★ Winner of the 2021 "Image of the Book" Award!
★ Winner in the Children & Teenagers category of the 2021 Russian Publishers Association "Book of the Year" Award!
★ Third Place in the 2024 non/fiction Book Fair Illustrator Competition!
★ Selected for the International Independent Festival of Illustration and Visual Literature MORS's "100 Best Books of the Decade"!
★ All riddles are selected from the classic collection "Russian Folk Riddles" by folklorist Sadovnikov. The illustrations blend the spirit of folk art with modern visual language, featuring uniquely hand-drawn playful fonts.
★ Interactive lift-the-flap design transforms "reading" instantly into "play"! Enhances concentration and logic, stimulates creative thinking, offers delightful visual experiences – interactive and collectible!
★ English translation available.

Opening this book is like opening a window to the wisdom of Russian folklore. Ordinary everyday objects suddenly become magical in these riddles: a road that carries two kinds of footsteps simultaneously, a single hat shared by four brothers, a head that grows a belly button... They are more than just logic puzzles; they are codes through which ancient people dialogued with the world.
All the riddles in this book are selected from the 19th-century folklorist Dmitry Nikolayevich Sadovnikov's compilation "Russian Folk Riddles" – the most complete and authoritative version to date. To make these century-old words come alive again, the artist Zina Surova uses her signature bright colors and playful lines to translate the spirit of folk art into a modern visual language.
The reading experience is designed as a "slow surprise": a riddle illustration on the left page, and a concealed small flap on the right page – don't rush to lift it. Let your eyes and mind wander together, allowing the answer to slowly emerge in your imagination. If you're still unsure, gently lift the flap, and the answer leaps out in pictorial form, delivering an "aha!" moment of understanding.
Thus, this book possesses a dual rhythm: it can be a storybook for parent-child reading, or an interactive toy for children to play with on their own; it pays homage to folk traditions while opening its arms to contemporary creativity.

[Author & Illustrator] Zina Surova
A creator who is an author, illustrator, and designer all in one. She conceives and produces books together with her husband, the designer Filipp Surov. To date, they have collaboratively published over twenty types of children's books and educational board games. Surova loves nature, enjoys forests, boating, and playing with children. She has personally planted more than a hundred trees and spent her childhood and teenage years by the sea in Sevastopol. Her parents founded a local art school there, and her father often read to her and accompanied her in studies. This rich childhood experience is like a treasure trove, continuously nourishing her creations.

Surova adheres to a holistic creative philosophy, believing a book is not just about illustrations, but the organic unity of concept, text, design, and imagery. She is committed to allowing readers – both children and adults – to immerse themselves in the world of a book as if entering a house or a magical country. She excels at flexibly choosing various media for creation based on the theme of different projects, including acrylics, watercolors, pen, colored cardboard, pencils, ink, and even comprehensively using materials like clay, metal, and wood to suit the unique character of each work.

She particularly regrets the common abandonment of illustrations in adult books and advocates for illustrating literary classics, imagining how works by authors like Joyce, Pavić, or Kafka would be even more captivating with illustrations. Her representative works include the children's books "Find It," "Use Your Brain," "Attack, Universe!," "Summer in the Countryside," "Kite Tea Party," and the board game "Forest Path," among others. She also fulfilled a childhood dream by creating "Who Has a Belly Button on Their Head? A Collection of Russian Brain-Teasing Riddles." For this book, she not only illustrated the folk riddles and handled the overall design but also handwrote the riddles and designed interactive mechanisms to hide the answers. The illustrations for this book were inspired by folk art, but she emphasizes conceptual absorption and re-creation rather than repeating traditional styles.

[Honors]
2021: Won the "Image of the Book" Award for illustrations in "Who Has a Belly Button on Their Head? A Collection of Russian Brain-Teasing Riddles."
2021: Received the Russian Publishers Association "Book of the Year" Certificate in the Children & Teenagers category.
2024: Received a non/fictio№ "Illustrator" Competition Certificate.
2024: Longlisted in the non/fictio№ "Illustrator" Competition ("Attack, Universe!").
2021: Won the International "Image of the Book" Award, Grand Prize in the "Author's Book" category for illustrations in "A Leaf, a Feather, Blue."
2025: Received a non/fictio№ "Illustrator" Competition Certificate, recognizing her unique practice of continuing the golden tradition of "Detskaya Literatura" (Children's Literature publishing house) in children's books ("A Leaf, a Feather, Blue").
2025: Finalist in the Children's Book Unit of the DAFES AWARDS ("A Leaf, a Feather, Blue").