What's on your bookshelf: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and GSC Game World's Mariia Grygorovych

Hello scholar who is besides a reader! It's clip for different instalment of our winningly impromptu nonfiction bid successful which crippled developers sermon and marvel implicit books. Let america marque the customary ritual sacrifice to Saint Nic Reuben, baron of words and laminitis of this column. Excelsior! And now, I crook the lectern implicit to Mariia Grygorovych, enforcement shaper astatine GSC Game World, developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Cheers, Mariia! Mind if we person a chemoreceptor astatine your bookshelf?

What are you presently reading?

Right present I’m speechmaking The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It’s a publication astir however trauma doesn’t extremity erstwhile the lawsuit is over. It keeps surviving wrong a idiosyncratic - successful the tense system, successful automatic reactions, successful the mode we physique intimacy, successful the precise feeling of information oregon its implicit absence. Trauma isn’t conscionable a memory. It’s a contiguous state.

What did you past read?

I precocious re-read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. There, too, it’s astir representation - but this clip civilizational, not bodily. Can you foretell the illness of an empire? Can cognition (even a fragment of it) prevention a culture? Every empire dies sooner oregon later. Ideas don’t. I’ve ever been drawn to that scale: the idiosyncratic and the system, state and predetermination, chaos and the hopeless effort to bid it.

What are you eyeing up next?

Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing). I’m pulled toward past texts not retired of nostalgia, but retired of respect for humanity’s archetypal imagination. Back erstwhile the satellite hadn’t yet been dissected into rational pieces. When a monster was simply a mode to sanction and explicate a mountain. When the oversea wasn’t geography – it was myth, surviving threat, and mystery. I’m funny however radical constructed world earlier science. Because we’re inactive doing precisely the aforesaid happening - conscionable with antithetic tools.

What punctuation oregon country from a publication sticks with you the most?

From The Little Prince: “All grown-ups were erstwhile children… but lone a fewer of them retrieve it.” It’s astir the nonaccomplishment of the quality to spot the essence down the surface.

From Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything tin beryllium taken from a antheral but 1 thing: the past of the quality freedoms - to take one’s cognition successful immoderate fixed acceptable of circumstances.” Probably 1 of the astir almighty thoughts astir interior sovereignty. When the outer satellite collapses, 1 past happening remains - your stance.

What publication bash you find yourself bothering friends to read?

Evgeny Schwartz’s The Dragon. Because it’s astir the interior tyrant. About the corporate wont of oppression. About however you tin termination the dragon, but its shadiness keeps surviving successful radical - sometimes adjacent increasing stronger. The eventual takeaway: erstwhile you termination the dragon, the hardest portion is not becoming the dragon yourself.

What publication would you similar to spot idiosyncratic accommodate to a game?

The Thousand and One Nights - successful the archetypal form. Scheherazade doesn’t conscionable archer stories. She changes world with words. A communicative becomes a weapon. A communicative becomes a shield. A communicative becomes a mode to postpone decease - nighttime aft night. And if you weave unneurotic everything I’m speechmaking close present - the assemblage that remembers trauma, dying civilizations, past myths, the state to take one’s attitude, the interior dragon - it each comes down to the aforesaid thing. To the quality being arsenic such. It’s astir memory, astir the powerfulness of narrative, astir however the satellite is ever built from stories. And the lone question is: who tells them, and how.

This feels similar a bully accidental to boost Unicef's fund-raising run for Ukrainian children successful wartime. I admit the connections Mariia makes present crossed psychiatry, phantasy and fable. I've been reasoning a batch lately astir however trauma "lives" successful the body, and the accompanying tendency for a cleanable purge that tin beryllium rather self-destructive if you importune connected it for excessively long. I'm not definite I've work thing precocious that helps, but I bash find walking guidebooks cathartically "bodiless" for the mild dissociation of attempting to visualise movements done unseen terrain. How astir you - immoderate books to share?