I can’t remember, or perhaps I have never known, how the idea to apply for a program at Mittag-Leffler was conceived. It could have been suggested by Björn Gustafsson, or perhaps Håkan Hedenmalm casually mentioned about this opportunity. Or maybe even Ari Laptev himself, after becoming director of the institute, suggested that Sasha writes a proposal.
Sasha got extremely enthusiastic about this possibility to organize a research semester at Mittag-Leffler. Even though by that time Sasha had already spent several years in Nor-way, he needed a stronger Scandinavian team. He secured support from Björn, Håkan and Nikolai Makarov, who is undoubtedly held in high regard in Sweden to this day.
Program’s organizers Håkan Hedenmalm, Nikolai Makarov, Sasha Vasiliev and Björn Gustafsson at Mittag-Leffler
Sasha’s core policy was always to take the initiative. He would write the first draft, and then the other team members would join in, completing the project with their ideas, agree-ing with the proposal or criticizagree-ing it. It happened this time, too. For a month, or maybe two, we did not talk about anything but this project at our home. Then the proposal was finally submitted, and we forgot about it for a year, while it was being forwarded between various evaluation committees and expert groups. Then they invited Sasha for an inter-view. I remember him being nervous, preparing for all possible questions, coming up with reasons why his program was so critically important and why Scandinavian mathematics would fall apart without it, and why it would flourish with new tremendous achievements if the program did take place. His confidence in doing the right thing convinced the people around him and ultimately led to success. Whenever he achieved something, he was happy as a child, and when he failed, he got sad, but luckily not for too long, never falling into depression. Instead he would soon get excited about another idea and move forward. This time he was not very happy about his interview: he did not give the best answers, could not find the right words, but he was thankful to Björn and Håkan, who supported him at the right moment and managed to turn the tide. The final decision was made in 2010, and Sasha spent the next year selecting and inviting participants to the program. One should note that this process had very non-trivial logistics, as he had to find room for everyone without offending anyone. Some participants did not want to share a house with other families, taking it as a personal insult, without realizing that almost everyone was going to live like that. Other participants kept moving the dates of their stay, and many did not reply to emails.
Once all those questions had been settled, we began looking forward to the quiet work in the library of Mittag-Leffler. But no, things don’t work that way! Attending a program
78 CHAPTER 8. MITTAG-LEFFLER AND CHILE and organizing it are two completely different experiences. As always, Sasha set an ambi-tious goal: “This program should become the most memorable one!” It was decided that on Tuesdays, after the seminar, the organizers would invite everyone to a cheese & wine party.
This meant that after lunch, Sasha put Zhora in his car, and they went to buy cheese, wine, fruit and crackers. Later, in the afternoon, other students would help to put refreshments on the tables. After the seminar, the participants were happy to grab a glass of wine.
As you know, mathematicians are not known for having even basic communication skills. Most of us are introverted, and making a mathematician participate in an informal conversation is a formidable task. It does not mean at all that mathematicians are awful bores. On the contrary, most of them are very interesting and are full of humor, although their sense of humor may be very peculiar. Wine helped to overcome the initial barriers and spark conversations, which lead to new acquaintances, ideas and sometimes even ro-mances. People would first gather at the round table in the middle of the room, and then they wandered away to all corners of the institute. As a rule, by the end of the cheese
& wine party, the blackboard of the seminar room was covered in formulas, interspersed with children’s drawings. From every corner one could hear discussions in many languages about distortions, differentials, white noise and other mathematical exotica. At the end of the party, already dead tired and falling asleep, we had to deal with the party aftermath, cleaning the room, because everything had to be ready for the next working day. On Fri-days, we arranged musical evenings, where cheese and wine were very welcome, but it was up to participants to bring them. People took Friday evenings even more serious. There was no shortage of wine, and cracker leftovers from Tuesday got eaten rather quickly.
