In Soviet times, there was a distribution system: specialists from the capital's universities were sent to the countryside, and children in small towns and villages had the opportunity to learn from masters. I was one of those kids. At school, he collected all possible awards, won Olympiads, and received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture. When I entered the Ural Academy of Architecture and Art, my training was such that I won first place among 300 applicants.

I have always been attracted to sculpture: when I was young, I sculpted from clay and carved out of wood. At the academy, in his spare time, I also went to the sculpture department to sculpture. Once in 2002, master Ilya Borovikov came there and ordered several stone models. I completed the order and he offered to work in his studio. This is how I started stone-cutting.

I started working with stone more or less freely when I was six years old, when I managed to make horses — the Russian troika. This is considered a technically difficult sculpture, but then it became possible for me. According to my observations, it takes a master to poke around in this business for ten years to start feeling free and not afraid of difficult tasks.

The master must communicate with the stone as with living material. Then his products begin to sing — this can already be called stone-carving art. All people have a different inner world, so the products are different. But nothing will work without labor discipline; you have to work every day.

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A distinct feature of our Ural stone-cutting school is realism. The tradition in the Urals dates back to 1780, and the tastes of the then customers, factory owners, were dictated by classical European art.

Analyzing the huge amount of work done by the workshop, I came to the conclusion that we need to create symbols of our culture — “the gems of the Russian soul”. We work with Russian fairy tales, myths and legends, and make ceremonial portraits of prominent figures in Russian history.

I perceive all the richness of Russian folk epics and stories as a single worldview. If you know fairy tales, you can understand who is around you: Baba Yaga, Koshchei the Immortal, Tsarevna, and so on. And knowing how the plots of these fairy tales develop, you will understand how to treat all these characters and how their stories will end.

Russian fairy tales are cunning and difficult; they contain a lot of kindness and even negative characters are revealed from the human side. This is a great field for creativity and these symbols are very important for everyone. And from time immemorial, the stone has been used in all cultures to fix symbols and create objects of worship.

I like and am interested in the Chinese stone-cutting school: they have cool craftsmen who don't carve cowboys and Indians, but work with religious stories from their culture. I am planning a trip to China: I would like to see their handicraft finds and share mine.

I'm proud to have my family, my kids and my workshop. Most of all, we now buy more than thirty gifts for our employees' children every New Year.

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What else is there to be proud of? We live and work, thank God.

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