CANR
WORK TITLE: She Lover of Death
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CITY: Moscow
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COUNTRY: Russian Federation
NATIONALITY: Georgian
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2011
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PERIODICALS
Booklist vol. 116 no. 12 Feb. 15, 2020, Michele Leber, “She Lover of Death.”. p. 34.
Kirkus Reviews Jan. 15, 2020, , “Akunin, Boris: SHE LOVER OF DEATH.”.
Publishers Weekly vol. 267 no. 1 Jan. 6, 2020, , “She Lover of Death: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin.”. p. 23.
Washington Post Feb. 8, 2019, Drabelle, Dennis. , “Book World: A literary butler that makes Downton’s Carson seem positively fancy free.”.
Kirkus Reviews Sept. 15, 2018, , “Akunin, Boris: THE CORONATION.”.
Publishers Weekly vol. 265 no. 53 Dec. 24, 2018, , “The Coronation: A Fandorin Mystery.”. p. 42.
Kirkus Reviews May 1, 2017, , “Akunin, Boris: THE STATE COUNSELLOR.”.
Publishers Weekly vol. 264 no. 15 Apr. 10, 2017, , “The State Counsellor: A Fandorin Mystery.”.
ONLINE
Grimdark, https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com (November 25, 2020), review of Not Saying Goodbye
Boris Akunin
(Grigori Tchkhartichvili)
Russia (b.1956)
Boris Akunin was born in Tbilisi, in the Republic of Georgia, as Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili. His father was Georgian and his mother was Jewish, since 1958 he has lived in Moscow. Influenced by Japanese Kabuki theatre, he joined the historical-philological branch of the Institute of the Countries of Asia and Africa of the Moscow State University as an expert on Japan.Before he embarked on a life of crime writing, Grigory Chkhartishvili worked as an assistant to the editor-in-chief of the magazine Foreign Literature, but left in October 2000 to pursue a career as a fiction writer.
Genres: Historical Mystery
Series
Erast Fandorin
1. The Winter Queen (2003)
2. The Turkish Gambit (2004)
3. Murder on the Leviathan (2004)
aka Leviathan
4. The Death of Achilles (2005)
5. Special Assignments (2007)
6. The State Counsellor (2008)
7. The Coronation (2009)
8. She Lover of Death (2009)
9. He Lover of Death (2010)
10. The Diamond Chariot (2011)
11. All The World's A Stage (2017)
12. Black City (2018)
13. Not Saying Goodbye (2019)
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Sister Pelagia
1. Pelagia and the White Bulldog (2006)
2. Pelagia and the Black Monk (2007)
aka Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk
3. Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (2008)
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To Kill a Serpent in the Shell (2018)
Boris Akunin
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Shalvovich and the family name is Chkhartishvili.
Boris Akunin
Akunin in 2013
Akunin in 2013
Born Grigory Chkhartishvili
20 May 1956 (age 68)
Zestaponi, Georgian SSR, Soviet Union
Pen name Anatoly Brusnikin, Anna Borisova, Akunin-Chkhartishvili
Occupation Writer, journalist, translator
Citizenship Russia
Alma mater Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University
Period 1980s–present
Genre detective and historical fiction
Notable works Erast Fandorin series
Website
www.akunin.ru
Grigori Chkhartishvili (Russian: Григорий Шалвович Чхартишвили, romanized: Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili; Georgian: გრიგორი ჩხარტიშვილი), better known by his pen name Boris Akunin (Russian: Борис Акунин, born 20 May 1956), is a Georgian-Russian[1] writer residing in the United Kingdom. He is best known as a writer of historical fiction, specifically his Erast Fandorin novels. He is also an essayist and literary translator. Grigory Chkhartishvili has also written under pen names Anatoly Brusnikin, Anna Borisova, and Akunin-Chkhartishvili.[2] His characters include Erast Fandorin, Nicholas Fandorin and Sister Pelagia.
Early life
Chkhartishvili was born on 20 May 1956 in Zestaponi to a Georgian father and a Jewish mother. He moved to Moscow in 1958.[3]
Career
Moscow International Book Fair 2013
Chkhartishvili worked as assistant to the editor-in-chief of the magazine Foreign Literature, but left in October 2000 to pursue a career as a fiction writer.[3]
Influenced by Japanese kabuki theatre, he joined the historical-philological branch of the Institute of Asian and African Countries of Moscow State University as an expert on Japan. He was engaged in literary translation from Japanese and English. Japanese authors Yukio Mishima, Kenji Maruyama, Yasushi Inoue, Masahiko Shimada, Kobo Abe, Shinichi Hoshi, Takeshi Kaiko, Shohei Ooka were published in his translation, as well as representatives of American and English literature (T. C. Boyle, Malcolm Bradbury, Peter Ustinov, etc.).
Under his given name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, he was editor-in-chief of the 20-volume Anthology of Japanese Literature, chairman of the board of a large "Pushkin Library”, and is the author of the book The Writer and Suicide (Moscow, The New Literary Review, 1999). He has also contributed literary criticism and translations from Japanese, American, and English literature under his own name.[3]
He publishes other critical and documentary works under his real name.
Since 1998 he has been writing fiction under the pseudonym “B. Akunin", decoding "B" as "Boris". "Akunin" (悪人) is a Japanese word that translates to "great bad man". In his novel The Diamond Chariot, the author redefines an "akunin" as a great evil man who creates his own rules.[3]
Under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, he has written many works of fiction, mainly novels and stories in the series The Adventures of Erast Fandorin, The Adventures of Sister Pelagia, The Adventures of the Master (following Nicholas Fandorin, Erast's grandson), all published in Russia by Zakharov Books, and the Roman-Kino ("Novel-Film") series set during World War I. Akunin's specialty is historical mysteries set in Imperial Russia. It was only after the first books of the Fandorin series were published to critical acclaim that the identity of B. Akunin (i.e., Chkhartishvili) was revealed.[citation needed]
Akunin lived in Moscow until 2014.[3] He has since lived in Britain, France, and Spain.[citation needed] As of 2024 he is living in London.[4]
Recognition
Chkhartishvili has been called by Igor Pomerantsev the "undisputed champion" of Russian crime fiction, given that as Boris Akunin he "has written more than a dozen crime novels and has been widely appreciated by discerning readers ... and has been translated into many languages."[5]
Political views
Akunin at a rally-concert in support of Alexei Navalny during his 2013 mayoral campaign
Akunin has been critical of Vladimir Putin's domestic and foreign policies since the invasion of Georgia[6][7] and the annexation of Crimea.[8]
Akunin participated in a fundraiser in 2022 to benefit Russians accused of "discrediting" the Russian army under the Russian 2022 war censorship laws.[9]
In December 2023, the pranksters Vovan and Lexus called Akunin and Dmitry Bykov, pretending to be representatives of the Ukrainian Government, and released the recordings of Akunin and Bykov expressing their support for Ukraine. The response in Russia was negative: many Russian publishing booksellers, including publishing company AST, ceased publication and distribution of Akunin's and Bykov's works. One of the few booksellers that continued to distribute Akunin's books, Zakharov Books, came under investigation by the Investigative Committee of Russia.[10][11][12] Russian politician Andrey Gurulyov called Akunin an "enemy" that "must be destroyed".[13]
Akunin was then added by Rosfinmonitoring to its list of terrorists and extremists, with Akunin specifically believed to be complicit in terrorist activity by the Russian Government.[14][15] The government also opened a criminal case against Akunin, with allegations of discreditation of the Russian army.[16] In response, Akunin wrote on Facebook: "Terrorists declared me a terrorist."[17] In an article on his website, Akunin has warned Russians abroad to not return to Russia.[18]
In January 2024, Akunin was designated a "foreign agent" by the Russian Ministry of Justice. This designation requires that the subject identify themselves as a "foreign agent" on social media and any other publications, and imposes heavy financial reporting requirements.[4] Later that month, Russia's Interior Ministry put his name on a wanted list for alleged criminal activity.[19]
On 6 February 2024, a Moscow court ordered the arrest of Akunin in absentia.[20][21] After the death of Alexei Navalny, Akunin said that "There is nothing more the dictator [Putin] can do to Navalny. Navalny is dead and has become immortal."[22]
Awards and honors
In the year 2000, Akunin was nominated for the Smirnoff-Booker Prize. In September 2000, Akunin was named Russian Writer of the Year and won the "Antibooker" prize 2000 for his Erast Fandorin novel Coronation, or the last of the Romanovs.
In 2003, the British Crime Writers' Association placed Akunin's novel The Winter Queen on the short list for the Dagger Award in Fiction. In 2004, he was a member of the jury at the 26th Moscow International Film Festival.[23]
On 10 August 2009, for the contribution to the development of cultural ties between Russia and Japan, he was awarded the prize of the Japan Foundation acting under the auspices of the government.[24]
Laureate of the Noma Prize (2007, Kodansha Publishing House, Japan) - "For the best translation from Japanese of works of the writer Yukio Mishima".[25]
Adaptations
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Two Fandorin novels, The Turkish Gambit and The State Counsellor, were made into big-budget Russian movies. Azazel was adapted twice for television, first as The Winter Queen, and later as Fandorin. Azazel, produced by Yandex Studios and Kinopoisk streaming service.[when?]
