of art. That trim is about to be given its second wind.”
The inhabitants of Buzuluk credit Anya with saving the town’s history, and the local media have dubbed her the resident krayeved (a term that encompasses local historian, ethnographer, and much more). And she deserves both accolades, informal as they may be.
Anya and her cohorts keep track of what’s happening in the town and react fast. When an unpermitted demolition began on a historical building last spring, she organized – from self-isolation – a one-night flashmob picket line under the hashtag #nesnoci (“donttearitdown”). One of her social media posts read:
“This is the second downtown demolition in the past six months, and it’s happening before our eyes. At this rate, there’ll be nothing of historical value left in the town center, just wall-to-wall fakes. Our president sounds off about the hundreds and hundreds, the thousand-plus years of Russia’s history, but then why aren’t we actually taking care of it? All too often these days we’re seeing buildings razed and replaced with cookie-cutter cinder-block boxes. We DESERVE good architecture. We deserve RESPECT.”
Thanks to the noise she made, the police halted the demolition.
“It’s hard to say who I am,” Anya admits. “In a sense, I am saving the town’s history. I want to rescue buildings, give the town room to develop, raise its profile, and make pieces of art. And I’m doing it all at the same time. But it wouldn’t be right for all the attaboys to come my way, because an active community of townsfolk has taken shape in Buzuluk over the past five years. We now have something called the Green Patrol, for example. Several girls got together and started doing weekend volunteer work, and at this point they’ve registered themselves as a nonprofit and have organized a two-bin waste collection system to encourage recycling. That’s very cool for a little place like Buzuluk.”
When asked what she’s doing right now, Anya has plenty to report. “I’m working. Nobody’s put a stop to that yet. Not long ago I taught myself to mix the plaster for the walls of a house we’re redoing, and I’ve been fixing the brickwork there. I’m also working up a domestic tourism concept, because we have so many sights to see around here, not least the pine wood and the caves dug by hermit monks. And, at the same time, I’m designing postcards, t-shirts, and hoodies. The first batch came in already, so I’ll be starting on the promotion and sales soon.
“I’ve also developed a project for an art gallery with woodshops and a museum. A lot of the boys who come to our job sites are being raised by single mothers like me. Denis, a kid who volunteered with us for a while, went to study restoration in Samara this year. His mother is so delighted with him, so proud. That gave me the idea of setting up a master craftsman school for teens. I thought of having older guys working there and teaching the youngsters how to handle various tools, while at the same time passing on all sorts of life lessons.”
Anya’s artist-in-residence plan won her a free enrollment in two remote-learning courses on preserving cultural heritage at the European Humanities University. The next step, though, was finding the money to buy the building that would house the residency program and put the whole thing together.
“My dream house is a single story, stone structure rendered in an understated kind of Art Nouveau. I used to fantasize about buying it, restoring it, and living there, but the fantasy has morphed, and now it’s going to be a place for everyone. It’s listed at 2 million rubles [about $30,000], which I unfortunately don’t have. Maybe I’ll be able to register a nonprofit and apply for a grant. I’m keeping my options open.”
After hearing everything Anya has had to say, I tell her that she’s a very strong, awesome woman. She disagrees.
“I don’t feel awesome or strong,” she says. “I have an aunt who runs two factories. Now, she’s strong. Or that old lady who’s restoring her own house – she’s awesome. But what am I? So I’ve saved a few buildings, learned how to use a tool or two, so what?”
I ask what has changed inside her since she started saving Buzuluk’s heritage. This is what she says: “I have a tool collection on my balcony now: a saber saw, angle grinders, sanders, a tool sharpening set, a hand drill, a coping saw… There’s a whole lot of them, and I know how to work them all. Guys come to borrow my tools, and that’s flattering. I’m more confident. I don’t stress any longer about going around dressed like a man and covered in dust. On the contrary, I feel I’m even more of a woman now. I’m not scared of cameras, and I can keep my cool in interviews. I never, ever stew over being alone, because I’m in great shape on my own. It’s just that I miss having a car or a friend to drive me places. I’d like to head out onto the steppe with a tent, lie on my back, and look at the stars… And I’m somehow certain that everything’s going to be all right. I realize that I’m dealing with some very complex challenges, which means that I can deal with anything that everyday life throws at me.”
Anya can’t predict what will come next. She’s bored with doing offsite brochure layout and is looking for another, more interesting job. But, since Buzuluk offers no work like that, she’s thinking about moving to somewhere larger. She talks about how good it would be if a robust historical preservation society were in place by the time she moves away. Buzuluk would be out of all danger then and could go on developing whether she’s there or not. “At that point I’ll be able to let out a sigh of relief and say that I’ve done what I set out to do.”
These popular public events are billed as a celebration and encouragement of marriage and family life. They also give recent brides a chance to wear their wedding dresses one more time.
When rendered in wood, the Russian modern (Art Nouveau) style looks like a close relative of Carpenter Gothic in the United States.
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