A Main Character

**Where does Anastasia Live?**

Anastasia lives in the heart of the Siberian taiga, in the same spot where her parents and her ancestors once lived. The distance from the spot where she lives to the nearest god-forsaken Siberian village is about twenty-five to twenty-seven kilometers. There are no roads and not even any paths. You’d have a very difficult time managing a trip like that without a guide. The actual glade where she lives doesn’t differ much from all the other taiga glades. Except in that it looks somewhat cared for, and in the number of flowers. There are no structures in Anastasia’s glade, no fire pits. But it's precisely this spot that Anastasia considers her family space.

## When did Vladimir first meet Anastasia?

The first time I met Anastasia, in 1994, she was twenty-six years old.

## Anastasia’s appearance

The Siberian woman Anastasia is a very beautiful woman, even extraordinarily beautiful. The words “extraordinarily beautiful” are not an exaggeration. Imagine a young woman, a bit more than a hundred seventy centimeters tall, with a good figure – not waiflike, like contemporary models – but genuinely well built, and lithe, as if she were a gymnast. She has regular facial features, gray-blue eyes, and hair the color of golden wheat spikes that cascades to her waist.

Perhaps you could see a woman anywhere who looks like her – on the outside. But I don’t think you’d ever come across the other, special qualities deep inside her that make the taiga-dwelling Anastasia extraordinarily beautiful. Everything about her external appearance speaks of ideal health – it comes through in the fluidity and lightness of her gestures, in the springy way she walks, as if she were flying. You get the impression that her body contains within it some kind of other-worldly energy, whose abundance warms the surrounding space with invisible rays.

## Anastasia's extraordinary ability # 1: special gaze

Your body warms up slightly when Anastasia looks at you, and by squinting at you with some kind of special gaze, she can heat up your body to such an extent at a distance, that your whole body begins to sweat, especially around the feet. Toxins leave the body, and afterwards, you feel significantly better.

## Anastasia's extraordinary ability # 2: to cure any illness

In general, I surmise that Anastasia’s knowledge of the properties of the taiga plants and some kind of internal energy enable her to cure a person of absolutely any illness. At least, she cured my ulcer with her gaze in the course of a few minutes. However, she categorically refused to do any subsequent healing.

## What and how does Anastasia eat out there in the taiga?

And to answer the question, what does Anastasia eat out there in the taiga, I can tell you that she eats world class ecologically pure food of a type that you can’t possibly buy, not even for a million dollars.

   Back in my first book I described how Anastasia lives out in the taiga and how astonished I was by her way of life. Now that so many years have passed since we first met, in thinking about her, I’ve come to the conclusion that the way people live in today’s giant cities looks unnatural and absurd if you juxtapose it with Anastasia’s life out in nature.

   At first glance it seems extraordinary, the way the wild animals bring food to Anastasia when she gives them a certain signal. But even a hunting dog today will bring its prey to its master. And a falcon released to hunt also turns its prey over to its master. Goats and cows in a village farmyard are happy to feed their owners by giving them milk.

   The wild animals inhabiting the area around the glade where Anastasia lives mark their territory, and within this territory they consider a person something like a pack leader. I think that over the generations, they were trained by Anastasia’s forebears, and then they themselves trained their offspring.

### Anastasia's food habits

   Anastasia actually eats very little. She never makes a fetish out of food.

## How Anastasia makes it through the severe Siberian winter?

   Many people have been asking recently about how Anastasia makes it through the severe Siberian winter – when the temperature reaches thirty-five to forty degrees below zero – if she doesn’t have any warm clothing or a heated dwelling. I’ll start by saying that if the air temperature out in the open gets down to minus thirty, it’s always significantly warmer in the taiga, and there can be up to a ten-degree difference in temperature.

   Anastasia has dug-outs at various locations in the taiga. The main one, where I myself have had occasion to pass the night more than once, consists of a spot hollowed out in the ground, about two and a half meters long, two meters wide and also about two meters high. The entrance to the dug-out is narrow, about sixty centimeters wide and a meter and a half high. The entrance is covered over with cedar branches. The walls and ceiling of the taiga bedroom are woven of vines with bunches of dried grasses and taiga flowers stuffed into them. The floor has been carpeted with dried hay.

   It’s very comfortable sleeping in that kind of bedroom in the summer. No sounds penetrate it, to say nothing of all those radio and electrical emissions that a person living in a multi-story building is subjected to.

### Anastasia's Anabiosis

   In late fall, Anastasia fills the entire area of her bedroom with dry hay and enters into an extended sleep similar to the state scientists call anabiosis.

   Anabiosis, as modern science explains it, is a state in which all of a living being’s vital processes, including metabolism, slow down to such an extent that there are no visible signs of life.

   Scientists have been focusing on this unique biological phenomenon as they develop plans for extended space travel. What primarily attracts them is the fact that creatures in an anabiotic or hibernation state use much less oxygen and do not need food. It’s been proven that their resistance to negative environmental factors increases. So, for example, it’s been shown that infectious diseases don’t develop in such animals, even when they’re artificially infected, and that many poisons which would be fatal for their organism under normal circumstances are entirely harmless to them when they are hibernating or in an anabiotic state. It’s even been proven that if you subject such animals to a fatal doses of ionizing radiation, they will still survive, since their metabolism has greatly decelerated, and that once they awaken, their vital functions resume entirely normally.

## Anastasia has become the heroine of the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series of books

And so, Anastasia, the hermit of the Siberian taiga, has become the heroine of the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series of books. She has borne me a son and a daughter. She now lives in the taiga, in my heart, and in the image of the heroine of my books.

   I don’t think I’ve been able to do this amazing woman’s beauty, her intelligence and her extraordinary capabilities justice in my descriptions. Really, it’s probably not even possible to do this using ordinary language.

   Even now, I only sometimes see Anastasia as someone who is close to me, as a loved one. More often I see her as unattainable and mysterious, as someone who possesses an inexplicable strength of spirit that she can use to create the future.