THE Russian-born photographer Nadia Sablin (born in 1980) grew up in the small village of Alekhovshchina, north-west of St Petersburg in the then Soviet Union. She and her family left in 1992, fleeing the “lawlessness and violence” unleashed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of wild-west capitalism, to settle in the US.

Sablin returned to the village in 2008 and for the following decade documented the life of the people. She says that immediately: “I felt a connection with the world of my childhood. And when I walked into the house my grandfather built with hand-hewn logs, the tight knot which had been constricting my chest began loosening. The house smelled of pinecones burning in the samovar and my auntie’s blintzes. 

“It was a magical experience, this transport to a different time, and it was steeped in memories of stories, both real and imagined... Still, I missed it, even as I learned to fear it from my new home in the West. I missed the smell of linden trees in our courtyard after rain, and the sound a train makes on the tracks, and the angle of the light.”