For the 2026 Winter Conference, we are featuring a series of interviews with the authors of Reacting Games being played at the event. For our second interview, David Harris sat down with Dr. Linda Mayhew, author of Russian Literary Journals, which recently went to publication with UNCP this year. 

 I’ll start off with the most basic question, how did you get introduced to Reacting to the Past?

It was with Larry Carver and Paul Sullivan. Larry Carver was the director, the former director, of the program I work at in Liberal Arts Honors here at the University of Texas at Austin. And Paul Sullivan is the co-author of the Shakespeare and Marlowe game. And so Paul was, at the time, stepping down from his position in Liberal Arts Honors, and they wanted someone to come in and teach Reacting. They reached out to me about the position and said it involves teaching, come visit a class and see what you think. And I was like, okay, sure, I'm interested.

I still remember, sitting in that classroom – and it was 16 years ago – it was the Athens game, the student was the Herald, and she was had her pig sacrifice, and she was walking around the room sprinkling pieces of paper everywhere. And I was kind of confused, but so intrigued. And then, you know, there was just this amazing debate and discussion with the students, and I just kind of fell in love with that idea of constant interaction in a classroom.

So, to someone who's not really familiar with Russian history, what is this game about? What classes is it a really good fit for?

The game is really about different writers and trying to publish at a time when there is censorship and some intense debate about how Russia can move forward. So there's a lot of discussion about different political structures, the Russo-Turkic war, and how involved Russia should be with other countries and the issues that they have going on. There's a big discussion about how Russia relates to Western Europe, and so those are kind of all these things that are happening in the country right now.

And what the game is looking at is, how do authors, how do people talk about this or write about it when there is censorship and some of these things are not legal to publish about? You're not allowed to criticize the Tsar, or, you know, be very critical about anything that's going on. There's a list of rules that's something like 10 pages long of what's acceptable.

I think that people who aren't wanting to teach a class about Russia would still find use for the game if they're wanting to look at writing, that's the big thing. Almost everyone in the game is a writer, and so students in their roles have a lot of opportunity to play around with different kinds of writing. They can do editorials, they can do different kinds of creative writing. If they want to do poetry or short stories, there's a way to work that in. And then there's also traditional literary analysis or historical essays that students could do as well.

So it's really adaptable for whoever's using the game to like focus on some kinds of writing or the others, and the game book has all different all kinds of examples of those different kinds of writings in there for students to work on. But I also think it would be good for people that are wanting to look at literature in context or to place an influential author like Dostoevsky in a social, political, and historical context.

Do American students kind of struggle with adapting to writing under censorship as they have to do in the game? Or are there any other interesting student reactions to the social situation in 19th century Russia?

Well, it's we've had some interesting conversations with students who are making connections between what was happening in 19th century Russia and what's happening in contemporary Russia. You see the continued influence of religion, the clamping down on rights and things in contemporary Russia. You can see some clear parallels in that.

But the censorship, what I think is hard for students – I think the tendency is to see it like, “Oh, I'm not allowed to say this, so I'm just not going to try and say this.” And so as an instructor, you have to kind of nudge them. “But maybe, what could you say? That is a little bit of a gray area that you know – do you want to push the boundaries in that case?” And so that's something that they get to play around with.

So obviously, your game includes a veritable who's who of the Russian literary scene in the late 19th century, names that most people are familiar with, like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. But with that said, Who's your favorite character in your game?

I really like almost all of the female characters in my game, because those are people that aren't talked about as much. One of my favorites is Elena Shtakenshneider, who is the hostess of the literary salon – I just really like her. She hosting this literary salon and bringing all these writers together. So obviously she's like an important figure in that way. But she also wrote these huge, or very lengthy, at least, memoirs about her salon. Because they were like personal memoirs and she wasn't trying to publish them at the time, they weren't censored at all. But they're this great history looking back on how hard it was for writers to sometimes publish; how arbitrary some of those decisions were, how easy it could be to attract the attention of a committee that would reprimand you.

I also love some of the female revolutionaries, and I think they would be really fun to play, because they're just so dedicated to their cause. They’re willing to do just about anything for the larger goal that they have, for a more fair government, and a more equal Russia.

Speaking of doing anything to make a better Russia, as it were, how often do students try and assassinate Alexander II in the game?

Almost always there is always someone who has tries. The radicals try really hard to make that happen. And the game is designed so they have a good chance of success, because that is what was happening historically. There's a lot of information out there about the eight or nine different assassination attempts on Alexander II before they finally succeeded. But they can easily be foiled if they get infiltrated by people that are not sympathetic to their point of view.

So the way the game works, many of the radical revolutionaries are working very covertly, and they don't talk about what they're trying to do very often in class. They don't lay that out there for everyone, because they know if they talk about it, there could be a censor overhearing things who then flags them for something. So for some of the students, it is really a surprise when that assassination attempt happens that they weren't expecting it, because that hasn't been part of the debates.

Are you going to be the game author who finally writes the Russian Revolution game for Reacting?

I don't know. If I did it, I would sort of do it through like a literary lens. There is a game I'm helping co-author now that set in the 1905 Russian Revolution. And that's the Markov versus Nekrasov game that Chad Curtis is working on and Sungju Moon, one of his colleagues at Nevada State. I'm helping to translate some of the documents that aren't available in English, that are just in Russian, and then also add a literature component to what's really a game about statistics.

But that's the 1905 Revolution, so I don't know about the 1917 one. That may just have to remain the Reacting white whale for now.

Are there any other projects, Reacting or otherwise, that you are working on at the moment?

I have some other ideas for some smaller reacting games. There's one I’m working on about artists at the same time period that's called The Wanderers. That came out of this game, broadening to look at the visual arts – I just think it would be fun to examine the art from the period a little more.  

I would also like to translate the memoirs of Elena Shtakenshneider more fully, because there's so much interesting information in there – I only ended up using small fragments for the game. And so I've been kind of playing around with the idea of translating all of that. I think her memoirs might need annotations for somebody who wasn't already knowledgeable about that time period, to help people appreciate all her references and literary connections in there.

If you want to try out Russian Literary Journals for yourself, and find out about the exciting changes coming in Reacting 3.0, be sure to sign up for the Reacting Consortium's 2026 Winter Conference before December 21st!