We have a saying, “No matter what you do, a mathematician will do it better.” One can argue with that, but how many talented musicians participated in the program! Guitars were in great demand, but when someone sat down at the piano, it was absolutely breath-taking. If the mathematicians’ talents were lacking, their wives came to the rescue. They sang, played musical instruments, made small-talk, strengthened connections, and some-times just made sure that the mathematicians did not get carried away by a new scientific
Together with Sasha in the seminar room at Mittag-Leffler
SASHA’S SEMESTER AT MITTAG-LEFFLER 79 problem.
Sasha at the program organizer’s office
As a program organizer, Sasha got his own office, which he was very proud of. He loved antiquities, therefore the old furniture, books and paintings in the office had a magical effect on him. He was full of energy: he could spend the whole day with people, solving inevitably arising new problems, minor conflicts, disagreements, financial questions, while doing mathematics in between. It was only later, when we returned home to Norway, that he could relax, give in to his weaknesses and get sick for a month. I remember that participants liked to chat with Sasha in his office. People of course loved Sasha, but later I found out about another reason. Sasha kept a bottle of cognac in his desk, and he would often offer it to particularly tired and stressed out participants, to help them relax.
Almost every evening we either paid someone a visit, or arranged a small get-together at our place. Participants would also hang out with each other, go to theaters, walk in the nearby forests to pick mushrooms or without any particular purpose. The Russian com-ponent of the program held an informal competition in cooking mushrooms. Mushrooms were stir-fried, salted, pickled, put in soup. That year, there were tons of mushrooms in the forests around Stockholm, and we also picked them. Sasha managed to make time to salt and pickle them, and he also went to the store looking for jars and spices. The jars with pickled mushrooms were then stored in the fridge of the institute’s kitchen, something that the institute administrators remembered for many years.
Some program participants embarked on amusing adventures during the program. One of them forgot his suitcase at home and came to Stockholm for a month with only a laptop.
Or rather, it was that his big loud family forgot to put the suitcase in the car, which he only discovered when they got to the airport. As an emergency aid, Sasha took him to a store, where they bought him shoes and clothes for the next month. Another participant did not see the taxi waiting for him at the airport, and gave us a call already after midnight, asking for the address, because he could not remember where he had to go to. When he said that no one around him spoke English, we began to doubt whether he was at all at the Stockholm airport. The next morning, apparently still dealing with the shock of the previous night, he tried to enter the seminar room through the balcony door. Luckily, the director had the key in his pocket and opened the door for him. Everyone smiled, but then quickly returned to the talk. After all, this was a typical situation for a mathematician.
chapter 9 OUR PARTIES
It became customary that a lot of guests gathered at our place. Sasha was known for his warm hospitality. At least once a month someone would stay with us, either because they were traveling through the city we lived in, or because they specifically wanted to visit us.
When it comes to parties, we would throw them at least a couple of times a month. In Chile, at first it was only Víctor Gonzalez and Rubén Hidalgo with his wife who visited us. Víctor always told us a lot of interesting stories about Chile, introduced us to the local music and best restaurants not only in Viña del Mar but also other cities, which we visited for conferences or during our joint trips with him. Sasha and Rubén were great guitar players, and they liked to indulge in improvisation after a bottle of red wine. Then acharango(a small Peruvian guitar) appeared in our house, so when Rubén joined in playing the flute and his wife Betty played the guitar, it became a real orchestra.
Miguel, Cecilia and their family
Later we met Yulia Polyakova, a physicist from Moscow. She had a very interesting life story. I can’t remember exactly why she came to Chile, but she moved there not as a professional physicist, but as an ordinary immigrant, already in her middle years. She had to start all over from scratch, but eventually she got an hourly job at Santa María, then she graduated with a Master’s degree in history, and as far as I know, she is now fin-ishing her second history book. She introduced us to Alexander Zamyatnin, a Doctor of Science in physics, a famous bioinformatician, who worked with protein clas-sification, was an amazing pianist and always glowed with happiness.
