In the polar night of Russia’s far north, legends and lives are frozen in time

Kostikova and Sivkov make their way toward the lighthouse, which seems to rise in the air in the midst of a blizzard. It is one of the few remaining lighthouses in the Arctic. New sea routes are opening, and many ships today have modern navigation systems.

Vika Taenom wears a customary Chukchi dress called a kamleika as she rehearses a traditional dance in the cultural center in Enurmino. Many dances mimic animal movements, and this one is meant to conjure birds such as geese, ducks, and seagulls.

Kostikova keeps warm by a small radiator as she reads her book. When Kostikova was a little girl, a family friend told her stories of Arctic life. At 19 she began work at her first polar station. She says she instantly knew that the Arctic was the right place for her.

The children who last attended school here are now adults, but their textbooks still lie open, seemingly frozen in time. Arbugaeva waited through two weeks of darkness and stormy weather until the aurora borealis provided enough light for photographs.

Nikolai Rovtin is lost in thought after speaking of his wife, who passed away last year. He now lives alone at an abandoned weather station. Before the Soviets attempted to develop the Arctic, he lived in a yaranga, a traditional Chukchi home of wood and reindeer skin.

A homemade doll leans against a frosty windowsill of an abandoned school in Dikson. In its heyday in the 1980s the town was a symbol of Arctic ambitions and home for a population of about 5,000.

This radio at the old weather station transmitted meteorological data such as temperature and precipitation to the station in the closest city, Arkhangelsk, nearly 500 miles away. Korotki continues to report meteorological data every three hours, night and day.

Korotki walks toward a lighthouse that went out of service over 10 years ago. When he ran short of firewood, he’d pry away the lighthouse’s timber panels to heat the weather station where he lived and worked. That station has since been replaced with a newer facility.

A walrus skull rests on a table in a hunter’s garage. Walrus meat is a primary means of sustenance for the Chukchi community, which, local hunters say, is allowed an annual quota of walruses and whales. Hunters use traditional harpoons as well as modern guns.

The cultural center, once alive with performances and celebrations, has long stood empty. Its Soviet architectural style can be found in other Arctic outposts developed during the push to build infrastructure along the Northern Sea shipping route.

Kesha the parrot, a New Year’s gift from photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva, keeps Korotki company as he eats lunch at the old weather station. Kesha is named after a bird in a popular Soviet-era cartoon series.

A lighthouse model that Korotki is building from matches seems to cast a shadow of the Arctic landscape against the wall of the weather station. The little lighthouse rests atop a Soviet reference book called The Dynamics of Sea Ice.

Night falls as Chukchi hunters head home after harpooning this gray whale for its meat. On the return voyage, by tradition, the hunters are silent, speaking only in their minds and only to the whale, asking forgiveness and explaining why the hunt was necessary.

Kostikova and Sivkov, joined by their dog, Dragon, collect water samples to measure the salinity of the seawater surrounding the narrow Kanin Peninsula, where the White Sea and the Barents Sea meet.

“The edge of the world”—that’s what meteorologist and lighthouse keeper Ivan Sivkov wrote in white paint on this storage shack. It sits near where an icebreaker docks to deliver supplies to the Kanin Nos lighthouse and meteorological station every summer.