Until the middle of the 16th century the Volga flowed through the territory of four states - the Muscovy, the Nogai Horde, the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates. As a result of the military campaigns of the Russian troops the winding water artery with a length of 3,500 kilometers completely became part of the Russian state. Despite this, for quite a long time in Russian history the Volga remained a border and wild river and the nation did not perceive it as "its mother." The writer Aleksey Ivanov rightly noted: “The Volga fully entered Russia only at the end of the 18th century, when robbery was eradicated, the Cossacks were abolished, the Kalmyks received statehood, the persecution of Islam ended, the Makariev Fair gained support from the authorities, Ottoman ambitions switched to the Black Sea region, and the Volga foreigners became Russified. Some time passed and the Volga inhabited by Tatars, Maris, Chuvashs, Udmurts, Bashkirs, Mordovians began to be perceived only as the Great Russian River. The common place of countless poems and songs dedicated to Mother Volga turned out to be a comparison of the river with the Russian soul - the same wide, generous, majestic. This truism is the starting point. If there is a river that embodies the national character in the public mind, then perhaps in order to better understand it we should take a closer look at the river? With this thought I set off on a journey along the main Russian river. Along the way I photographed coastal landscapes and strangers I met. However, the longer the journey lasted, the farther I moved away from home, the more clearly another common metaphor took shape in my mind - the flow of the river as the flow of life. Unhurried and at the same time swift, boundless but at the same time having both a beginning and an end. The name of the project is the first two words of the song "The Volga River Flows", popular in the 1960s on the Soviet stage. Its drawn-out chant soundtrack lay down on the landscapes floating outside the window at the moments of my trip from here to there. By the end of the journey I already knew that this song was not about the river.