Yulia also introduced us to a wonderful couple, Miguel and Cecilia, who had met each other and got married in Moscow, while studying there at the Peoples’
Friendship University. By the time we got acquainted, they had already been married for about 30 years, but still treated each other with infinite tenderness. For us, they set a good example of how one can stay loyal to each other throughout the years and keep the affection as warm as it was in the first years together. For Sasha, his parents were such an example, but for me, the story of Miguel and Cecilia was a reve-lation about romantic rereve-lationships. A little later, a Chinese couple who had spent 11 years in Chile, became another such example.
Somewhat later, a large group of physicists from Dubna appeared in our life, Sergey Kovalenko being first. We often got together, drank wine, grilled meat, discussed science and politics. Sergey and his wife Larisa, who was an excellent cook, became the life of our parties. With Larisa, boredom became a thing of the past for my mom. Sasha and Sergey would often lay out a Russian newspaper as a tablecloth, put Soviet faceted glasses on it, open a can of sprats in tomato sauce (where did they manage to find those!) with a small folding knife, and would engage in nostalgic conversations. When I asked if it was
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82 CHAPTER 9. OUR PARTIES necessary for the newspaper to be in Russian, they answered, “Yes, and ideally it should be Pravda.”
Sergey and Larisa Kovalenko with me and Dasha
Then came Boris Kopeliovich and his wife Irina Potashnikova, both physicists, a lovely couple. Boris used to tell us that he had come to Chile because of his dream to finish the ca-reer according the Russian song: “And on the shores of the Pacific Ocean his campaign came to an end.” After retirement, Boris decided to work in Chile and live by the Pacific Ocean, but then Irina began working, too, and they became the scientific core of the Department of Physics.
Boris always told us jokes, of which he knew an unlimited quantity, and he never told the same joke twice. Then their students followed them to Chile and formed a remarkable community.
Among them were Igor and Elena Kondrashuk, parents to a little baby girl. Elena helped us to look after our kids when we traveled to confer-ences, and Igor eventually transitioned from a physicist to a mathematician and is now work-ing in Chillán.
Sasha and José in Chile For a short time, even José and Sveta moved
from Colombia to Chillán. However, something didn’t go well at the school of their son David;
or perhaps after metropolitan Bogotá, Sveta did not like it in provincial Chillán, so they moved back to Colombia.
When we traveled to the south of Chile, we stayed at Sergey Trofimchuk’s, a Ukrainian mathematician who had built a huge house in Talca, where all sorts of guests liked to stay, too.
His very beautiful wife had to divide her time between her husband in Chile and her daugh-ters and ill mother in Kiev. And if Sergey hap-pened to be in Kiev, we stayed instead at the
huge European-style house of Philippe van Dijen and Ana Cecilia de la Masa. They are a great couple: on the surface, he looks like a very serious and cold Dutchman, but in truth, he is a very kind guy, full of humor. Ana Cecilia is an incredibly energetic and enterprising woman, whose ideas would be enough for ten people. They all came to Viña del Mar to visit us for Christmas in 2005. This was when Sasha came back for holidays from Norway and we announced to everyone that we were moving to Norway. It was unbearably sad to say good bye to those warm and people who had become our close friends. Many of them later visited us in Norway.
We also made a lot of friends in Santiago. We regularly met Rubí Rodríguez, Victor Cortéz, Rolando Ribolledo, Ricardo Baeza and Angél Carocca at Chilean conferences, and we also often visited each other’s seminars. Victor Cortéz kept coming up with plans to buy my dacha in Siberia, and Angél Carocca would often make fun of my Spanish, asking whether the Spanish word for compote is masculine or feminine. Do you think it was easy to remember that “compote” in Spanish isla compota, a feminine noun, and that “theorem”
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Sasha created a banner
and “lemma” suddenly both became masculine (el teoremaandel lema)?