An English remake of The Winter Queen was in production. It was set to start filming in 2007, but the leading actress, Milla Jovovich, became pregnant, and the production process was delayed to unknown date.
Pelagia and the White Bulldog was made into a TV mini-series in 2009, while The Spy Novel came out in a 2012 theatrical release as Spy.
List of works
Erast Fandorin series (publication dates in parentheses). Each historical mystery novel is assigned its own subgenre of detective fiction (conspiracy, political, etc.):
The Winter Queen, original title Azazel / Азазель (1998). A conspiracy mystery. 1876. The 20-year-old Fandorin begins his career by accidentally stumbling over a plot for world domination.[26]
The Turkish Gambit / Турецкий гамбит (1998).[27] A spy mystery. 1877. Fandorin takes part in the Russo-Turkish War and the Siege of Plevna as he is trying to uncover a Turkish spy.
Murder on the Leviathan, original title Leviathan / Левиафан (1998).[28] A closed set-up mystery. 1878. Fandorin investigates a murder while traveling on a steamship headed from England to India.
The Death of Achilles / Смерть Ахиллеса (1998).[29] A hired assassin mystery. 1882. Upon returning from diplomatic service in Japan, Fandorin tackles the mysterious death of Mikhail Skobelev (called Sobolev in the novel) in a Moscow hotel.
Special Assignments:
The Jack of Spades / Пиковый валет (1999).[30] A novella about confidence men. 1886. Fandorin hunts down a clever gang of swindlers.
The Decorator / Декоратор (1999).[31] A novella about a maniac. 1889. After ending his string of murders in England, Jack the Ripper surfaces in Moscow.
The State Counsellor / Статский советник (1999). A political mystery. 1891. Revolutionary terrorism in late 19th-century Russia takes center stage, as Fandorin is pursuing a group of daring radicals.
The Coronation / original title Coronation, or the Last of the Romanovs (Коронация, или Последний из Романов) (2000). A high society mystery. 1896. The plot surrounds the ascension of Tsar Nicholas II, whose family is being blackmailed by an international supervillain.
She Lover of Death / Любовница смерти (2001). A decadent mystery. 1900. A decadent suicide society causes a stir in Moscow.
He Lover of Death / Любовник Смерти (2001). A Dickensian mystery. Simultaneously with the decadent society investigation, Fandorin is looking into a series of murders in the slums of Khitrovka, Moscow.
The Diamond Chariot / Алмазная колесница (2003). An ethnographic mystery. Events of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 set against a flashback to Fandorin's diplomatic service in Yokohama in 1878.
Ying and Yan /Инь и Ян (2006). A play about Erast Fandorin, set in 1882.
The Jade Rosary / Нефритовые четки (2006). Seven short stories and three novellas set between 1881 and 1900. Some of the "holes" in the narrative are filled, including Fandorin's service in Japan, his investigations in the 1880s while a Deputy for Special Assignments in the Moscow city administration and his adventures in America.
All the World's a Stage / Весь мир театр (2009). A theatrical mystery. 1911. The 55-year-old Fandorin has his life turned upside-down when investigating strange incidents in a fashionable Moscow theater.
The Black City / Черный город (2012). 1914. While pursuing a daring Bolshevik terrorist, Fandorin goes to the Azerbaijani capital Baku, where his wife is shooting a motion picture.
Planet Water / Планета Вода (2015). Three novellas set between 1903 and 1912: Planet Water (1903, a treasure hunt in the Atlantic), A Lonely Sail (1906, a cruel murder of an abbess from a distant monastery), and Where Shall We Paddle? (1912, a pursuit of a cruel train robber in Poland).
Not Saying Goodbye / Не прощаюсь (2018). A novel set between 1918 and 1921. In his final adventure, Erast Fandorin finds himself in a country radically transformed by the Revolution and the Russian Civil War.
Erast Fandorin's Dao / Дао Эраста Фандорина (2023). Three shorts set in 1876, 1896 and 1917.
Tamba's Lessons / Уроки Тамбы (2023). A novella set in 1878, at same time with The Diamond Chariot.
Frog Bashō / Лягушка Басё (2023). Interactive detective.
Note: (The Jack of Spades and The Decorator were published together in a single volume, Special Assignments: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin / Особые поручения.
Masahiro Shibata series (publication dates in parentheses).
Just Masa / Просто Маса (2020). A novel set in 1923. New adventure of Masahiro Shibata after Fandorin's death.
Yama / Яма (2023). A novel set in 1900. Memories of Masahiro Shibata.
Sister Pelagia series (about a crime-solving nun in turn-of-the-20th-century provincial Russia):
Pelagia and the White Bulldog / Пелагия и белый бульдог [1] (2000). A bishop of a large Volga province sends an astute nun Pelagia to look into mysterious deaths of his aunt's prize-winning dogs.
Pelagia and the Black Monk / Пелагия и черный монах (2001). Mysterious events in a remote monastery force bishop Mitrofani to start an inquiry, which only leads to more tragedy.
Pelagia and the Red Rooster / Пелагия и красный петух (2003). A stranger who has started a new sect in provincial Russia becomes the focus of sinister and deadly plots.
Nicholas Fandorin series (about Erast Fandorin's grandson, a modern-day British historian):
Altyn Tolobas / Алтын-толобас [2] (2000). Nicholas visits Russia in 1995 to investigate artifacts left by his ancestor, Cornelius von Dorn, a German soldier in the service of the Russian czar in the 17th century. Cornelius's story is told in alternating chapters.
Extracurricular Reading/ Внеклассное чтение (2002). Nicholas' adventures in Moscow in 2001 are told together with a story of a 7-year-old prodigy entangled in a regicidal plot at the end of Catherine the Great's reign.
F.M. (2006). Nicholas is looking for a lost Dostoevsky manuscript, a fictional original draft of Crime and Punishment written as a detective novel.
The Falcon and the Swallow / Сокол и Ласточка (2009). Nicholas and his British aunt are looking for a treasure in the Caribbean. The origin of the treasure is told in a story about Laetitia von Dorn (Cornelius's niece) set in 1702.
The Genres Project (novels written in different fiction genres, each book's title refers to the particular genre):
Children's Book / Детская книга (2006). Erast Fandorin Jr. (Nicholas' ten-year-old son) goes on a time-travelling adventure.
Spy Novel / Шпионский роман (2005). Set in 1941, just before Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. State security officers are on the trail of a deeply embedded German spy.
Science Fiction / Фантастика (2006). Two young men cope with their mysteriously acquired superpowers in the Soviet Union's dying days.
Quest / Квест (2008). In 1930, an Indiana Jones-like American scientist and two of his colleagues go to Moscow in an attempt to disrupt Soviet eugenics experiments. The novel imitates a computer game. The second part of the narrative, called Codes to the Novel is set in 1812, during Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Children's Book For Girls / Детская книга для девочек (2012). Co-authored with Gloria Mu. Angelina Fandorina (Erast Jr.'s twin sister) goes on a time-traveling, world-saving quest of her own.
Fairy Tales from Around the World / Сказки народов мира (2021)
Brüderschaft with Death (A "cinematic novel", written as a collection of ten novellas ("films") about the rivalry between Russian and German intelligence during World War I. Each "film" is written in a different cinematic genre. There are two main characters in the series: Alexei Romanov and Sepp von Theofels). The following "films" have been released in Russian:
The Infant and the Devil / Младенец и черт (2007). Comedy. July 1914. A German ace of espionage is trying to steal the plans of Russian military operations, as a young St. Petersburg student unexpectedly interferes.
The Torment of a Broken Heart / Мука разбитого сердца (2007). Melodrama. November 1914. Junior sergeant Alexei Romanov, sent away from the front after being wounded, takes part in an operation in Switzerland, where Russian intelligence is attempting to neutralize a "dealer in secrets."
The Flying Elephant / Летающий слон (2008). Aeronautic adventures. April 1915. Captain von Theofels infiltrates Russia's Special Aviation Corps in order to sabotage the development of the world's first heavy bomber, the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets.
Children of the Moon / Дети Луны (2008). A decadent étude: August 1915. Ensign Romanov, fresh after completing the Russian General Staff's counter-intelligence course, goes undercover into a Petrograd society of young decadents. One of the members is about to transfer a copy of secret military documents to a German spy.
The Wandering Man / Странный человек (2009). Mystical. December 1915. Major von Theofels is trying to discredit the head of Russian military intelligence. To achieve his goal he is trying to get close to a mysterious "Wanderer" who greatly resembles the historical Grigory Rasputin. The Russian title plays with the double meaning of the word "странный": wandering (archaic meaning) and strange, weird.
