Far north Russia, where dreams are frozen.

There is a saying here that,As long as the blood of the far north flows in one's veins, that land will always call out to them.

Evgenia Arbugaeva spent her childhood running around the tundra, watching the aurora borealis on her way to school under the polar night sky.

Years ago, she left her hometown of Tikis, a remote seaport on the Laptev coast of Russia, to live in big cities and different countries. But as the old saying goes, the Arctic called. She longed for its isolation and slow pace of life. In the icy far north, her imagination soared like the wind, unhindered. Every object became a symbol, every color held meaning.

It's the same with the people I photograph. Sometimes, I think of their stories as chapters in a book, revealing different dreams, but all connected by a love for this land. There's a hermit who imagines living on a ship at sea, and a young woman who longs to live with her loved one on the edge of the world. There's a community still preserving the past and the future, following traditions and recounting the myths of their ancestors. Finally, there's the dream of exploring and conquering the polar regions of the former Soviet Union. Each dream has its own unique color palette and atmosphere. Each person who stays here has a reason to stay.

The first dream belonged to Vyacheslav Korotki. He was the station chief of the old Khodovarikha Meteorological Station, on an isolated peninsula in the Barents Sea – a barren, arid land which Korotki described as feeling like a ship.

When Evgenia first met him, she immediately recognized the canvas jacket he was wearing, the kind all men wore in her hometown during the Soviet era. Mr. Korotki was apolyarnik- This means he is an expert on the Arctic region, and has dedicated his entire life to working in the Arctic. To this day, he still works as a weather reporter.

Outside the station, Evgenia could hear the ice shifting and the wind whistling through the radio wires, sounding like someone playing a flute. Inside, it was silent, only the footsteps of Korotki and the creaking of the door marking the passage of time. Every three hours, he would go outside, then return, muttering to himself as he observed: "Southwest wind, 12 meters per second, gusts up to 18 meters, getting stronger, pressure dropping, a snowstorm is coming." Then he would report all of this to a man he had never met, on the other end of the crackling old radio.

One day, Evgenia felt weary. The polar night filled her thoughts with confusion. She brought Korotki a cup of tea and asked how he managed to live there, alone, day after day repeating the same routine.

He said to me, "You expect too much, everyone does. But not every day is the same. Look, today the aurora borealis is so bright, and there's even a rare phenomenon of thin ice covering the sea. Isn't it wonderful to see the stars tonight? They've been hiding behind the clouds for a whole week." I felt guilty for focusing too much on myself and forgetting to observe the outside world. Since then, I've learned to look at everything with delight.

For a month, Evgenia lived with a young couple – Evgenia Kostikova and Ivan Sivkov – who were collecting meteorological data in another frigid region on the edge of Russia. Kostikova had invited her beloved Sivkov to join her north, after a year together in a Siberian city. They came here, monitoring the weather, chopping wood, cooking, tending the lighthouse, and caring for each other. Their only source of medical assistance was a distant helicopter, which could take weeks to arrive if the weather turned bad. Kostikova called her mother almost daily, but because there was so little to talk about, she often just told her mother to put the phone on speaker and go about her chores as usual. Kostikova would sit there and listen to the sounds from home, far away.

Perhaps partly due to their near-total isolation, the 300 Chukchi people in the village of Enurmino still maintain ancient traditions, living far offshore like their ancestors, believing in myths and legends passed down through generations. For the Chukchi, being a hunter is an honor. The villagers hunt walruses and whales to survive the long winter, but they still adhere to quotas set by the Russian Federation and internationally.

The dream of Soviet greatness is now shrouded in frost in Dikson, on the Kara Sea coast. In its heyday of the 1980s, it was known as Russia's Arctic capital, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dikson has become almost a ghost town.

For the first few weeks, I felt disappointed with the photos I took in the endless darkness of Dikson. But then, suddenly, the aurora borealis blazed across the sky, painting everything in neon hues for hours. There was a statue of a soldier captured just as the aurora turned green, looking like Frankenstein's monster escaping from Mary Shelley's book to the lonely Arctic. Then the aurora faded, and the town slowly disappeared back into the darkness, until it was no longer visible.

An translation - Text and photos: Evgenia Arbugaeva