Experience from my former exhibitions and communication with my audience has allowed me to identify a series of questions which are asked very frequently. I will try to answer them.

How is everything done?

All my works are hand-made without any micromanipulators. Obviously, I work with the help of a microscope. My microscope is MBS-9, binocular (that is, you look with both eyes), with linear magnification up to 100 times. I also have two little self-made machine units - a lathe and a sharpening unit. Each of them can fit in the palm of a hand.
I invent and make tools on my own. While working I hold my creation in my fingers. Even one's heartbeat disturbs such minute work, so particularly delicate work has to be done between heartbeats.

How everything began or how you ended up doing this?

When I was in my last year at the University, I decided to begin making jewelry. I went to the library and started to look for literature on metal soldering. Among the library cards that I browsed through I came across this one: The Mystery of Invisible Masterpieces by G.I. Mishkevich. The title sounded interesting and I ordered the book. When I started to read it, it turned out that the book was a collection of novels on masters of microminiature. I was impressed by the works that were described in the book. The desire to make something similar appeared and stuck in my head like a splinter. I knew that I needed a microscope. I did not have any idea about microscopes, what kinds there were, and what the differences were, and I started asking my acquaintances where I could get a microscope. Being na?ve, I thought that the bigger magnification the microscope had, the simpler and easier the work. It turned out to be a different situation. With bigger magnification the depth of field, focal distance, field of view, and illuminance of the object decrease. At last I managed to get a children's one eyed microscope, which, moreover, turned the representation over. I had to write letters from left to right and "upside down" so they looked normal in the ocular of the microscope. For three months I studied how to burnish rice grain and to scratch out letters upon them. And on New Year's Eve, 1999, I wrote a New Year's greetings and gave it as a gift to my mom.
In the summer of 1999 I managed to obtain a good binocular microscope which did not turn the representation, and the first week I had to learn again how to write on rice grains right side up.
The first work that formed the present exposition was a rice grain with a text of 2027 letters. Then there was an inscription on a hair.
At my first show during the Art Expo at the Siberian Fair (Novosibirsk City) I presented only three works: a rice grain and two inscriptions on hair.

What are Crocodile Gena, Cheburashka, and Buratino are made of?

These works are very complicated since they are three-dimensional, volumetric, and it is very, very hard to make a 3D object. These figurines were not made of something and then painted. No. They are entirely made of painting pigment which was processed in a way that it becomes sturdy enough to "hold" small plastic objects.

How did you cram camels into a hair?

For some reason 9 out of 10 viewers ask "how did you cram…" and not "how did you install, locate, or pass through." It is a pity, for the camels are so tiny and people apply such a rough word!
The diameter of a horse hair is 0.12 mm (a little bigger than the width of a razor blade). The hair is drilled along its axis, the diameter of the hole is 0.08 mm. This means that you need to make a drill, sharpen it and drill through the hair. The most important thing while drilling is that the axis of the spinning drill and the axis of the hair should coincide. But this is not all. Then you need to burnish a hair to make it transparent. And it should be burnished both from the outside and from the inside! I burnished the hair with diamond paste of various coarseness. But this is not all. To put eight camels (I didn't even mention that they should be made lesser than 0.08 mm high) inside the hair without damaging them, and putting them in the same plane is very, very difficult. The drill, drilling process, burnishing - it takes years to solve these problems.

How much time does it take to create one work?

Depending on the complexity of the work and accumulated experience, it takes from one week to half a year.
To be more precise, the "simplest" works (in a sense that making them did not take too much time) are the inscription on a hair and chess-men on a poppy seed. The most time-consuming work was the chess table. I made it for half a year and it came out only on the third attempt: two tables.
The inscription on a rice grain took three months of work, camels in an eye of a needle took two months. Camels in a horse hair also took two months.
But this is only time for making the actual thing. I don't count time for perfecting technology and for making tools. This takes several years.