What is Ksenia Volkava from «The Last Hero» doing now? A quarter of a century ago, this Belarusian woman landed on a tropical island
In 2002, Ksenia Volkava — a simple postgraduate student at the Institute of Microbiology of the National Academy of Sciences — became a national star. Half the country followed the Belarusian woman who survived on the show «The Last Hero — 2». Now Ksenia has a completely different life.
Belarusian Ksenia Volkava on the show «The Last Hero-2»
Ksenia Volkava took third place in the wildly popular Russian show «The Last Hero-2». On the project, she then won a red jeep, which she waited a long time for from the organizers. But in the end, she did receive the gift and used the car for over nine years.
Ksenia married Uladzislau Murashkevich, who owned a private television company «Svoy Krug» (My Circle) in Minsk. It sounds quite grand, but in fact, it was a small advertising agency.
For Ksenia, it was already her second marriage — but it has lasted for over 20 years. The couple traveled a lot; their children were born relatively late. They are now 9 and 7 years old (and Ksenia is 49). The woman admits that if it were biologically possible, she would have given birth even later. Because life before children and after are two very different lives.
The family lives in a house near Minsk, and Ksenia travels to her apartment in the capital for work. Ksenia also maintains a YouTube blog dedicated to her hobby — perfumery. She sometimes answers subscribers' questions.
Yes, in one of the videos, Ksenia shared that she started taking an interest in perfume when her youngest daughter was one year old. The family was vacationing in Morocco, and during an excursion, the woman heard about Serge Lutens, the creator of a perfume brand. Ksenia didn't have a large perfume collection at the time, but she became interested in the story.
Ksenia Volkava in 2013
The Belarusian woman recalls the principle: if you want to learn something, explain it to someone else.
Therefore, when she prepares to record a video for her channel, she learns a lot of new things about perfume. She says that pondering different scents helps her relax.
Ksenia considers herself not an expert, but a perfume collector. She claims she had no blogging ambitions.
She just wanted to develop her hobby and… learn to speak again. Because when you spend almost all your time with small children, you start speaking in very simplified phrases. Ksenia felt at one point that she was regressing during her maternity leave. And it was nice to talk, even if just to the camera.
Answering a question about the cost of such a hobby, Ksenia smiled: she explained that her husband, a numismatist, spent significantly more money on acquiring various coins.
The woman linked her life to biology. Ksenia told her subscribers that she never dreamed of being a biologist — in childhood, she wanted to be a director and an underwater archaeologist.
The girl loved to read a lot and sometimes was too lazy to go to the library — so she read the books that were at home. And the family library had plenty of popular science literature.
This is how it happened that Ksenia began to win biology Olympiads, then entered the Mogilev Regional Lyceum specializing in «chemistry-biology» — and from there, the path to the BSU Faculty of Biology was quite logical.
Ksenia worked at the Academy of Sciences for twelve years and received her candidate's degree (Ph.D.). She resigned because at some point she realized she didn't know where to go next.
Ksenia noted that it was more interesting to work as a junior researcher. Because when you get a promotion, life becomes too full of various meetings and reports.
Therefore, the woman received a business education and went to work in the family business. Then her first maternity leave happened — and when Ksenia's eldest son was only one year old, she remotely got a job as a biologist at a large IT company.
So how did such a serious woman end up on an exotic island in her time? It was all thanks to her love for adventure — already in her school years, she started going on hiking trips. The Belarusian woman watched the first season of «The Last Hero» project with enthusiasm — her eyes lit up.
Hard to believe, but Ksenia didn't consider herself photogenic
For a junior researcher with meager earnings, the idea of flying to the other side of the world seemed almost impossible.
Ksenia was sure that they wouldn't take her for the extreme show because she was Belarusian (and the casting was actively advertised for Russians and Ukrainians). Plus, she didn't consider herself very photogenic. But it happened that during a business trip to Moscow, she bought a magazine with a casting application form. She carried that magazine in her bag for a month — her future husband and a now-former colleague persuaded her to fill out the form.
The competition was fierce — about 50,000 applications were submitted for the casting of the second season of «The Last Hero». Ksenia attached not formal photos to her application, but ones from various trips and hikes, to make it clear that she was an active person.
But she ended up among the thousand lucky ones invited to the in-person casting stage in Moscow. The selection lasted a month — there were psychological tests as well as various field trials.
Ksenia believes that healthy apathy helped her. The 26-year-old girl was surprised by how many people sincerely believed that participating in a television project would completely change their lives. She herself treated everything as an unusual experience — like a chance to enter the pirate books of her childhood.
«The Last Hero-2». Ksenia in an orange swimsuit
After the show aired, Ksenia most often had to answer two questions in numerous interviews: whether what happened on the islands was true, and whether the film crew really didn't feed the participants.
The Belarusian woman confirms: it's all true. The direction on the show was only at the editing level — the director chose which specific situation to include in the final episode of the program. Because of this, some people were shown very one-sidedly — some as villains, some as angels.
And yes, the participants really found their own food. Ksenia recounts: over a month and a half of filming, she lost 12 kilograms, considering she had no excess weight.
The woman herself didn't see all the episodes she was in. Because in the 2000s, you could only watch the show if you made it to the TV on time, or if someone recorded the program on a cassette for you.
Now everything can be found online, but in over 20 years, Ksenia has not had the desire to rewatch the show. She didn't suffer any terrible trauma, but she admits she was sure that viewers would quickly forget her.
But because Ksenia was noticed by all of Belarus, she became a star, and journalists mentioned her even years later. She grew tired of all the attention.
Even today, Ksenia believes that she has had many more interesting and noteworthy achievements in her life than a hunger strike on an island in the South China Sea.
Ksenia Volkava now
But still, the extreme show brought its bonuses. Thanks to it, Ksenia participated in several cool television projects (for example, the show «Belarusians in Africa»). Sponsors provided money for them when they learned that the Belarusian woman from «The Last Hero» would be participating.
By the way, that trip to Malaysia was Ksenia's second overseas flight in her life. Afterwards, she traveled a lot with her husband, actively engaging in various sports. Ksenia considers herself a tropical person — she loves heat, tolerates high humidity well. She loves strolling through ancient European streets, but she is drawn closer to the ocean.
Another one of her unconventional hobbies is learning Korean. Ksenia says there's no specific goal, but it interests her; it's a kind of brain game. She chose between Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Japanese wasn't very appealing in terms of sound. Ksenia was afraid to give up Chinese because of the complex hieroglyphs. But with Korean, the stars aligned.
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