“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” by Anthony Marra (Hogarth, 400 pgs., $26)

Six years after starting to think about Chechnya, the disputed Russian republic that became the setting for his acclaimed new novel, Anthony Marra visited for the first time last summer, signing up on the Internet for something called “The Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour.”

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said recently. “It could have been a gigantic scam, but as it turned out, I could not have been treated better.”

He traveled with a guide and talked to Chechens, many of whom, he said, were still trying to recover from years of war and occupation.

While in Chechnya, though, Marra discovered that he had made a factual error in the book, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” (Hogarth), which was published this month: The first escalator there was not installed until 2007, when it became a sort of tourist attraction.

So Marra had to do some escalator-elimination in the final draft. Otherwise, he found that his knowledge of Chechnya, gleaned mostly from books, held up. From journalistic accounts, he learned details like how the Chechens would upend toilet bowls over unexploded artillery shells. For a grisly amputation scene, he read medical journals and watched YouTube videos.

“Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of,” Marra said. “It can be one of the real joys of writing. Someone once said, ‘Don’t write what you know, write what you want to know.’”

He added: “But to make a book convincing, it’s less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real. I did the best I could to make the environment and the setting as realistic as possible, but I hope it’s the characters and the emotional reality that make the book true.”

Marra is 28 but seems simultaneously older and younger. He has an earnest, boyish manner, yet his hair is already flecked with gray. He has yet to finish writing school — he is finishing up the second year of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford — but has already published a book, and, unusual for a first novel, it is purely a work of research and invention, without even a hint of autobiography.

Until the Boston Marathon bombings most Americans paid little attention to Chechnya. Over lunch at a New York restaurant recently, Marra said that his own interest began during an undergraduate semester studying in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2006.

He arrived not long after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who exposed Russian atrocities in Chechnya. At a metro stop near his apartment, he would see Russian veterans of the Chechen wars hanging out, drinking and begging for change.

“Chechnya was sort of in the ether then,” he said, “but I realized that like most Americans, I didn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t know where it was on the map. I didn’t know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn’t even sure how to spell Chechnya.”

‘Life’ in Russian

“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” — the title comes from the definition of “life” in a Russian medical dictionary — mostly takes place during just five days in 2004, during the second Chechen war, but every other chapter toggles back to 10 years earlier, during the first war, and within the chapters there are flashbacks and sometimes flash-forwards to a time decades in the future.

The novel tells several interlocking stories, mostly about ordinary Chechens simply trying to stay out of the way of the Russian occupiers, on the one hand, and the rebel insurgents, on the other; it is a tossup which faction is more brutal. The main characters are a pair of doctors — one famously incompetent, the other a resolute female surgeon trying to keep an abandoned hospital going practically by herself — who are protecting a young girl from Russians who have already abducted her father.

Dwight Garner, writing in The New York Times, called the book “ambitious and intellectually restless.” Another fan is Sarah Jessica Parker, who in a review for Entertainment Weekly described it as “full of humanity and hope.”

Mature writer

One of Marra’s teachers at Stanford, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson, said that he arrived on campus “fully formed.”

“I don’t know how much credit we can take for Tony,” Johnson said. “Most people his age are still learning the conventions, the traditions, the craft, and here he is leveraging the full power of the novel. When I was writing my first novel I was struggling with conventional realism, traditional structure, but he has abandoned all that right out of the gate. He looks like a very mature writer, with profound concerns, at the height of his powers.”

Marra grew up in Washington, where both his parents were corporate lawyers. He was an unambitious, “solid B” student, he said, smiling, and didn’t discover novels until he was caddying one summer at a country club in Chevy Chase, Md., and needed to pass the time waiting in the caddie yard for a loop.

He took a year off between high school and college, during which he worked in a UPS store, missed his girlfriend and began writing short stories about a lovelorn guy working in the same store.

“One of them had three pages on a single kiss,” he said.

But Marra no longer has much interest in autobiographical fiction.

“I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable,” he said. “My parents are happily married. There haven’t been any major traumas. I’m not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.”

While an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, he began writing a historical novel, 250 words a day, about, of all things, Bobby Sands and the 1981 hunger strike at Long Kesh.

“It will never see the light of day,” Marra said emphatically, but added that the book sprang from a preoccupation with religious and political violence.

“I was a junior in high school when 9/11 happened,” he explained, “and I’ve spent my entire adult life in a world where terror is present in a way it may not have been before.”