The World Painted

It’s always fascinating to discover traces of one’s present occupation in the artefacts of childhood. Above my bed hung a large – in my memory, absolutely enormous – world map (judging by a photograph, it must have been at a scale of 1:20 million, in Ginzburg’s polyconic projection).

I would pore over it constantly, imagining the arduous journey across the Atlantic and Pacific undertaken by that small red fragment marked “USSR”, separated from the main mass of the same colour, to reach the upper left corner of the map and become Chukotka.

The map above my bed may not have set the course of my life in its entirety, yet it seems to have left its mark: I still feel a sense of reverence towards maps; for many years I have carefully gathered images of those that caught my eye into a folder-collection on my computer; and when, decades later, I had the chance to take part in making a map myself, I embraced it as a rare opportunity to step into the mystery I had once only admired from afar.

Maps are a very particular kind of love — and somehow, they just turn up on their own. Back in school, I confidently joined the orienteering club at a youth centre. I think it was a mix of things: a pull towards nature, towards maps, and maybe a bit of everything else, too.

Later, when I was finishing a maths-and-physics lycée, most of my classmates were heading straight into IT or engineering. I wanted to take a different path — something less obvious. So I chose the Faculty of Geography, specialising in cartography and geoinformatics — a choice made entirely out of passion.

As for the first map I ever made… well, the first one I took part in was still at school: at that orienteering club, we travelled to Camp Orlyonok to map the grounds for orienteering. The first map I truly made myself came a bit later — with friends, whom I paid in beer — when we turned one wall of my first flat into a world map using hand-cut stencils.

I don’t have any heartwarming childhood stories to tell—there were no maps hanging on the walls, and when I read Treasure Island, I was more into the adventures than the endpaper map.

But I clearly remember a moment at university, studying geography and writing my thesis on Europe’s energy networks, when it hit me:I could write dozens of pages of text—or I could tell the same story with a few maps. And it would be clearer, more engaging, and much more enjoyable to make.

Back in 2015, those black-background maps with bright cyan lines weren’t yet mainstream, but they were the perfect metaphor for electricity. I drew them—God forgive me—in CorelDraw, and honestly, I’m still not ashamed of them. Technically, they were far from perfect, but they were bold, clear, and genuinely told the story better than pages and pages of writing.

Since then, I’ve seen maps primarily as a way to tell stories. And it works the other way too: when you’re placing labels, you end up lingering over each area, and the more familiar the place, the more carefully you treat it. I especially enjoy labelling Australia and remembering hitchhiking across the Nullarbor desert, or recalling sketching a little Alpine valley in pencil and black ink, or getting lost in Bill Bryson’s tales of the Appalachians.

I believe that once a place comes alive in the mind of the cartographer, artist, or designer, it’s impossible to treat it carelessly.

Part of my childhood was spent in Siberia, and from time to time, our whole family would travel by train across vast distances.
And by “vast,” I mean journeys that took three days or more — one way.

Later, we moved to Kirov. At school, I loved studying the maps in the geography classroom, trying to estimate how long it would take to travel from one place to another by train. I enjoyed that feeling — when a few centimetres on paper translated into days on the move.

As I got older, I realised that I had grown up not far from Lake Baikal. Not far by Siberian standards, at least — just 700 kilometres away. That thought wouldn’t leave me alone. So my very first solo trip was to Baikal.

Distance wasn’t an issue: I didn’t have much money, but I had plenty of time. The route took me through the town where I’d once lived. In total, I spent 7 days on a train, 19 hours on a bus, and 10 hours in a shared taxi — all for a few days on an island in the middle of Baikal, to make a childhood dream come true.
And it was wonderful.

To this day, I still love looking at maps and imagining how long it would take to reach different corners of the world.