Let the Thunder of Victory Rumble! / Гром победы, раздавайся! (2009). Front-line sketch. April 1916. Junior lieutenant Romanov's adventures at Russia's South-Western Front, as he is trying to ensure the secrecy of the plans for the impending Brusilov Offensive.
Mariya, Maria... / "Мария", Мария ... (2010). A true tale of the sea. October 1916. Major von Theofels has a new assignment, to sabotage the Russian battleship Imperatritsa Mariya.
Nothing Sacred / Ничего святого (2010). A hellish scheme of the Germans. November 1916. Von Theofels and his nemesis Alexei Romanov are about to meet again as the German spy is preparing an assassination of Czar Nicholas II. This time, Romanov, now a lieutenant, is a much more worthy opponent.
Operation Transit / Операция "Транзит" (2011). Preapocalyptic. April 1917. With Russia facing political turmoil after the February Revolution, the Germans hope to further the collapse by helping the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin return to the country. Major von Theofels' new assignment is to ensure his safe passage.
The Angels Battalion / Батальон ангелов (2011). Apocalyptic. Summer 1917. With Russia's ability to sustain the war at an end and the army demoralized, the Russian Provisional Government creates the Women's Battalion of Death in order to boost the soldiers' morale. Stabskapitän Alexei Romanov joins the strange outfit as an instructor.
History of the Russian State (История Российского государства). A series of non-fiction books documenting the history of Russia from the 9th century to 1917, complemented by a series of fictional works.
A Part of Europe - From the beginnings to the Mongol Conquest / Часть европы - От истоков до монгольского нашествия (2013). History of Russian statehood from its beginnings (9th century) up to the Mongol Conquest (early 13th century).
The Fiery Finger / Огненный перст (2013). Three historical novellas set between the 9th and 13th centuries: The Fiery Finger (the adventures of a Byzantine spy in the Slavic lands in 856 AD), The Devil's Spittle (political games at the court of Yaroslav the Wise in 1050) and Prince Cranberry (about a young ruler of a tiny duchy, located dangerously close to the Wild Steppe, in 1205).
A Part of Asia - The Horde Period / Часть Азии - Ордынский период (2014). History of Russian statehood under the Mongol rule (from early 13th century to mid-15th century).
Bosch and Schelm / Бох и Шельма (2014). Two historical novels. The first novel tells of a horrific invasion of Tartars (Mongols) in 1237 and is narrated from both the Russian and Mongolian perspectives, falling into the Tragic Genre. The second novel is about the adventures of a smart swindler who is wandering around Russia and the neighbouring countries on the eve of dramatic events – the great Battle of Koulikovo in 1380 where the united Russian army faced the army of the Golden Horde. The novel is comical and belongs to the Picaresque genre.
Between Asia and Europe - From Ivan III to Boris Godunov / Между Азией и Европой - От Ивана III до Бориса Годунова (2015). History of Russian statehood from Ivan III (mid-15th century) up to Boris Godunov (first years of the 17th century).
Widow's card or Widow's kerchief / Вдовий плат (2016). Two historical novels. Widow's card is set in the times of Ivan III, while The mark of Cain takes place during Ivan IV's reign.
Between Europe and Asia - The Seventeenth Century / Между Европой и Азией - Семнадцатый век (2016). Russia's emergence from The Time of Troubles and the reigns of the early Romanovs.
Sennight of the Three-Eyed / Седмица Трехглазого (2017). A historical detective novel, relaying the life of a 17th-century Moscow sleuth and a play To Kill The Snakelet about Peter the Great's coup to overthrow princess Sophia Alekseyevna.
Asiatic Europeization - Czar Peter Alexeyevich / Азиатская европеизация - Царь Пётр Алексеевич (2017). The reign of Peter the Great foundation of the Russian Empire.
Nutshell Buddha / Ореховый Будда (2018). A novel about the adventures of a Japanese monk and an orphan Russian girl in Peter the Great's Russia.
Eurasian Empire - The Era of Czarinas / Евразийская империя - Эпоха цариц (2018). Post-Peter 18th century Russia, including the reign of Catherine the Great.
Goodventures and Ruminations of Lucius Katin / Доброключения и рассуждения Луция Катина (2019). A novel set in the middle of the 18th century, focusing on an idealistic young man and his desire to bring about progress and enlightenment.
The First Superpower - Alexander the Blessed and Nicholas the Unforgettable / Первая сверхдержава - Александр Благословенный и Николай Незабвенный (2019). Russia's rise and fall as a European superpower during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I.
Peace and War / Мiр и война (2020)
Medicine for the empire. The Liberator Tsar and the Peacemaker Tsar / Лекарство для империи. Царь-освободитель и царь-миротворец (2021)
Road to Kitezh / Дорога в Китеж (2021)
As he walked away, he asked / Он уходя спросил (2022)
The destruction and resurrection of the empire. The Lenin-Stalin era / Разрушение и воскрешение империи. Ленинско-сталинская эпоха (TBA)[32]
Non-series books:
The Seagull / Чайка, Комедия в двух действиях (2000). A reworking of Anton Chekhov's Seagull as a mystery[33]
Comedy/Tragedy / Комедия/Трагедия (2000). Two plays, Hamlet, a Version and Mirror of Saint Germain
Fairy Tales for Idiots / Сказки для Идиотов (2000).[34] A collection of short stories, not related to any of the series.
Screenplays / Сценарии (2006). Original screenplays written by Akunin for three of his novels.
Photos as Haiku / Фото как хокку (2011). A collection of biographical stories sent in by the readers of Akunin's blog.
The Most Frightening Villain and other stories / Самый страшный злодей и другие сюжеты (2012). A collection of blog posts from 2010 to 2011.
A Real Princess and other stories / Настоящая принцесса и другие сюжеты (2013). A collection of blog posts from 2011 to 2012.
The most mysterious secret and other stories / Самая таинственная тайна и другие сюжеты (2014). A third collection of blog posts.
The Northern sentry and other stories / Северный Часовой и другие сюжеты (2015). A fourth collection of blog posts.
As Grigory Chkhartishvili:
The Writer and Suicide / Писатель и самоубийство (1999). A non-fiction study of suicide in literary circles throughout history.
Cemetery Tales / Кладбищенские истории (2004). Written as both Boris Akunin and Grigory Chkhartishvili, the book consists of literary essays about cemeteries in different parts of the world, each accompanied by a macabre short story. One of the short stories (Shigumo) features Erast Fandorin, and is included in The Jade Rosary.
As Boris Akunin-Chkhartishvili:
Aristonomia / Аристономия (2012). Akunin's first attempt to write "serious literature", as opposed to genre fiction. The novel is set during the turmoil of the February and October Revolutions and the Russian Civil War, with philosophical ruminations on the nature and development of human dignity woven into the plot.
Another Way / Другой Путь ' (2015). The novel is set in 1927, as Joseph Stalin is consolidating power. The main character finds true love and continues his philosophical work, now on the subject of intimacy and love's transformative powers.
Happy Russia / Счастливая Россия (2017). The story continues in 1937, at the height of Stalin's purges. A secret society of Moscow freethinkers, who philosophized about an ideal future for their country, is investigated by the secret police.
Tresorium / Трезориум (2019). A novel theory of primary education is explored in the Warsaw Ghetto, and a young Soviet officer seeks his destiny in War-ravaged Europe.
Anatoly Brusnikin
In November 2007, AST, one of the publishing houses with which Akunin is affiliated, came out with a historical mystery novel by a new author, Anatoly Brusnikin, called Девятный спас (Devyatny Spas, The Ninth Savior). Despite the fact that Brusnikin was a complete unknown, AST spent lavishly on an advertising campaign for the book, which almost immediately resulted in rumors that Brusnikin might actually be Akunin in a new disguise.
The rumors about the authorship of Devyatny Spas were also fueled by the total secrecy surrounding the person of the author and the fact that his name, A. O. Brusnikin, is an exact anagram of Boris Akunin. AST has also released a photograph of Brusnikin, which greatly resembled Chkhartishvili's face.[35]
In January 2012, two years after the second Brusnikin novel was published and just prior to the release of the third one, Chkhartishvili admitted in his blog that it was indeed him hiding under a new nom-de-plume. The reason for creating another alter ego was Akunin's desire to write historical novels without a mystery component and to attempt a "Slavophile" look at Russian history in lieu of his usual "Westerner" outlook. The Brusnikin "photograph" was revealed to be a combination of Chkhartishvili's face with the face of a studio designer who made the picture.
To date, three Brusnikin novels have been written.
The Ninth Savior / Девятный Спас (2007). Set in the beginning of Peter the Great's reign, it follows the lives of three friends (clearly modeled after the Three Bogatyrs of the Russian folk tales) and a scion of the Romanovs named Vasilisa (modeled after Vasilisa the Wise) and their involvement in a series of sinister plots.
