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. (more…)