When we lived in Miraflores, Sasha became passionate about Soviet music. Coming home from work, he would put on the Soviet national anthem, turn it up and go to the kitchen to cook dinner. I joked that the locals had long become convinced that their neigh-bors were KGB agents. To honor these new musical interests and the love of Miguel and Cecilia to the Soviet Union, we decided to hold a celebration of May Day. As the most prominent graffiti artist in our family, Stepan prepared banners, making sure to use au-thentic Soviet fonts, and Sasha chose the music and made the celebratory dinner. Cooking for him was always a way to relax, as he enjoyed it tremendously. Besides, he knew how to set the table beautifully, enjoying the anticipation of a tasty dinner, always accompanied by a bottle of good wine. On that May Day, around 15 Russian speakers gathered at our place, and we were reminiscing about our past demonstrations, and everything associated with this day, and it turned out that almost all of us viewed it as a celebration of springtime and youth, not as political activism.
Our second May Day celebration took place already in Norway, when several Russian speakers were visiting us. The community of Russian “Norwegians” had also grown signif-icantly by that time. Using the earlier experience and modern technology, we could afford to take it one step further.
The correct fonts for the banners were found by Sasha on the Internet, and a red table-cloth was received a couple of years earlier as a gift from our Israeli friends. Sasha found Brezhnev’s medals and put them on his jacket, proclaiming himself the General Secretary of the Party of Rabbits. To which Mark Agranovsky, who had recently returned from Australia and was still in love with kangaroos, declared himself the leader of the Party of Kangaroos, denouncing the one-party system.
We improvised a stage for the leaders and covered it with red satin. The masses (our guests) were passing by the stage, cheering to the dear leaders. The leaders did not
disap-84 CHAPTER 9. OUR PARTIES point, either, as they had prepared greetings for all the demonstrating groups.
Among the represented groups, there were emancipated female workers – women wear-ing revolutionary red headscarves, armed with saucepans, soup ladles and other means of emancipated labor. There was also a column of Latin American agricultural workers, who arrived on broomstick horses, wearing ponchos and sombreros. A column of toy factory workers also marched past the leaders (we have plenty of plush toys in our house). There were plans to organize a column of briefcase-carrying intelligentsia and similar elements, but after passing by the stage, the masses took unnecessarily long breaks at the tavern
“Under the Branchy Mandarin”, where they were served beer for relaxation, so we had to proceed to the second part of the program:shashlik, skewered grilled meat.
All the participants were very enthusiastic about the celebration. Some brought their own banners, others brought revolutionary forage caps, flags and balloons. Soon after the beginning of the party, our worker Dima arrived, bringing construction supplies in his van, which was strangely evocative of the famous episode with Lenin carrying a log.
Three professors of the University of Bergen resting after beer tasting (Irina Markina, Sasha Vasiliev, Fedor Fomin)
Norway is a wonderful country, but it is way too expensive, especially when it comes to products with the smell of alcohol. Sasha got excited about homebrewing after five years of his acquaintance with Mathias Ziegler, a fan-tastic German biologist with Russian education, working at the University of Bergen. As always, he took brewing seriously, applying almost sci-entific accuracy. He found a bunch of recipes on the Internet, received initial training from Mathias, bought containers, bottles, caps, other accessories, while giving me a dozen of lectures about the the secrets of beer production. In such way, he learned the details himself. Finally, he
Party leaders: Sasha Vasiliev (Party of Rabbits) and Mark Agranovsky (Party of Kangaroo)
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The columns of happy laborers and Latin American peasants
made some beer. The result was beyond all ex-pectations! Not only was the beer excellent, but it was also ten times cheaper than the beer in the supermarkets, even though Sasha always claimed that it is not the price that matters, but his love for beer, as well as the pure water on our island.
With time, he greatly broadened his beer offering, and even tried to malt grain himself.
The experiments were not always successful. We filmed once a depressing video where we had to dispose of 30 liters of not-so-good beer. Once we spent a whole day on the Internet looking for tips on improving beer, from adding lemon to boiling the beer with cinnamon
Sasha at the tavern “Under the Branchy Mandarin”. Mark Agranovsky and Victor Gichev carrying a log.