A Hero of A Different Time / Герой иного времени (2010). An homage to Lermontov's A Hero of Our Times, it is set during the Caucasus War in the early 1840s.
Bellona / Беллона (2012). The Crimean War is the main subject.
Akunin has said he has no definite plans to write more Brusnikin novels, though he remains open to the possibility.[36]
Anna Borisova
At about the same time as Brusnikin had made his appearance, Chkhartishvili's other disguise, Anna Borisova, hit the bookstores relatively undetected. In this literary experiment Chkhartishvili wanted to attempt to write as a woman and to get away from detective and adventure fiction. Similar to the Brusnikin ruse, the "photograph" of Borisova released by the publisher was actually a combination of Chkhartishvili's face with that of his wife.[37] Borisova's work, though not overly complicated, is more literary and philosophical in nature. There were three Borisova novels written.
There... / Там ... (2007). Victims of a terrorist attack in Moscow experience afterlife, each in accordance with their very different beliefs.
The Idea-Man / Креативщик (2009). A mysterious stranger walks the streets of Saint Petersburg, telling people strange and fascinating stories.
Vremena goda (2011). Set in a French retirement home for Russian-speaking clientele. The main characters are a young Muscovite doctor suffering from a potentially fatal brain aneurism and a supercentenarian owner of the home incapacitated by the locked-in syndrome.
Akunin has said that he will not write any more Borisova novels "unless I get a sex-change (surgery)."[36]
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December 19, 2023
Russia: Authorities step up campaign of reprisals against renowned writer Boris Akunin
Reacting to the initiation of an unfounded criminal case against renowned Russian writer Grigori Chkhartishvili, best known under his pen name Boris Akunin, accusing him of “disseminating false information about the Russian Armed Forces” and “justifying terrorism”, Marie Struthers, Amnesty International’s Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said:
“The Russian authorities’ ongoing persecution of Boris Akunin and this unfounded criminal case exemplifies their sheer vindictiveness against anyone who dares to express dissent. In a matter of days, his books were withdrawn from sale, a play based on his work was removed from a theatre, and the police raided the only publishing house that continued to collaborate with him.”
“All this is in reprisal for Boris Akunin’s vocal opposition to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and he is not the only victim of such campaigns. Many others, including artists, performers, musicians, and filmmakers have found themselves persecuted and isolated from Russian cultural life simply due to their opposition to the war.
Many others, including artists, performers, musicians, and filmmakers have found themselves persecuted and isolated from Russian cultural life simply due to their opposition to the war
Marie Struthers, Amnesty International’s Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia
“These shameful charges must be dropped immediately and the campaign to denigrate and persecute cultural figures who oppose the war must be stopped.”
Background
On 18 December, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced the initiation of a criminal case against Boris Akunin, who has been residing outside of Russia since 2014, on charges of “justifying terrorism” (Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) and “disseminating knowingly false information about the Armed Forces” (Article 207.3). A day earlier, Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial regulator, included Boris Akunin on the list of “terrorists and extremists.”
Following the announcement of the charges, Moscow’s largest bookstores began removing Boris Akunin’s books from shelves, while major online stores like Wildberries and Litres e-bookstore almost completely removed his works from their platforms. The Moscow Gubernsky Theatre has ceased performing Akunin’s “The Adventures of Fandorin,” a play based on his series of adventure novels.
On 19 December, law enforcement agents raided the Zakharov publishing house, which possesses publishing rights to many of Boris Akunin’s books, confiscating all editions held at the premises. Irina Bogat, the publishing house’s director, said that “Obviously, this is due to the fact that we are the only ones who did not withdraw Akunin’s books from sale.”
Boris Akunin is the pseudonym of Grigory Chkhartishvili, a Russian writer who has also written under the pen names Anna Borisova, Anatoly Brusnikin and Akunin-Chkhartishvili. He has been compared to Gogol, Tolstoy and Arthur Conan Doyle, and his popular Erast Fandorin books have sold over eighteen million copies in Russia alone, and have been translated into thirty languages, including English. A number of his titles have also been adapted into Russian films.
Not Saying Goodbye, the final title in the Fandorin series, was published on the 6th of August, 2020, in Russia by Zakharov. Other works by Akunin include the Sister Pelagia series, Genre series, Cinematic series and the Nicholas Fandorin books, whose protagonist is the grandson of the famous detective, Erast Fandorin. His latest project, The History of the Russian State, is a series comprising nine non-fiction titles and accompanying fiction counter-parts.
Akunin won the Antibooker prize for The Coronation and was named Russian Writer of the Year in 2000. In 2004, he was a member of the jury at the 26th Moscow International Film Festival. In 2017, the UK edition of All The World’s A Stage, the thirteenth title in the Fandorin series, was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize for literary fiction translated into English.
Photo credit © A. Strunin
Follow Boris on Twitter @borisakunin
A Russian court orders the arrest of a bestselling writer over his support for Ukraine
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FILE - Writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, also known as Boris Akunin, is seen during a presentation of the book " Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Articles. Dialogues. Interviews.” in Moscow on Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011. A Moscow court on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024 has ordered the arrest of bestselling detective novelist and dissident Grigory Chkhartishvili, known under the pen name Boris Akunin, on charges of “justifying terrorism.” (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)
Updated 6:44 AM EDT, February 6, 2024
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MOSCOW (AP) — A Moscow court ordered the arrest Tuesday of a bestselling detective novelist and dissident on charges of “justifying terrorism,” two months after he was pranked by two pro-Kremlin activists into expressing support for Ukraine on a phone call.
Moscow’s Basmanny District Court ordered Grigory Chkhartishvili, who is known under the pen name Boris Akunin and lives abroad, to be taken into custody once he’s detained.
In December, Russian authorities added the Russian-Georgian writer to Russia’s register of “extremists and terrorists” over the call, in which two pranksters known as Vovan and Lexus posed as Ukrainian officials. A criminal case was opened against Akunin for “discrediting the army” — specifically for “justifying terrorism” and spreading “fake news” about the Russian military.
Discrediting the Russian military is a criminal offense under a law adopted after Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. The law is regularly used against Kremlin critics — although it is unlikely that Akunin, who lives in London, will face detention.
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After the authorities branded Akunin an extremist, one of Russia’s leading publishers, AST, announced it was suspending the printing and sale of his books. In an online statement, Akunin described his publisher’s move as “an important milestone,” saying that Russian writers had not been accused of terrorism since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s purges.
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Also on Tuesday, the allies of top Kremlin foe Alexei Navalny reported that the politician and anti-corruption campaigner had been placed in a one-man punishment cell in the remote Arctic penal colony where he is serving out a 19-year sentence.
Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh did not specify the reason, but said that Navalny had already spent months in solitary confinement since he was jailed in 2021, facing the punishment over two dozen times over minor infractions such as failing to properly button his prison uniform.
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Navalny, 47, has been behind bars since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He has since received three prison terms, including on charges of extremism, fraud and contempt of court.
Navalny and his allies have rejected all charges against him as politically motivated, and accused the Kremlin of seeking to keep him in jail for life.
QUOTED: "A seemingly minor event, the banning of books, the declaration of some writer as a terrorist, is in fact an important milestone. ... Books have not been banned in Russia since Soviet times. Writers have not been accused of terrorism since the Great Terror."
RUSSIA PLACES BEST-SELLING NOVELIST BORIS AKUNIN ON ITS WANTED LIST
“Books have not been banned in Russia since Soviet times. Writers have not been accused of terrorism since the Great Terror.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 29, 2024
(NEW YORK) — PEN America condemns the Russian government for placing London-based Grigory Chkhartishvili, better known under his pen name Boris Akunin, on its wanted list for alleged criminal activity. Akunin, a best-selling author of historical detective fiction and one of Russia’s most popular novelists, has been an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s atrocities committed in Ukraine.
“Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have rushed to silence critical and dissenting voices, including writers, artists, and poets, who give expression to the kind of Russia that many dream of: free, democratic, peaceful. That the Russian government took the shameful and alarming step of putting Akunin on a “wanted list” speaks to the resonance of his anti-war statements,” said Polina Sadovskaya, PEN America director for Advocacy and Eurasia. “Writers help people express their opinions and imagine a better future. The criminal charges against Akunin are baseless and pernicious efforts to vilify free expression in favor of false state narratives.”
The specific criminal charges, which were not listed, add to an intensifying campaign by the Russian government to retaliate against Akunin and other anti-war advocates with the goal of stifling dissent. Earlier this month, the Russian Justice Ministry placed Akunin on the “foreign agents” registry, citing his opposition to the “special military operation in Ukraine” and participation in “fundraising events for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” On December 18, Russia added him to its list of “terrorists and extremists,” as determined by Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial monitoring body. On the same day, it opened a criminal case against Akunin for “justifying terrorism” and spreading “fake news” to discredit the Russian armed forces.
