Acknowledgement

The creation of this book was a journey in itself, filled with countless stories, moments of wonder, and the precious support of many people.

First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Benedicte Braconnay, a friend dear to my heart who shared her valuable achievements in this project. Your belief in my vision was a beacon that guided me through difficult times.

And finally, to you, the reader, for embarking on this journey with me. These photographs and the accompanying stories will inspire you as much as they have inspired me.

Foreword

Dear Reader,

As you open the pages of this book, you are embarking on a journey of memories that have taken me across continents, through diverse cultures, and into the heart of our shared human experience. This is more than a collection of photographs. It is a visual narrative of the world as it was seen by a young French traveller, all its beauty and pureness.

Travelling, It’s about immersing yourself in different cultures, forming connections with people from all walks of life, and finding stories that otherwise might have remained untold. This book is a testament to these stories, captured in moments of time through the lens of a non Russian person.

Each photograph you see is a doorway into a moment of discovery, a story waiting to unfold.

I invite you to journey with Benedict, not as a passive observer, but as an active participant. Allow yourself to be moved by the images, question, wonder, and explore. Let your imagination fill in the gaps, and your curiosity guide you beyond the confines of each page.

Let the stories unfold before your eyes.

Warm regards,

Elizaveta Manoshkina

When Elizaveta proposed that I collaborate on her project, I accepted with great pleasure to reopen my memories with her and look together at my dusty photographs to rediscover the feelings of my first encounters with Russia. The idea was to retrace the journey together and allow her to try, through her gaze and talents, to transmit something of it. We chose to gather in this book the images and memories of the trips I undertook between August 2006 and December 2009. As a student then, I nurtured a love for Russia, passed on during my childhood by my parents; and I dreamed of long trips and great crossings. To experience distant worlds, vast spaces... to take buses, trains, and boats for days, to dare to meet and trust strangers, that seemed to me then to go without saying, and Russia seemed the most fabulous playground. In these trains that sped across the vast Russian landscape, I felt a powerful and difficult-to-describe feeling, something that approaches both the sense of freedom in its strongest sense but also an acute awareness of human fragility and grandeur, to be a small nothing in space and time, yet, in its way, grasping the world.

I met Elizaveta in 2011 in Saint Petersburg. She was then a child and is now the age of my first trips to Russia. I very much like the idea of crossing our gazes. Her country, or at least that of her childhood, my eye of an apprentice traveller, this thirst for discovery at the edge of adulthood that each one experiences in their way. “Beyond the Borders” is an invitation to retrace the journey together; it is a book that speaks to me of borders of different kinds, the geopolitical ones that are closing and would make these trips in the current Russian context oh so difficult (but all the more necessary); and then the borders of another nature, those that exist between oneself and others for a thousand and one reasons, and which, while travelling, during rare suspended moments, manage to fade away. It is this magic that I would like to testify to while allowing the reader to understand a complex and pluralistic country better.

I warmly thank the Shtykov family from the village of Gurez’ Pudga, especially Marina Shtykova, who took me by the hand with serenity and kindness during my first trip to Russia and probably gave me confidence for the following ones. I was not able to ask all the subjects of these photographs for publication permission, but I hope that if, by the most beautiful of chances, this book were to fall into their hands, they would be convinced of the sincerity of this project.

Finally, I express to Elizaveta all my gratitude for having associated me with her project and for allowing me to immerse myself again in these moving travel memories and leave this magnificent trace.

Benedicte Braconnay