There was a family in Siberia who went off-grid and lived in the Siberian forest for 42 years. They were discovered by the Soviet authorities in 1978.<p><a href="https://allthatsinteresting.com/lykov-family" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://allthatsinteresting.com/lykov-family</a>
This immediately reminds me of a book I read a year ago about a man who walked off into the woods of Maine in 1986 and lived as a hermit for 27 years [1]<p>[1] “Stranger in the Woods” by Michael Finkel: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30687200" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30687200</a>
I believe he's not Petrov but Petro after all (out of options listed in the article)<p>You are unlikely to have no first name and two last names, and Zailenko looks like a last name, so the other one is likely a first name, which would be Petro.<p>Of course there is always a chance that he is Petrov-Zailenko.
<p><pre><code> “And I was a kid, so I thought love could fix anything,” she said, recalling how she hugged him good-bye once, “and he just shook.”
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Wow. I did not expect to cry at this story, but here I am. How profoundly sad this man must have been.
I’m always blown away by how people like this managed to eat. I suppose you could live off bottle deposits if you only ate corn and beans. Even at five dollars a day he would’ve had to collect 50 bottles in the best case scenario.
> John Melvin said Zailenko was eventually taken to the hospital in Ukiah, and over several days, many different people visited and tried speaking to him in Russian and many other languages, but no one could identify what words exactly he was speaking.<p>I'm assuming it was Ukrainian? Although if someone tried to speak to him in Russian, they'd be able to understand that he was speaking Ukrainian and naturally understand a good majority of it.
A doctor did this in Hawaii for a while <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/The-tale-of-the-doctor-hermit-Hawaii-17051298.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/The-tale-of-the-doctor...</a>
Also an interesting story of a man who lives now for more than 20 years in a mountain cave in Serbia.<p><a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/23086418/tiny-cave-home-in-remote-mountains/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/23086418/tiny-cave-home-in-rem...</a>