The Russian government’s persecution of Akunin has been accompanied by a crackdown on broader literary freedoms. Akunin’s books were removed from sale by Russia’s largest bookstore chains and publishing houses. Zakharov, the only publishing house to attempt to continue distribution, was raided by the police, who seized its inventory of Akunin’s works. In October, all theaters staging performances of Akunin’s works removed his name from posters, and one theater was ordered to cancel his plays.
“A seemingly minor event, the banning of books, the declaration of some writer as a terrorist, is in fact an important milestone,” Akunin wrote on Dec. 18. “Books have not been banned in Russia since Soviet times. Writers have not been accused of terrorism since the Great Terror.”
Numerous prominent Russian writers have been subjected to recent book bans, including author and public intellectual Dmitry Bykov, whose books were suspended at the same time as Akunin. Other writers in Russia continue to be jailed for voicing their opposition to the war, including poets Artem Kamardin and Egor Shtovba. In her first report to the Human Rights Council in September 2023, Mariana Katzarova, the Special Rapporteur on the situation for human rights in Russia, detailed the range of tactics the Russian authorities use to curtail artistic expression and dissent by cultural figures.
About PEN America
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.
User’s Guide to Russian History: Interview with Boris Akunin
Posted on July 18, 2016 by Stephen Norris
The 2015 Havighurst Center’s Young Researchers’ Conference began with an interview between Stephen Norris, Professor of History at Miami, and Boris Akunin, the bestselling Russian author. Below is a transcript of the interview, transcribed by Emily Walton, a 2016 graduate of Miami.
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Stephen Norris, Grigory Chkhartishvili (Boris Akunin) and conference organizer Zara Torlone.
Stephen Norris:
This conference is called “Writing the Past, Righting Memory” a play on words that gets at serious subject matters; namely, the ways that Russian historians, writers, scholars and officials have tried to write new histories after 1991 and address important historical legacies. These are also the implicit goals of your ongoing project, The History of the Russian State. I have several questions about it but I’ll start with a broad one: what are your goals in writing this history and how do plan to “use Occam’s razor in order to reveal what really happened,” as you state in the introduction to the first volume?
Boris Akunin:
Well, hello everybody. I’m happy to be here. Yes, this is my first time in this part of Italy and I have never participated in an event like this in my life so it is a new experience for me, that’s why I did not want to make a speech or a lecture because it is not usually my kettle of fish. I am not the one who speaks–I am normally the one that writes. You’ll have to ask me questions and then I would know what you are interested in. Talking about this new project of mine, I should say that this is something that I have wanted to do for a long, long time. The main goal is not just to deliver a message to the public, it is something I want to do for myself because I have been living for many years in my country and I feel that I do not understand it properly. Russia is still a country of unpredictabilities, for me. This country keeps surprising me and recently more than ever. In order to understand what kind of country I am living in, I thought that I have to go to the very beginning.
As those of you that have studied Russians know very well the favorite question of Russians is Kto vinovat’? Who is to blame? We have these two, well, you know sacred… questions, both of them even became titles of classical novels. One is Kto vinovat’? Who is to blame? And another is Chto Delat’? What is to be done? Russians, they are never really interested in what is to be done, they are more interested in who is to blame. And I have been growing up to hearing this kind of talk since I was a kid. Everybody around me had been trying to figure out who was to blame because everybody agreed that life was terribly wrong. Things were not going the right way. This is also a very Russian trait. Russians are either absolutely unhappy with their life or just euphoric about it. So, first the general idea was that it was Stalin who was to blame. He spoiled everything and then we have to go back to Lenin. That is what my parents used to say in the 1960s. Then we discovered that no, it was Lenin who was to blame. Then we discovered that no, it was the Romanovs who were to blame because the country was not well-ruled under them and they were not able to save this country, so it was their fault. But no, it was not the Romanovs it was Ivan the Terrible who was to blame. No, it was not Ivan the Terrible it was Ivan III who created this state. No, it was the Tatars. Well, everybody liked that idea and Russia accepted the Tatars because we have a lot of them in Russia today. So I thought that I had enough of this I had to go back to level zero and to explain everything to myself.
First of all, Russian history, probably more than any other history, is full of myths. And lies. Because in Russia, historical science existed for a very short span of time, probably, well, a part of the 19th century a part of the 20th century. Before, it had been practically non-existent because it was Karamzin who invented it in the beginning of the 19th century in a serious way. And afterwards in the 20th century it was so full of ideology that history was supposed to not be a science but a kind of propaganda. Soviet authorities were using history in order to create myths in order to for as they call it, for pedagogical purposes, so that young people should be proud of their great ancestors and their great country , which I thought then and I think now is an awful misconception. History is not about being proud. History is like an instruction, a manual. How to “use” your own country. Something such as: don’t put your fingers in here you will be hit by electricity. Just if you want to achieve this do this and this and do that. In order to be that you have to know. You have to know the truth. You have to know that if a country succeeded in something it was because of this and this and this. If there was a defeat we have to know everything about it. Why it happened. What didn’t go the right way. So I wanted to write this sort of history.
This is something I believe that in our time no professional historian can do in general. Because a professional historian is a specialist in quite a narrow field usually or it would be someone who wants to create a new concept and would build it, build a theory and try to prove it and when you try to prove it, it is impossible to evade the temptation to push forward some things and to push down this which if they don’t fall in your line. My history is not like this. Initially, from the beginning, I had no preconceived conception. I didn’t want prove anything to anybody. I just wanted to understand what is true and what is probable among all those facts that I have been taught at university and that I learned in studying history. I wanted to go step by step along this ladder. Little by little I would be able to understand and explain to my readers what this Russian state is like.
I should say that my book in Russian is not called “A History of Russia” but “The History of Russian state.” So it is a political history, a history of power, a history of relations between those in power and the people. It’s also a history of a country written by a writer, not by a historian, which is not a new thing. Probably some of you have read the wonderful books by Isaac Asimov who was known mostly as a science fiction writer but also wrote histories. And now in the UK, for example, the novelist Peter Ackroyd is publishing a volume of his history of England. These books do not contain long commentaries and have no footnotes; nothing, in other words, to frighten off normal, peaceful readers. They are not meant for students nor for scholars; they are meant for people such as my wife, who claim to be uninterested in history. I want them to be interested in history.
That is why these volumes of history of Russian history that I am writing are supported by a series of historical novels, which in turn create a history of Russia seen through the eyes of one family that has been living in Russia for one thousand years. So this is mostly about the history of human relations and the history of love: it is one thousand years of loves. In the novels I can run free with my imagination, with what I cannot write in my nonfictional histories. Of course, it’s also part of a publishing scheme because we were expecting most readers to buy just my historical adventure novels and hopefully to get hooked by them, to get interested in to what was actually happening in this period and then to go to the book shop and buy the non-fiction volume, which is quite expensive because there are a lot of illustrations. The most difficult thing here is not the facts, which are more or less well known, but how to calculate the right balance of heaviness and lightness, of entertainment and seriousness, to avoid losing the reader’s attention. I had to work on this formula when I was preparing the first volume. With the second volume I made it just a bit lighter. Now I am finishing the third volume and I understand that the second one was just a bit too light. Now I’m putting more “heaviness” in the third. So that’s how it works.
Norris:
Speaking of the third volume, I assume it’s going to be on Ivan the Terrible and his period. Can you give us a sense of what you are going to argue in it, what will be heavier, and what in general you are planning?
Akunin:
The first volume, which was entitled A Part of Europe, covers the period before Russia was conquered by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. The second part is about the Tatar-Mongol period and it’s logically entitled, A Part of Asia, because Russia was a part of a vast Asian empire in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and first half of fifteenth century. The third volume is called Between Asia and Europe. It starts in the mid-fifteenth century, with Ivan III, and ends at the beginning of seventeenth century, during the smutnoe vremia, the Time of Troubles. By my calculation we are currently living in the early years of the sixth Russian state. The first Russian state was the pre-Mongolian state, which began between Novgorod and Kiev and then moved to Vladimir before it collapsed when the Mongols conquered it. For two hundred years afterwards there was no Russian state, it was just a dominion of the Tatar Horde. My third volume is therefore about the second attempt at building a Russian state. It was started by Ivan III in the middle of 15th century, and proved to be very successful, but in the end it failed and ceased to exist in the beginning of the 17th Century, when the country was conquered by the Poles. There would be a third Russian state in the 17th century, then a fourth created by Peter the Great when the state had to be rebuilt and moved even closer to Europe. Then there was the fifth state, the Soviet empire. And now we are living in the sixth state, the post-Soviet one, which, as it seems is not going too well right now.
Norris:
How many of these states will you narrate?
Akunin:
There will be nine volumes in total and I will stop in 1917.
Norris:
And why stop then and not cover the Soviet state, particularly after the appearance of the very controversial history written by Alexander Filippov that referred to Stalin as a great state builder?
