The loneliest man on the planet

Polar explorer Vyacheslav Korotky is a meteorologist working at the North Pole.

For the last 30 years, he has been traveling on Arctic ships and sometimes stays in Khodovarikha, once a village on the shores of the Barents Sea, and now a semi-abandoned lighthouse. Vyacheslav regularly conducts meteorological measurements in the village. Korotky has a wife, but she lives very far from his main place of work — in Arkhangelsk. Vyacheslav is 65 years old, he and his wife have no children.

Photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva, who grew up in Tiksi, on the instructions of The New Yorker visited the polar explorer and took some great pictures about his work and life.

1. Vyacheslav Korotky inspects an abandoned lighthouse on the site of the village of Khodovarikha at full moon. Once this lighthouse helped sailors walking along the Northern Sea Route.

2. Short lives in a wooden century-old house in the now abandoned village of Khodovarikha. He enters all weather data into a special log.

3. Meteorological journal, cloud atlas and other useful and important books are scattered on Vyacheslav's desk. The photo of Yuri Gagarin was cut from a newspaper article about his death in 1968.

4. Short, standing knee-deep in water, measures the level of the Barents Sea.

5. On the radio station, the Short transmits weather data to another weather station, from where they are then sent to Moscow. Often, reports of snowstorms or gale-force winds are delayed for these very reasons.

6. In his spare time, Vyacheslav makes such houses out of matches.

7. In a boat made with his own hands, Short sometimes likes to smoke a cigarette.

8. Khodovarikha, January 25, 2014. Korotky takes readings from a weather booth located five minutes from his house. Above his head is the northern lights.

9. View of the Barents Sea from the porthole of the Mikhail Somov, a diesel-electric ship that delivers food and tools for Vyacheslav once a year.

10. From the window of his wooden house, Korotky watches the desert landscape that stretches for many kilometers.