Tag: interview

I’ve said more than once that I’ve loved all kinds of logic puzzles since childhood. For example, back when I wrote a review of Gareth Moore’s Lateral Logic five years ago. To solve puzzles like these, you really just need to understand the general approaches, break the setup down into its components clearly, and be able to build logical chains. I got lucky: in school I was taught that by a wonderful math teacher, and later I kept solving things like that myself, whatever I could get my hands on.

Sometimes video games include puzzles like this too. For example, in Dishonored 2, in one episode a gate is locked with a code, and you can figure it out by solving a logic puzzle. The developers also give you a workaround — you can use force or stealth to get the hints from other characters and skip the brainteaser. But I couldn’t resist and spent almost 40 minutes solving it: to my own delight, once I did, I entered the code correctly on the first try. For that I got a separate achievement in the game, but the main pleasure was the solving itself.

But let’s get back to the book. Can You Solve My Problems? by Alex Bellos is another book by a lover of this kind of puzzle, who collected them into a book not with some goal of teaching people to think outside the box (as in the Gareth Moore book mentioned above), but simply to entertain the reader.

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Almost four years ago, Russia attacked Ukraine. Because of that, many families were forced to flee Ukraine to escape the war. But at the same time, inside Russia it suddenly became dangerous to condemn the war—and even to call it a war. And those who didn’t want to fall silent were forced either to go to prison or to leave, branded in their own country as traitors, “foreign agents,” and even terrorists. (Many Belarusians went through a similar path after the 2020 protests, but that isn’t really related to the book I’m talking about.)

Russian journalist Sergey Nikolaevich also left Russia after the war began. And then he decided to interview members of the creative intelligentsia—people whom their homeland no longer considers its own—and turn those conversations into a book. That’s how Status: Free. A Portrait of the Creative Emigration came to be.

Nikolaevich focuses specifically on people in creative professions. Among the subjects of his interviews are Kirill Serebrennikov, Renata Litvinova, Chulpan Khamatova, Maxim Galkin, and others.

Based on the blurb, I expected to hear conversations with those who left about how and why they had to go, what the main trigger was, what they’re doing now, and how they’re coping morally—when they’re both enemies to their own country and hated by many Ukrainians, for whom there are no “good Russians” right now.

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