Akunin:
Oh I’m not interested in that. … and nobody’s really interested in it either, the book was just something meant to receive part of the state budget. It’s in no way important. Why am I stopping in 1917? Well, you see main task I think I am doing, is to make sure that I am distanced from the events I am describing. I am not for this part or for that part, I try to be neutral. And I think that if I start to describe the events of the 20th century after 1917 I feel like I wouldn’t be able to stay objective because it is too close to me personally. The Soviet era passes through the history of every family, mine included. I feel as though I wouldn’t be able to cover it the right way, so better not to cover it at all. I should say, however, that I have found another way of describing the history of the past one hundred years in Russia. Since it is emotional, and since I cannot stay objective, I thought then I would try to tell the story with the help of fiction where you don’t have to be objective. So I am working at the same time on a series of novels, serious novels, which is something new for me. Up to now I have only written entertainment. Just for a change, I wanted to publish a serious series of typically Russian, thick, heavy, gloomy, depressing novels. I wouldn’t care about sales and bestseller lists at all I would do it just for myself. They would be novels the way I always wanted to write, impolite literature. I wouldn’t try to be polite or entertaining and not trying to press my problems on my readers.
In these new works I would press my problems on my readers. I wouldn’t care about athmography, you know athmography is a sort of charter you make before writing a detective novel. Inhaling, exhaling, you have to keep rhythm. So here you have to go like this, then do this, then this, before this. You have to count the length of this chapter, and this part of the book should be that long, and here it only has to be three pages long. In my new project there will be nothing of this kind. If I want to describe a dialogue that is important for me, it can go on for twenty pages. I don’t care. This is this kind of, well, think Dr. Zhivago. I hate this book but okay this is something. And so I was thinking of, well all of us I think have this kind of dusty, thick, album of family photographs from grandmothers. And what intrigues me most is that there are people with faces that do not exist any longer. Their expressions, everything about them. Many family members who look at these photos do not even know who they are. There is a mystery to it. They are somehow related to your family but nobody knows because grandmother and grandfather are dead already and nobody will tell you. When you also look at class photographs of, say, a gymnasium in 1915, or even a Soviet secondary school of 1939, the same thought occurs. You look at those young faces and you try to figure out what happened to each of them, because it is Russia and because this is the 20th century. You know deep down that most of the boys were either killed or imprisoned and most of the girls were probably never married or widowed. And you try to guess, looking at them, what happened to each of them. So, I called this series of novels Family Album and it is built like this. I focused on a photograph, an old photograph, and made a story around it. I published the first novel, which is about the Civil War and revolution. It was published three years ago. Now I am finishing the second novel, which will be about the 1920s. And I have no plan, although I am very meticulous and make plans for decades ahead, when it comes to mass literature. Here I don’t press myself. I just write it as it goes. So, if I ever finish it will be my plan for the 20th century. There may be ten novels, and if so, there will be a novel dedicated to each decade.
Norris:
I want to shift focus for a moment and talk a little more about your previous projects then return at the end to this family history you just described. Again in The Turkish Gambit, Fandorin declares states, “If you live in a state you should either cherish it or leave it. Anything else is parasitism or mere lackey’s gossip.” And Varvara who is his love interest in the novel responds a third way for an unjust state to be demolished and a new one built in its place. And Fandorin the hero shoots back, “A state is not like a house, it’s more like a tree. And it’s not built, it grows of its own accord, following the laws of nature and it’s a long business. And it’s not a stone mason who is required,” he says, “but a gardener.” I understand we should not read your fiction as a statement of your own philosophy, especially a novel written in 1998, but I’m curious, who might that gardener be today? Are there other possibilities aside from these three? And second, now that you’ve launched your own History of the State series, how do you think the tree of Russia has grown under its own accord and what are the laws of nature it follows?
Akunin:
This quote has been thrown back at me a lot! It is not me who is saying this. It is Fandorin who says it. Fandorin here is 22 years old. After that, and over the course of many novels, he has changed and changed his opinions. I think that the state is not a tree. If it can be compared to something it is a house. It has to be built. It has to be built according to a certain plan. I think that there is a difference between the notions of a country and that of a state. Now a country is probably a tree – something that grows. But a state isn’t. A state is something that is built by people who create it. In most cases you can always name the architects of this state. This is true for the United States of America and for Russia. For example, now we are still living in a building the foundation of which was created by Ivan III in the 15th century. We are still living in its basic dimensions. And I believe now if we do not change it, this model of authoritarian rule will be recreated again and again and again no matter who wins. Tomorrow liberals will chase away Putinists and after ten years the building will again be something like it is now. So it’s the foundation that is wrong and we have to change it.
Norris:
As you have stated in several interviews you initially planned the Fandorin series that made you famous as a response to the pulp mystery in the 1990s. According to one tale, maybe you even told me this; you initially got on the idea because your wife was reading a pulp fiction novel on the subway and had covered it up with a Dostoyevsky cover or something like that.
Akunin:
No, just with brown paper.
Norris:
Just with brown paper because she was embarrassed to read the pulp fiction of the 1990s. You wanted to write something explicitly more middle brow, more elegant, more intelligent. In the end you have almost completed the Fandorin series. I think you’re going to write two more? Is that right?
Akunin:
One more.
Norris:
One more. In the end you have used this series to rewrite the history of the late tsarist period in Russia and rewrite it for an audience in post-Soviet Russia. Looking back what do you think the Fandorin series helped to articulate about the Russia that was lost, that period of tsarist history?
Akunin:
I didn’t really intend to rewrite Russian history or to recreate a myth of Russian history. This series is ultimately not about history, it is about literature. And I am fascinated not by the history of tsarist Russia, I am fascinated by the people from a time when Russian fiction was great because Russian literature is the best thing to happen to my country. It is also the biggest gift that Russia gave to mankind. This is something where Russia is second to no other country. If we talk about the Russian novel, about Russian literature they are – in all seriousness – not so much playing with history, they are about something else, something bigger. I do love most classical authors. I also dislike some of them. Because Russian literature is very much about life itself, about being alive… it is not “classic” per se. Classic is something meant for a museum. I believe that as soon as an author becomes a “classic” and is treated like one it means he or she is dead. If you want to argue with him, if you want to mock her, if you want to deride him, it means he or she is still alive. I have been very heavily criticized for my rewriting of Chekhov’s play The Seagull. But it means he is still alive to me. Or Dostoyevsky–I wrote a detective novel called FM and it’s a remake of Crime and Punishment because Dostoyevsky irritates me a lot … it means he is alive. He is not an icon to me, he is not a statue. I admire him but sometimes I also hate him. So this is what literature is about. This view is very individual: I cannot read Cervantes, for example. I respect him, but he does not touch me in any way. Absolutely not. Shakespeare is alive. Cornell isn’t. I am not moved by Moliere, but Chateaubriand is alive for me. Again, it is very individual and it doesn’t have to be the same for everyone. My relations with literature are very private. I forgot what were we talking about …
Norris:
The Fandorin series and how you have rewritten the past. Because in the end it is as much a historical series as it is a mystery one and it attempts to rewrite the past from just before the Russo-Turkish war all the way through the revolution – a crucial period in Russian history.
Akunin:
Well I wouldn’t advise anybody to study literature by Fandorin novels! That would be a bad idea. And even if we talk about their historical elements they should be understood with caution because I write for my contemporaries and there are a lot of deliberate mechanisms in there just for fun, just to make people smile. History is in one sense not important for me in the series. At the same time, everything I describe in those novels could have happened. This is a must. They must be a version of history that is possible. Sometimes it is not really plausible, but still it is technically possible. It is possible that the Russian army was stuck in Plevna because there was a gifted Turkish spy who provoked the army to undertake a useless siege instead of going straight to Constantinople. Because there is a mystery to the actual event. No one can adequately explain why, after an initial success, did the Russian army stay at Plevna and why tens of thousands of lives had to be lost there. Why not leave a smaller detachment to undertake the siege while the rest of the army could go on? This is a mystery to me, so I found an explanation for it in The Turkish Gambit. I have another novel, The Spy Thriller – Shpionskii roman. It is really impossible to explain how in 1941 Hitler could surprise Stalin with his assault. How could he possibly keep 190 divisions on the near distance, from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea, and then attack the Soviet Union by surprise? There has to be a reason, so I offered one. Or I have another novel, which is called The Quest about the Battle of Borodino in 1812. There is also a mystery in it. It was a very bloody battle between the French army and the Russian army and the French were winning. They were taking one position after another, albeit with a heavy loss of life, but still they were winning. The only thing that Napoleon needed to do was to send his old guard to attack and a final offensive would have been the absolute end of the Russian army. He didn’t do it. Why he didn’t do it, this is a mystery. He didn’t do it and he lost the war and he lost his troops and eventually he lost everything eventually. So, I created a quite fantastical version of events because I could not find a realistic version of them.
