It feels good more than ever to read Russian authors, especially when they are contemporary. It clears your head of all the clichés endlessly thrown around in the media. Russians this, Russians that – it’s the same with Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and all people; generalization is a poverty of the spirit, fortunately literature is there to counter its effects. Elena Tchijova’s book is first and foremost a literary work, that is to say a style, a construction, an assembly of words and sentences creating a world, atmospheres, feelings in the reader, sensations. It is then the story of three main characters, living in Saint Petersburg: Anna, her mother and her son. Anna was a teacher and today she is a cleaning lady in her fifties, at the bottom of the social ladder, where she struggles to exist in the eyes of others. His tyrannical mother experienced the terrible siege of Leningrad as a child and she keeps the details of her life secret. The son grew up without a father and without friends, he is a geek, he wants to design a video game that will make him rich and famous. The book begins on March 18, 2014, the day Crimea was annexed by Russia. Anna’s mother loses her mind, mixes her memories of the war with negative comments about Russian actions in Ukraine, her grandson records her and broadcasts his grandmother’s monologues on the internet, which does not will not be without consequences. It is of course a book about secrets, about guilt, individual and collective. But we can also see in The Great Game characters struggling in existences whose rules they have not defined themselves, and we then ask ourselves the question: what does it mean for ourselves?
Elena Tchijova talks about her book
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