Both of my parents are lawyers. Mom is a lawyer and dad is a judge. I know all the ins and outs of the law; my sister and I spent a lot of time in the courts as children. We didn't have any grandmothers and there was no one to leave us with, so my mother took us with her. The guards were our friends. Really, it felt like we were going on vacation—they gave us candy in the office, the Chernoye Lake is nearby, there's a pizzeria. As kids we played detectives, had court battles, pretended we were prosecutors.

I was born in Kazan and spent most of my early childhood on Dekabristov Street. Yesterday I went to the play Decentralization, which stirred up a lot of memories: it's right across from the Stalin era building where the Mayak restaurant used to be. My mother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and grandfather lived there, and yesterday I remembered seeing this huge window from my grandfather's bedroom; it was a building with stucco molding. Stalinist architecture always seemed so bullish to me. When I went to the microphone, I closed my eyes and could hear the sound of the wheels of the tram no. 9.

There was a fountain in our yard and, next to it, in a public garden, there was a pool with no water, but it had "gems." We had read Bazhov [Soviet author of fairy tales], and I remember we collected pebbles and pretended we were mistresses of Copper Mountain [fairy-tale mountain-spirit maidens that protected underground treasures] and they were our gems.

The Tatar language is hidden somewhere deep down inside of me, because until I was three, I spoke only Tatar, before they sent me to kindergarten. Mom says I learned Russian in a week and I stopped speaking Tatar, because it was such a drastic change in my environment.

I felt like I was raised in a museum and conservatory, because my weekend as a child was spent at the conservatory on Svoboda Square; at Lakomka [restaurant], where we went about once a month; and at the State Museum of Fine Arts—we started going to the studio there when I was three.

I remember the first time I saw an icon and how they explained to us what it is. My sister and I prayed and asked my mother not to take us to the Opera and Ballet Theater anymore because we had already gone to the Shalyapin Festival seven days in a row and had seen everything. That was in elementary school.

I studied at School no. 122, the same one my mother, uncle, and aunt went to—there was a continuity there. We rode from Pobedy Prospect to Razezd Vosstaniya, which takes about an hour and fifteen minutes. Public transportation every day, with transfers. We knew the city very well, down to the littlest thing ... I remember the gypsies who stood near the Central Universal Department Store, selling something; I remember Sverdlova Street and all of Sukonnaya Sloboda [metro station]. My sister, she's a little more spirited than me, said "find a heavy-set man, lean on him and get another half-hour of sleep."

I had a turning point when I went to the theater studio at school; a teacher came in, Lenya Talipov, and that's when everything changed: I had a long braid; I was an excellent student ... they shaved my head to a half-centimeter. It was quite a reboot. I started smiling and I began showing my hidden sarcasm and irony. It's as if a jug was opened and the gin began flowing out. That's when I realized that I was more of a director than an actor. I also staged performances with the younger kids: Carlson and Pippi Long Stocking.

School for me was a resource; it was very unusual. We had both theatrical and dance marathons there. We read Franz Kafka in tenth grade.

I'm still friends with a girl from school. We're still friends with classmates; we're all in the sciences: one is a physicist, another is a chemist, everybody became a scientist in their field. It was like my circle, or something; we were all different, but our parents were from approximately the same circle: teachers, engineers, and doctors. I didn't understand it at the time, but I felt it when I went to the university.

And we went to a photo studio on Dekabristov Street. Ever since then we have two family holidays: September 1st [the first day of school in Russia] and New Year. Now our children celebrate it.

When School no. 19 opened near our house and my mother suggested that I try going there, I rejected it outright. I didn't want to leave my friends and I didn't like Gorky, our neighborhood. It was a rather dangerous, high-crime area. And my friend, who graduated from that school in Gorki, says that half of her classmates are either in prison or dead.

I wanted a profession connected with languages, but I didn't want to study with just girls, so I decided not to go into philology or foreign languages. And it was hard to get into them without knowing someone; this was in 1996. At that time, I never considered leaving, although some of my classmates got into Moscow without any cronyism, and they asked why I didn't try. But I didn't want to leave Kazan, leave my family.

At the university I met my husband, and we're still together.

I studied in a Tatar group in my first year.

I transferred to the Russian speaking group in the second year.

Alexandra Supriyanovich played an important role in my growth at the university. She was an amazing woman: incredibly beautiful. And I'm like, "oh, a female scientist!" She focused on gender studies, female mysticism, and the Middle Ages in general. When I saw her, I realized I wanted to study with her!

In my third year I became fascinated by a figure comparable to Thomas Aquinas, but it was someone no one knew about at all. He was so prolific that it took twelve carts to carry all of his works, which followed him everywhere he went. Saint Bonaventure.

And from that moment on, my life on the margins began; what I mean is, I began to be attracted by things that were kind of obscure. I read his text The Soul's Journey into God, which is how the central figure appeared in my life: Saint Francis of Assisi. It's a love for life. Bonaventure was this saint's first biographer.

Just after my third year there, I was tempted to veer off for a moment. I went to Moscow with my sister; she had entered the Moscow Art Theater School, and I went to went to support her. There I met a teacher from the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts, and we talked; she said "Let me get you into directing department, without any entrance exams. You're a director." I looked at her like, what? "I'm a research historian."