Norris:
Your answer begs the question: why is spying, why are conspiracies, the answer to explaining everything? Are you running the risk of writing a conspiratorial history of Russia?
Akunin:
No, I don’t believe in conspiriology in general. But, I write about spies because they are so interesting to describe and they create psychologically interesting situations where someone who you think are your friend or your lover is actually your enemy and aims for your ruin. As a writer, these situations create the biggest dramas and the biggest tragedies. It can happen not only in politics, but in family life as well.
Norris:
Speaking of conspiracies and the one involving Stalin in 1941, this conference is not one where we only seek to investigate the way things have been written about the past but the way things haven’t been written or “righted” about the past. You recently conducted a series of very interesting interviews with Alexei Navalny and you broached the subject of Stalin, and whether or not Stalin had been properly dealt with in Russian history today. You suggested that Russia needs to drive a stake into the heart of Stalin’s ghost. Navalny said that a ghost is a ghost and that the Stalin question is one for historians to solve, not current politics. This exchange made me think of Alexander Etkind’s very interesting book Warped Morning; in it, he also suggests that Russian society has not addressed the past forcefully enough, particularly the Soviet past. In his exploration of this theme, Etkind argues that one of the reasons for this failure rests in the fact, these are Etkind’s words, “In Russia and Eastern Europe, novels, films, and debates about the past vastly outpace and overshadow monuments, memorials, and museums.” For him, the memory of the past is a hot and liquid one in Russia, rather than cool and crystalized, making it always unsettled. You, on the other hand, solely write novels and film scripts, so do you agree with this assessment? Or can novels, films, and debates produce a moral, more solid form of remembrance and in doing so maybe even drive that stake into Stalin’s heart?
Akunin:
Since you mention this dialogue with Alexei Navalny I should first say that although I disagree with him on many points, here I ultimately think that he was right. He said a very important thing, that there is no use arguing about Stalin because Stalin is alive as long as we still live in this sort of country. When we create a normal country Stalin will become obsolete, he will die by himself and no one will be interested in reviving him. It is true that during the perestroika era and in the 1990s there were a lot of novels, films, and non-fiction works that described all of Stalin’s crimes. The problem is that, as we can see now, it did not produce any real effects because Stalin is still inside too many people’s brains. There are too many examples of how many people’s mental existences have not been changed. We are still living in the same structure devised by Ivan III, a structure that keeps on producing authoritarian rule, where the will of the ruler means more than the law. It is like this, of course, under Putin. It was like this under Yeltsin too, who is supposed to be a democrat and a liberal. He was also an authoritarian ruler. And this circumstance was not a coincidence; it was not something that happened because he wanted it to be like this and because the general logic of the state pushed him into it, his advisors pushed him into it, we all pushed him into it. This notion is really unpleasant to think about but it is true because we wanted him to be reelected as President in 1996 no matter what and no matter what the cost because we were afraid of a communist return to power. We were ready to look, actually to close our eyes to some things we did not want to see. So Yeltsin’s era ended in an authoritarian state; it ended, of course, in Putin. I think what we have to do is change the structure of the state completely and then nobody would even think of Stalin as an effective manager or whatever they call him these days.
Norris:
The Navalny interviews came after you had done similar ones with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, but more importantly after you had become much more openly political. You may remember that when we first met in 2008 for an interview, you said to me that your major headaches were first traffic and then Putin – but that traffic was by far the bigger problem at the time. You also stated that you always saw yourself as a belletrist and wanted to write as one, not as a writer in the Russian sense, a pisatel’. What changed, specifically? How is it that you moved from traffic being your primary headache to Putin to being your primary headache?
Akunin:
This move was a big disappointment for me because I always wanted just to be a writer, and when I heard the term “public intellectual” applied to me it made me shudder. I didn’t want to be a public intellectual. I didn’t want to be a pisatel’ because this is a role I simply never wanted to play. I didn’t want to be a Hertzen, a Dostoyevsky, a Tolstoy. I mean not just that I lacked their talents, but I lacked their desire to be a shepherd of the people and to show people the white and black, to move this piece here because it is the right move and to avoid this move because it is the wrong one, to determine, on other words, what is good and what is evil for other people. I just wanted to entertain people. But Russia is such a peculiar country. You get into situations from which you cannot escape because otherwise you risk losing your self-respect and there is nothing worse than that.
Norris:
Is the answer in media for you, at least in terms of change in society and maybe even changing the state? You have always been an avid blogger but you are now an even more political blogger and run one of the most-read blogs in Russia.
Akunin:
I started my blog in 2010 and by then I was already a public intellectual, sadly, so it didn’t make any difference.
Norris:
Is this the way to reform the state? There are some scholars who write that the blog sphere represents the best thing of a viable civil society in Russia today.
Akunin:
No, this is something to let out the irritation that otherwise gets pent up. Sometimes you just have to let it go. There was a brief period in 2012 and 2013 when it seemed to me that blogs and internet forums actually did have a possibility to change the course of events. But because Putin and his team are so hopelessly stupid and ineffective they cost us this opportunity to live peacefully. Now there is no possibility for it. They are so proud that they crushed the opposition and its media outlets. What they did, however, was to crush the thermometer that showed how high the societal fever was. It doesn’t mean that the problems have been solved it certainly doesn’t mean that the country is in good health, it’s in much, much worse health and it will end badly. Their mistake and ours was there was at least one place to blow off steam. And now there isn’t.
Norris:
You have closed a lot of your projects. The Fandorin series has one more novel. The Pelagia series is finished. The Smert Brudershaft series is finished. The Nicholas Fandorin series is over. And you said you won’t write using the names Anatoly Brusnikin or Anna Borisova anymore since you have been exposed as these authors too. You have begun to publish under the name Akunin-Chkhartishvili. So perhaps the last, best question is this one: is the Akunin project over? “Boris Akunin,” does he or it matter anymore?
Akunin:
The Boris Akunin Project as entertainment is for all practical purposes over. There will only be one more Fandorin book to write and I am fed up with it. It is not interesting to me anymore. I am getting older. I am getting well, not wiser, but duller. As Pushkin said “aging drives you into prose.” It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t entertain myself once in a while with writing something hilarious – if I have a good idea, why not? But my new project is this history series and this family album series. They are what make life interesting for me.
QUOTED: "Akunin ... adds interest and texture here with multiple narrators, but it's the witty Fandorin who shines."
She Lover of Death. By Boris Akunin. Tr. by Andrew Bromfield. Mar. 2020. 272p. Mysterious, $26 (9780802148148); e-book (9780802148155).
Having reached the age of majority at the beginning of the twentieth century, Masha Mironova starts a new life by following a young man to Moscow, the City of Dreams. There she takes the name Columbine, fashioning outrageous outfits for herself and wearing a live garter snake as jewelry, as the man introduces her to the exclusive "Lovers of Death" suicide club. As the rise of suicide among young people becomes a concern in the city, the club, directed by the hypnotic leader who calls himself Prospero, is infiltrated by a journalist, a doctor, and Holmesian detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin, who takes a special interest in Columbine. Fandorin's mission becomes more urgent as two of the country's leading poets die, and some members of the club appear not to have committed suicide but to have been murdered. Akunin (the pen name for Russian-born essayist and critic Grigory Chkhartishvili) adds interest and texture here with multiple narrators, but it's the witty Fandorin who shines.--Michele Leber
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Leber, Michele. "She Lover of Death." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 12, 15 Feb. 2020, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A616047139/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=07e1d342. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "creepily entertaining though never exactly mysterious in the ways you might expect."
Akunin, Boris SHE LOVER OF DEATH Mysterious Press (Adult Fiction) $26.00 3, 3 ISBN: 978-0-8021-4814-8
Akunin returns to 1900 Moscow, where a suicide club's numbers threaten to diminish to the vanishing point unless evergreen investigator Erast Petrovich Fandorin (The Coronation, 2019, etc.) can put an end to its distressing trend.
Masha Mironova arrives in Moscow with a modest inheritance, a strong aversion to her native Irkutsk, and a starry-eyed determination to be reunited with Petya Lileiko, a carelessly attractive swain from the big city who'd wooed her as Harlequin during his visit to her hometown. What she finds is a little different from what she'd expected. At first the suitor who'd effortlessly pried her away from her designated fiance seems hardly to recall her; when he does, he whisks her off to a club hosting the Lovers of Death, where the cultish leader Blagovolsky, who's dubbed himself Prospero, lords it over an ill-assorted gathering that includes Prospero's assistant, Ophelia; noted poet Lorelei Rubinstein; seductive Kriton; medical dissector Horatio; accountant Caliban; twins Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; grammar school student Gdlevsky; Petya's fellow university student Avaddon; and Petya himself, who's known to the group as Cherubino. All of them share a consuming interest in suicide. Ophelia, a medium, calls on the spirits of the group's late members to inform the group which among them has been nominated for self-slaughter. But soon after Masha, who adopts the sobriquet Columbine, is admitted to the Lovers of Death, Ophelia's demise leaves the group casting about for an alternative way to decide which candidates should be moved to the head of the queue. Meantime, alarmed by the rash of suicides and suspecting that the club may be linked to anti-czarist terrorists, Lt. Col. Besikov arranges for Fandorin, operating under his own pseudonym, to infiltrate the group. The results, including the alter ego that conceals Fandorin, are creepily entertaining though never exactly mysterious in the ways you might expect.
