Tag: war

Book: Alex Bellos “Can You Solve My Problems?”

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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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Book: “Is It True?”

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This book first caught my attention with its cover—styled like a Soviet newspaper—and then with its blurb, which promised an analysis of a whole bunch of dubious “facts” in modern social and classical media, carried out by “Russia’s most famous team of fact-checkers.”

A lot of people really are used to believing everything they read or hear from supposedly competent sources. But we know that in politics, there’s never the whole truth—even if nobody is lying on purpose. You can still tell only part of the truth and emphasize the facts you need. And if propaganda doesn’t even have the goal of not lying, then pretty much any method “goes.”

That’s why even when you’re just reading something online, it’s always better to at least double-check that the alleged fact is real. Otherwise, you’ll sometimes read some nasty thing and, in righteous anger, come down on someone—or start spreading the news yourself. And then it suddenly turns out it was a fake, and you helped it spread. Awkward, if your conscience isn’t just an empty word.

So reading about fakes—and about things that only seem like fakes—along with a solid breakdown by fact-checkers (which is basically a new profession: checking whether a news story is lying) sounded like an insanely interesting idea.

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Book: Sergey Nikolaevich “Status: Free. A Portrait of the Creative Emigration”

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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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Book: Henry Lion Oldie “The Door into Winter

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I read this book by Henry Lion Oldie exactly one year ago, just a couple of months after their wartime diary, Invasion. This book is a collection of science fiction stories, but all of them revolve around one central theme — the war in Ukraine.

And today, it is impossible to separate them from real events, no matter how much you try to convince yourself that it’s “just fiction.” Because this “fantasy” feels far too real, and all the speculative elements are simply a backdrop for what’s going on in the minds of the authors — and in the minds of many people right now.

Normally, I try to write thoughtful and fairly in-depth reviews of books, but with this one, I couldn’t bring myself to write anything substantial for an entire year. It always felt like whatever clever ideas or interpretations I might come up with, any metaphors or hidden meanings I could find, would all crash into the wall of reality — a reality more fantastical and terrifying than fiction itself.

Even in their stories, the authors include fragments of autobiography. In The Small Circle, there are brief excerpts from their real diary.

And in the story Those Who Follow Me, they describe a magical wall that shuts the world away from the horrors of Mordor. A few years ago, I would have read that as quirky sci-fi. But now I realize — this is a dream many people share. They truly want an impenetrable wall to keep Mordor out. For many, many years to come.

I considered writing nothing about this book at all. But in the end, I decided to limit myself to a short note. Not all of the stories struck me as strong pieces of science fiction — and I did try to evaluate the book as a work of literature — so my overall rating is lower than for other story collections, whether by Oldie or other authors.

However, as a kind of mirror to our era and this war, the book deserves a much higher score. It is a must-read. At the very least, to get a glimpse of how this is being experienced, and how it finds expression in literature, by those who have now lived with this war for three years. Where people are dying who never wanted to fight — and every month brings news of children killed, children who should only have ever learned about war from history books.

P.S. I’m sorry I’m not able to write a proper review right now.

My mark: 3.5/5

Song and concert: Arthur Smolyaninov & cheLovek – “Elsinore”

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Disclaimer: Some meanings in this post, unfortunately, get lost for those who don’t speak Russian. However, I hope it will still be interesting for English-speaking readers. Thank you for reading!

Today, my wife and I went to a solo concert by Artur Smolyaninov. Artur is an incredible actor whom I first saw in one of the lead roles in 9th Company, a film about the war in Afghanistan, where his character is the only survivor after a brutal battle. Later, I remembered him from the series 9 Months, where he played almost the exact opposite—a young man who desperately wants to avoid military service and is instead assigned to alternative civilian service as a maternity nurse man in a maternity hospital.

Since then, I’ve seen him in many roles, and I’ve always enjoyed his performances. In 2022, when the war started, Artur was one of those who couldn’t stay silent. He spoke honestly about his views, and as a result, he was forced to leave his homeland—a decision that, of course, impacted his acting career. But for him, staying true to himself as a human being was far more important.

At the same time, beyond acting, Artur had also been writing songs. He never considered himself a professional songwriter, musician, or singer. But it’s clear that sharing this part of himself with the audience matters deeply to him.

Even before the war, in 2020, he formed a band called Smola (there’s a play on words here, as the Russian word “smola” (resin) sounds similar to the beginning of the actor’s last name). With this band he recorded several songs. But after leaving Russia, he had to start over from scratch in his musical journey. And in Riga, he put together a new band, which he named cheLovek (‘chelovek’ in Russian means ‘human’).

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Book: Alexey Dudarev “Dialog”

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Alexey Dudarev is a Belarusian playwright and screenwriter. My first encounter with his work (or at least what I thought was my first) happened during my final years of school, as his play Riadovyie (“The Rank and File”) was part of the Belarusian literature curriculum. Our school library handed out the book Dialog, which included this play among others. I read a lot during my school years, but I was cautious about unfamiliar authors, especially those who were part of the required reading list. However, the Belarusian literature curriculum often included real gems. Many years later, I couldn’t recall the details of Riadovyie, but I was left with warm feelings about it, as it had been a pleasant surprise.