Our department won a Soros grant, and in my fourth year we (almost everyone who specialized in the Middle Ages and Antiquity) were taken to the Academy of Sciences. There we met people who would play a very important role in my life.

For example, there was my future supervisor, Galina Zvereva, who forced culturology to take its rightful place in Russia, in Russian scientific knowledge. She created all these standards for cultural studies. A fantastic woman. I don't think there are any like her left.

I realized that I really wanted to work at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow; it was my calling.

The first semester I terribly missed the man who would be my future husband; we had moved to Moscow together: he lived in his dorm on the red metro line, in Yasenevo, and I lived at the Ulitsa Akademika Yangelya station; only Bitsevsky Park connects them ... everything was pretty bad. I went home once a month. There was no way I was ready to live in a dorm, and I couldn't find a place for myself.

The sun rises in Moscow an hour later, so in Kazan it would already be light; I'm an early bird, and it seemed to me that everything was just off.

But, at the same time, I could read 200 pages of Foucault in an evening, because there was that much. Once my mother and I went to an exhibition after my exams, and she told me "You talk like a critic, not like a real person." I was so saturated with this language; I couldn't digest anything and appropriate it. I just spurt out phrases from my own personal context.

If the Faculty of History ended with Sartre and Camus in the 1950s, in Moscow that's where it started.

As I was deciding what my job would be in science, and I didn't want to give up my St. Francis, a funny thing happened. I remember I was riding a bus and a guy was sitting in front of me drinking beer. I looked closely at the label and saw a Franciscan monk and it said "Franciscan Beer." My eyes lit up and without hesitation I asked him "Excuse me, please, do you need that bottle?" The whole bus was staring at me: I mean, she seems like a normal person, but she's asking this guy for a bottle. He held out his beer, and I say "No, no, I don't drink beer, I just need the bottle." And I left with the bottle and felt like Danko [the hero of Maxim Gorky's short story "Old Izergil" who sacrificed his own flaming heart to light the way for thankless refugees.]

The topic I finally chose was Francis of Assisi in modern mass culture using the example of the Russian Internet. And it all started with a bottle of beer! My life is full of many stories with these kinds of signs.

In Moscow, I first began to understand what it meant to really feel a city; it was how Moscow opened up to me. My friend started taking me to the Krutitskoye courtyard, started showing me estates, like Arkhangelskoye. This is how my dialogue with the city began.

Then Moscow became a different world with different opportunities. Everything suited me in terms of socializing, exhibitions, and all my work and nonwork needs.

I didn't work in Moscow for long: my mother broke her back in 2005, and I had to go help her in Kazan. And my husband didn't like Moscow very much. It wasn't out of any desire on my part to return to Kazan.

In Moscow, they held my place for two years and waited.

I got a job at Kazan University for a quarter of my wages. At the same time, I began working in my brother's consulting company in Kazan, registering companies, because I needed something to live on: the salary at the university was 750 rubles.

My dream of going to Italy took shape by the time I defended my dissertation, when I realized that I was writing about frescoes that I had never seen. Or about the valley of Spoleto, and I can't even imagine what it looks like.

I was in Warsaw in 2008, quite by accident, for the Icon Today conference, and on my way back I was riding with a very handsome young monk who said "We have a van; come visit and we'll travel all over Italy." At the time, the idea seemed incredible, and we didn't exchange contacts.

Then my mother and I once went to a public banya [Russian steam bathhouse], and there was a woman who said that they were extending the deadline to apply for the Algarysh grant. I applied and won. I went to Italy for two months in 2008. I studied Italian in Florence at the Michelangelo Institute; I remember sitting under the monument to Dante and doing my Italian language homework.

Later I applied for an Erasmus grant for postdoctoral research and went to Bologna for two years to study in the Department of Art History, where I came across an amazing professor, an Italian version of Jean Reno: Fabrizio Lallini, a very smart and sensitive person. He believed in my research, although the topic wasn't really en vogue.

Once I was at a lecture by Professor Carlo Ginzburg. I approached him afterwards, still not speaking Italian very well, and said that I'd like to talk to him about research. He invited me to his house, a medieval palazzo. I brought chak-chak [a Tatar desert made of deep-fried unleavened bread and drenched in hot honey]. I told him that I'm from Kazan and started talking about my research topic. He told me that if I narrowed my topic, he could help me, but I decided not to, because I still wanted a to do large-scale, daring, and independent research.

I worked a lot. For example, I remember sitting in the archives in Assisi and the librarians, at my request, locked me in there during the lunch break so I could work longer. Every evening I walked with huge mesh bags full of material from the 19th century; I was completely immersed. That was exactly how I wanted it: having filled myself up with this information for a week, I wandered the places of St. Francis ...

During my second visit to Italy, I passed the international Italian language test at level five out of six. Back then I didn't get why I needed that certificate at all, but now I laugh because I could teach Italian to a penguin if I had to. When I came back to Kazan, it was the Italian language that fed me and provided for me for a long time.

