I consciously did not write much about what Irina looked like, for example. I think we’re supposed to believe that’s always a huge central concern of a woman’s inner life—but I didn’t think it would be for Irina because, though she’s vain, her vanity lies elsewhere. Frankly, she’s got bigger things to worry about. Similarly, we often see women’s storylines resolve with a romantic relationship, which I didn’t want for Irina—not because there’s anything inherently uninteresting about that resolution, but because I just didn’t think that that would be responsive to the questions Irina and her storyline were posing. 

RY: Why did you choose the novel form to tackle this story?

JD: Both Irina and Aleksandr’s stories seemed to be too large to try to shove into a short story. Aleksandr’s arc covers thirty years and a very circuitous moral and professional journey, so I never imagined him as belonging in anything other than a novel. Irina’s voice did originally emerge in a bit of writing I might have been thinking of as a story, but the questions she was confronting quickly came to seem pretty novelistic in scope. Neither character’s story wound up feeling to me like it could have been served by a smaller canvas.

RY: Why Russia? Why chess? Could you talk a bit about the generation of the idea for the novel?

A: In talking about this book, I’ve realized how hard it is to really explain why something fascinates you. I honestly don’t have a very good answer to this. I played chess occasionally growing up, but I did a lot of things occasionally growing up. I went to Russia briefly as a child, but I was lucky enough to go to a lot of places briefly as a child. I’m very interested in geopolitics generally, and I suppose there’s a way in which Russia and all the post-Communist countries seem to inhabit a sort of parallel European universe. The borders of the former USSR run along one of those geographic fault lines that seem to divide history into two alternate versions of itself. But, really, everywhere is like that, to one degree or another. And there are countless numbers of places recovering from interesting, awful ideologies of various sorts, and obviously many countries currently engaged in democratic struggles even more dramatic than Russia’s. So I don’t really know.