Later on, I learned that Alexey Dudarev’s plays weren’t only famous in the BSSR; they were also performed in many theaters across the USSR, including the Maxim Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater in Leningrad and the Central Academic Theater of the Soviet Army, among others. These performances featured actors who were well-known throughout the Soviet Union, including from films.

It wasn’t until even later that I found out Dudarev wrote the script for one of my favorite films, which nearly every Belarusian knows—Belye Rosy (“White Dew”). This simple yet profound story about the final days of a village being displaced to make way for the city’s expansion is filled with both humor and the drama of family relationships, as well as reflections on what is truly important in life. And what a cast—Nikolai Karachentsov, Vsevolod Sanaev, Stanislav Sadalsky, Galina Polskikh, Boris Novikov, and many others.

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Songs: Mark Bernes – “Where Does the Motherland Begin?”

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Despite all the triumphalism that has been built around Victory Day in recent decades, there are things I continue to love. One of them is the wartime songs by Mark Bernes. One of my favorites is “Where Does the Homeland Begin,” which plays over the credits of the four-part film “The Shield and the Sword” about the Russian intelligence officer Alexander Belov / Johann Weiss.

Incidentally, the film itself is also one of my favorite war movies. Yes, in some ways it can be considered propaganda, and not all episodes made sense to me even as a child, but I still love it madly and rewatch it every few years. The book on which it is based, on the one hand, reveals the characters better, but on the other hand, it’s quite heavy and tedious. The film turned out much better. And it was the first film in which the very young Oleg Yankovsky starred, by the way.

In modern Russia, one of Mark Bernes’ songs, “Do the Russians Want War,” has been banned. This says much more about the memory of real history than all the showy veterans and parades.

And the song “Where Does the Homeland Begin” remains one of the best to this day and is constantly playing on my playlist.

Here is that song in the closing scenes of the first episode of the film:

Book: Igor Mozheiko “West Wind — Fair Weather”

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We often reproach Americans for supposedly knowing nothing about World War II, for thinking they “won it,” when without the Soviet Union Hitler wouldn’t have been defeated. Of course, that’s all true. But it’s just as true that we ourselves know very little about their side of the war.

What can most of us name off the top of our heads? The Normandy landings (which have been chewed over from every angle in movies and in dozens of games)… and then the meeting on the Elbe. Oh right — we might have heard something about Pearl Harbor, and that they fought the Japanese a little bit over there, and that the evil Americans dropped two nuclear bombs, and that was that.

As executive producers, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg decided to tell more of the war through American eyes. First, in 2001, they released Band of Brothers about combat in Europe. And nine years later, in 2010, they followed with The Pacific about a part of the war we barely know at all — because the Soviet Union didn’t take part in it, and so it simply wasn’t something people talked about. (And I very much recommend both series if you haven’t seen them.)

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Book: “White-Red-White. Flag. Nation. Identity”

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The publication in 2024 of a book about the white-red-white flag — or, as it is often called, the BChB (from the Belarusian bel-chyrvona-bely) — is rather symbolic. Once again, numerous myths and layers of dirt are being thrown at it, just as has happened periodically throughout its existence.

As an introduction, it’s worth noting that the white-red-white flag was the official flag of the Republic of Belarus from 1991 to 1995, as was the coat of arms “Pahonia,” rendered in the same colors (since, according to the approved designs, the red of the flag was meant to match the red of the coat of arms). Moreover, to this day these symbols are not formally banned in Belarus. However, in present-day Belarus one can receive a very real prison sentence for displaying them — and even for something as accidental as a white-and-red color combination, whether it’s socks or an LG TV box left on a balcony.

The book “Bel-Chyrvona-Bely” (published in Belarusian) is arguably the first full-fledged scholarly study of the origins of both the flag and the coat of arms, as well as of the color combination itself, released in the form of a substantial volume. I wouldn’t call it popular science — it is genuinely a thoroughly researched work by an entire collective of authors (who, unfortunately or perhaps fortunately for themselves, remain unnamed in the book). It is rich with illustrations, and all conclusions are supported by an extensive array of references, as one would expect from serious academic research.

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Book: Henry Lion Oldie “Invasion”

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About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Pavel Filatyev’s book, which was essentially an account of the first days of Russia’s war against Ukraine seen through the eyes of a Russian contract soldier. Even then, I wanted to believe that all this horror would soon be over.

But two years have already passed since Russia attacked Ukraine, and there’s still no end in sight. As a child, reading about the Great Patriotic War, I used to think that four years of that war was a whole lifetime. By that measure, Ukraine has already been at war for half a lifetime.

The initial shock has long since faded, and any hope of a quick ending is gone for good. And then a book came out by the remarkable Ukrainian authors Dmitry Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky, whom all fans of sci-fi know under the pen name Henry Lion Oldie.

Both authors are from Kharkiv — a city where, before the war, Russian was heard far more often than Ukrainian, even though its residents considered themselves Ukrainian. Before the war, Oldie were seen as purely Russian-language authors. They wrote in Russian, a language they command better than most Russians do.

But on February 24, 2022, war came to their home; Russian missiles and bombs began to fall on their city. And both of them, Dmitry and Oleg, started keeping a diary.

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