Italy taught me not to rush, not to run. It feels strange when we're told to slow down, be in the moment. The very atmosphere there tells you to slow down, enjoy life, see how everything is happening around you.

I began to listen to Kamalova and Mubai [Tatar musicians]. On the one hand, I felt like I was at home in Italy, like it was my world, my way of life, but, on the other hand, I was confident that I would return to Kazan. And I had no desire to make any effort to stay in Italy or try to get another grant.

I can definitely say that I was a completely different person after living in Italy. There I was surrounded (or I surrounded myself) only with people who loved me, whom I loved, who were nice to me. All the extra noise disappeared; people with negative attitudes who would belittle me went away.

I brought this feeling back to Kazan, as well. Of course, here I could still only be like that to a lesser extent, because sometimes I am really afraid to say "no" to people, afraid of offending them.

I worked at the university from 2005 to 2019, and three rectors came and went during my tenure there. It was a very important and amazing feeling, like flying.

I can influence the world in this way.

By meeting new people, students who have no boundaries, who are free in the literal sense of the word, with whom you can create. For me, university is about creativity.

When I was teaching, I always said that the aura of the teacher had disappeared. Walter Benjamin wrote "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." He said that when a picture is printed, stamped, or reproduced, its aura disappears. What I meant was that the aura of teacher/professor, from the 19th century, has disappeared. We're in the same boat.

In fact, I always teach myself and my view of the world. I tell my students: I can show you how I search for treasures. Your job is to figure out if this is right for you, and to show whether or not you have the ability to search for treasure.

It's a great feeling, going into a museum, library, or archive and seeing journalists there, for example, and they're your former students who are now making their mark on the city.

I was invited by Italian universities to give open lectures.

When I was giving a lecture to the residents of Bologna about Francis of Assisi and Alexander Nevsky, students, pensioners, and people with dogs came—the dogs sat next to them (and barked at boring lecturers); there were mothers with babies.

When I returned to Kazan, there was such a sharp contrast; it was quite hard to adapt.

There were certain difficulties at the university. It was being restructured. It was very uncomfortable. I felt like I had a lot to offer the university, all the experience that I had gained in Italy, but it was as if they didn't want it at all.

I brought in professors that were part of the Algarysh project to give lectures to my students about the specifics of exhibitions and working with cultural heritage, but it was the beginning of the end for me.

As a result, from the moment I returned from Italy, I made sure that I had Italy all around me: first I taught Italian at university courses, then I organized my own courses. My husband and I started a course of lectures on the history of Italian culture and conducted excursions in Italian.

I brought the Italian way of socializing back with me, although that's how I pretty much always talked, if I had the time, chatting with shop assistants, with cashiers. I allowed myself to be myself.

At the university, when I finished my work there, everything dragged out really slowly, like pulling out intestines. And when Marya Leontyeva invited me to a working group to create a concept for the sustainable development of the historical settlement of Kazan, I saw how quickly everything could be done.

The speed with which the international forum in Smena was created on the previously unproblematic topic of urban and territorial identity, precisely in regards to developing the city, made me think: "Is that even possible?"

Speed and swiftness—this is, of course, connected with the fact that Kazan is small and people live closely to each other, but in general it turned out that speed and swiftness are part of Kazan's identity; we're just like, poof! And it's done.

I'm just comparing it with the people of Samara. They meditate on it, thinking about what to do with their historic downtown. That's great; thanks to this, historic downtown Samara has been preserved. While they've been thinking, we've torn ours down and built it up, and now we're thinking about what to do with it.

My city has stayed the same, probably, divided into several territories. When I want to return to my childhood, I dive right in there. Koroleva Street, Gagarina Street, Uritsky Park, even if I no longer recognize it as my own—it doesn't really look very much like the park from my childhood anymore, but walking down the road to the park gives me the physical feeling that I'm searching for.

I love to wander the streets, Shchapova, Gogolya, Gorkogo, Ulyanova-Lenina. I used to like the Old Tatar settlement, and now I take visitors there, but I don't go there alone.

I love Dubki very much. It's our family's Narnia; we often go there.

My favorite street is Kremlyovskaya, this road from the university to the Kremlin.

Today I had my second Tatar language lesson. In my first lesson, my teacher asked what associations I have with Tatar; Russian; English, which I speak fluently; and Italian. Tatar for me is the language of my mother, my ancestors, my memory; I associate Russian with air and life; and, for English, it's work: it's very logical. It's about rules and boundaries, what is ours and what is theirs. But I use Tatar words to describe my associations with Italian: can [soul] and diñgez [sea].

The Italian language opened up my Tatar chakra: at the age of 30, I learned Italian from scratch in six months. I suddenly realized that I could speak it without knowing the language. For example, I read Arabic script without knowing Tatar; my teacher was surprised. I think that I had this indirect path to Tatar through Italian medieval culture: I came back, having made a detour, and realized that it was important for me.

Every time I found myself outside Kazan, this call of blood, my ancestors, and this need for language returned. Tatar words sometimes spontaneously slip out. I went to the play Khava, and to my surprise I found that some Tatar words began popping up in my mind, although I don't think in that language. But it's still a language that I'd like to make my own.