Maria Sagvik was born in Skopje, a city located in the lower Sjaland Islands. She was probably brought up mainly in her native land, as her mother was a Russian from what is now Kalmyksia. Growing up in a multicultural household with both Scandinavians and Russians, Maria would have had no qualms about marrying a Russian national, given that her own nationality was not necessarily considered to be Yiddish or anything like that. However, when Maria Sagvik turned eighteen, this possibility simply disappeared from her life, and she became a committed Christian.
This lack of any desire to mingle with the male gender, coupled with her overall dislike of religion in general, seems to have led to Maria Sagvik’s eventual development of a very strange and inappropriate relationship with a man in his thirties, whom she met in a bar. The man, Vitaly Chorneyev, knew something about Maria from an earlier relationship, and decided to take her on as his wife. Over the next several years, they began a relationship that would see Maria spend much more time in Chorneyevs home than in her own. In fact, Maria would almost always be staying late at their house and would return early in the morning to pick up Chorneyev whenever he went out for work.
It would seem that Maria Sagvik was never truly comfortable with her national identity – her apparent willingness to abandon her birth country to marry a man half her age shows that at least part of this was genuine. The distance from her family and the parallel existence she felt between her Christian husband and the Russian life she had longed to lead convinced her, though, that her new marriage was nothing like the love she had felt for her family. As a result of this and other factors, Maria Sagvik committed herself to a near constant state of loneliness, moving from one menial job to another, working to support herself and yet still finding herself drawn to the same people and situations that once caused her joy. And yet, through all of this, she never lost sight of her own national identity, and even in death found ways to honor her husband’s memory.