Fear and Obsessions

Prosaist Elena Chizhova is a master of psychological prose, the author of the novels "Time of Women" (Russian Booker Prize), "The Master of Things", "The Terracotta Old Woman", "Orest and Son", and others. In the novel "Fear and Obsessions", the narrative is nonlinear and multilayered, intertwining reality both real and imagined. The main character, a writer from St. Petersburg, goes to an international conference. Her plane makes an emergency landing at an unknown airport. Unexpected twists give rise to new literary characters in her imagination and evoke long-forgotten events from the depths of her memory. The invented people become more real than the actual: a professional historian who made a career as a bureaucrat; an unsuccessful actress who fervently dreams of a lead role; and even a fantastic knight and bishop — each of them has their own life, history, and their own judgments, which sometimes differ from the author's. This is a novel about how reality can be distorted in the eyes of a person, about how fear, seizing a restless consciousness, gives rise to strange obsessions that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get rid of.