The Weatherman

Vyacheslev Korotki lives and works at a Russian weather station three degrees north of the Arctic Circle, on the edge of the Barents Sea, within sight of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, among the decaying bones of an abandoned village called Khodovarikha. In the dark of the long winter night and the endless northern summer, multiple times a day, Korotki checks the conditions and plots temperature and precipitation and humidity in bound journals- a record of the world, or this tiny part of the world, anyway, that stretches unbroken for more than a century.

Time is integral to his work, and yet he seems like someone out of it. Hanging on Korotki’s wall is a portrait of Yuri Gagarin, the first man to go into outer space, torn from a 1961 newspaper story. When he communicates with the rest of the world, it’s via a Cold War-era radio phone. The Morse code machine hums when its power is on. A supply ship comes once a year.