Remember Grisha Perelman, Russian mathematician who declined the Fields medal in mathematics? At first I thought he was a nut—a familiar caricature of a quirky mathematics professor, riven by social anxiety, unable to hold a conversation, or tie his shoelaces. A Russian version of Bobby Fisher or John Nash, maybe even Ted Kozinski, who will eventually drop off the face of the earth only to be found years later and hauled away in handcuffs as he mumbled incoherently. After all, who in his right mind would not jump on the opportunity of fame and riches (and in Russia, $500,000 is definitely riches) that go along with winning the Fields prize in mathematics? Only someone mentally unstable.

For all I know, Grisha Perelman may have been all that—a nutty Russian eccentric. But as I read more about him, he seemed more and more familiar. Actually, the more I read, the more I found myself feeling nostalgic for people like him, people I used to know in Russia in the 70’s—writers, poets, artists, musicians, physicists. They lived in the rarefied world of ideas, completely removed from cares for success defined by money and fame. They gathered in tiny kitchens around cramped tables to drink tea, smoke cigarettes, argue, recite poetry, sing underground songs, exchange latest news of travails with the Soviet bureaucracy, and talk about big ideas. Troubles with the bureaucracy, being denied publication, or having a movie premiere canceled by the censors was their badge of honor, their status symbol. They lived in the forgotten world of pure intellectual and spiritual freedom that seems only possible in a totalitarian state where ideas is the only escape and only reward. This is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn talked about when he said that the freest he ever felt was in the Gulag. I guess the only regime more repressive, and at the same time more free than the Soviet regime, was the Soviet prison regime. In the Gulag there is nothing more one can lose, nothing much to aspire to. One can experience the kind of spiritual, almost ascetic freedom that is hard to imagine in a society in which there is so much to lose—good jobs, money, possessions, celebrity status.

The best and the brightest could not possibly succeed in the Soviet Union unless they did such unsavory things as joined the Communist Party, bribed or betrayed someone along the way. And of course, they couldn’t be Jewish, that a priori denied one entry into the official Soviet elite. And what did success mean anyway? A few more rubles? Opportunity to spend vacations at a special resort for Party members? Ensuring your child’s entry into a university? Ability to travel abroad on measly Soviet allowance? Horizons for success were limited and hardly worth the effort. Nothing compared to the Fields prize.

Instead, the people like Perelman built their own worlds. They created, invented, wrote for the pure pleasure of it. What did that gain them? Besides the pleasure of creation, ability to be a part of a circle of the best of the Russian intelligentsia. Succeeding in any traditional sense—being published, getting high level jobs, being rewarded with trips overseas meant selling out. Often it led to exclusion from the circle. Despite their lack of recognition and often persecution by the state, intellectuals like Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Sakharov served as a beacon for the rest of the progressive Russian society. They set the moral tone and gave a model for the rest to aspire to. They were heroes of my youth. My high school circle of friends fashioned ourselves after them—we were intellectuals, reading, debating, and in many cases, imitating their lives. They, rather than Bill Gates or Paris Hilton, were our paragons of success.

I find myself looking for people like them when I go back to the new Russia. But they are a dying breed, harder and harder to find in the new country filled with opportunity, possibilities of unheard of riches, and new success stories. My artist friend in Moscow whose tiny apartment was filled with exquisite avant garde paintings he could not get government permission to exhibit? He is making money doing portraits of the “new Russians”, the latter a much more extravagant version of the Soviet Communist Party elite. My friend who played violin in the symphony? She is busy playing the restaurant scene in the evenings. My poet friend? He is doing accounts payable for health companies in New York.

I don’t blame them, at least no more than I blame myself for living in California in a nice house and not in a run-down communal apartment in Russia. I just miss these people, that world, those ideas, and the kind of freedom that emerged in the most unlikely of places, a totalitarian state. And Grisha Perelman? He may yet turn out to be another Bobby Fisher. I am hoping, however, that he is just an anachronism of the old world who managed to wash up on the shores of the new Russia.

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