Akunin continues to notch the most consistently varied approaches to the adventures of the Great Detective on record.
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"Akunin, Boris: SHE LOVER OF DEATH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A611140458/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=544f5685. Accessed 27 June 2024.
She Lover of Death: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin
Boris Akunin, trans, from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. Mysterious, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8021-4814-8
Akunin's intriguing, if flawed, eighth mystery featuring investigator Erast Fandorin (after 2019's The Coronation) opens with a series of newspaper articles detailing several tragic deaths in 1900 Moscow. After a "latter-day Romeo and Juliet" take their own lives, a correspondent for the Moscow Courier speculates in print that his city has become the base for a suicide club, similar to ones that have existed in Berlin and London. The concept of a "secret society of death worshippers" who pledge to kill themselves is a promising one, and Akunin does a good job of bringing the reader into the mindset of a wannabe member of such a group, Marya Mironava, who arrives in the city in pursuit of a love-interest. An anonymous agent whom series fans will recognize as Fandorin goes undercover to infiltrate the society in an effort to destroy it, but newcomers may wonder why no one named Erast Fandorin appears in the book. This is not a good starting place for the uninitiated. Agent: Ann Rittenberg, Ann Ritterberg Literary. (Mar.)
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"She Lover of Death: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 1, 6 Jan. 2020, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A611171725/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=147435a0. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "The mystery is a good one, the villain meets the least-likely-suspect challenge flung down so often by Agatha Christie, and Andrew Bromfield translates Akunin with his customary brio."
Byline: Dennis Drabelle
The Coronation: A Fandorin Mystery
By Boris Akunin. Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
Mysterious. 368 pp. $26
---
To the short but luminous list of fascinating fictional valets and butlers - Jeeves in P.G. Wodehouse's celebrated series of comic novels, Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's "Remains of the Day," Carson in Julian Fellowes' "Downton Abbey" - we must add a new entry. He is Afanasii Stepanovich Ziukin, the narrator of Boris Akunin's zesty mystery novel "The Coronation." As butler to a member of the Russian royal family, Ziukin will be severely tested by the trouble that arises in May 1896, as Czar Nicholas II prepares to take the throne.
That trouble is double. First, a week before the ceremony in Moscow, 4-year-old Mikhail, a nephew of the czar, is kidnapped. Then the kidnappers threaten to kill the boy unless several crown jewels essential to the ceremony are given up as ransom. If it succeeds, the scheme will make the monarchy look so weak and ineffectual as to put its very survival at stake.
As a character, Ziukin performs dual functions. First, he acts as a slow-to-catch-on foil to Detective Erast Fandorin, formerly a state employee and now in private practice; in other words, Ziukin is to Fandorin what Dr. Watson is to you-know-who. Second, in telling the story, Ziukin makes the reader privy to a host of colorful details about the czarist era, for which the author has an unmistakable affinity.
We learn, for instance, that the palace ghost may pinch female commoners and servant girls in the dark of night, but he (or it, if you prefer) wouldn't dare lay a ghostly digit on the ladies of the royal family. And Ziukin sums up what's required for waiting on the participants in a top-secret meeting in terms that make Carson of "Downton Abbey" seem like a flibbertigibbet: "meticulous attention, unfailing deftness and - most important of all - total invisibility."
From time to time, too, Ziukin drops trenchant comments about the foreigners on hand for the coronation, above all the Brits, one of whom goes outside to watch a tennis game after being "attracted by the sound of a bouncing ball, so enchanting to the English ear."
The mystery is a good one, the villain meets the least-likely-suspect challenge flung down so often by Agatha Christie, and Andrew Bromfield translates Akunin with his customary brio. As a bonus, Ziukin sheds some of his austerity as the plot unfolds - the consummate standoffish observer ends up complaining of being suspected as "a thief and a deceiver, a scoundrel and a state criminal." Adding poignancy to the story is the doom we know awaits the czar and the rest of his immediate family two decades in the future.
As for Fandorin, the handsome, athletic, extraordinarily clever detective with a slight stutter, he dominates this, the seventh of his adventures to be published in the States, as he always does - with Sherlockian elan.
---
Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Washington Post
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Drabelle, Dennis. "Book World: A literary butler that makes Downton's Carson seem positively fancy free." Washington Post, 8 Feb. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A573127235/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6862b31e. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Just when you think you know what's coming next, Akunin, the most audacious author of historical mysteries ... in the business, shows that he's way ahead of you."
Akunin, Boris THE CORONATION Mysterious Press (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 5 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2781-5
Finally, it can be told: the highly fictitious story of how an audacious criminal who did his level best to disrupt the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in 1896 was foiled by perennial agent Erast Petrovich Fandorin.
When Nicholas' uncle Georgii Alexandrovich Romanov and his family arrive at the Small Hermitage in Moscow's Neskuchny Park in preparation for the coronation, the family's butler, Afanasii Stepanovich Ziukin, thinks his biggest problem will be deciding how to fit the whole household into a mere 18 rooms. More serious trouble promptly arrives during Afanasii's walk around the grounds with Georgii's daughter, 19-year-old Xenia Georgievna, and his youngest son, Mikhail Georgievich, 6, when they're attacked by a gang of brigands obviously intent on abducting Xenia Georgievna. The girl is rescued by the unexpected and muscular intervention of Fandorin and his valet, Masa, but the kidnappers get away with Mikhail. A suavely menacing letter from Doctor Lind, a pseudonymous supercriminal whose activities Fandorin has long been familiar with, demands an outrageous ransom: the Orlov, the largest diamond in the royal scepter. Since the absence of the stone would surely be noticed during the coronation, plunging the dynasty into unfathomable chaos, Fandorin proposes paying Doctor Lind a series of lesser ransoms every day for a week in hopes of gathering more information about his operation in the meantime. Lind accepts the plan, and the game of cat and mouse is on between two world-class antagonists who are both clever, resourceful, and well-stocked with backup plans. Fandorin recruits the butler and Emilie Declique, Mikhail's governess, to help him foil Lind's plot. But Lind has many more accomplices and no scruples about killing anyone who stands in his way. Nor is he distracted, as Afanasii is dismayed to see Fandorin is, by an utterly inappropriate attraction to Xenia Georgievna.
Just when you think you know what's coming next, Akunin, the most audacious author of historical mysteries (The State Counsellor, 2017, etc.) in the business, shows that he's way ahead of you. Like-minded readers who can get past all those royal patronymics are in for a treat.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Akunin, Boris: THE CORONATION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A553948760/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=87a703db. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Akunin keeps the action fast-paced, and the logical twists head-spinning, without sacrificing humor."
Boris Akunin, trans, from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. Mysterious, $26 (368p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2781-5
Set in 1896, Akunin's excellent seventh Fandorin mystery (after The State Counsellor) finds the brilliant investigator back in Moscow just in time to prevent some thugs from abducting Xenia Georgievna, the daughter of Georgii Alexandrovich, the uncle of Nicholas II, who's soon to be crowned as tsar. Fandorin is later stunned to learn that Xenia's brother, Prince Mikhail Georgievich, was snatched while she was being rescued. He suspects a Moriarty-like criminal mastermind known only as Dr. Lind. His theory is confirmed when the Russian royal family receives a letter from Lind, who demands the Orlov diamond, which adorns the imperial scepter and is an essential part of the coronation ceremony, in exchange for Mikhail's safe return. Fandorin, aided by a loyal family retainer, Afanasii Ziukin, races to retrieve Mikhail, in an effort to avoid giving up the valuable gemstone. Akunin keeps the action fast-paced, and the logical twists head-spinning, without sacrificing humor or depth of characterization. (Feb.)
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"The Coronation: A Fandorin Mystery." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 53, 24 Dec. 2018, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A568009676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c0ca8b11. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Both Akunin and his hero maintain an imperturbable decorum that makes this the most ceremonious tale of terrorism and counterterrorism you're ever likely to read."
Akunin, Boris THE STATE COUNSELLOR Mysterious Press (Adult Fiction) $25.00 7, 4 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2654-2
Readers who think State Counsellor Erast Petrovich Fandorin has encountered every kind of criminal plot imaginable (He Lover of Death, 2010, etc.) can cheer him as he matches wits with a problem both more traditional and more modern: a cabal of up-to-the-minute terrorists in czarist Russia.Security is tight around Adjutant Gen. Ivan Fyodorovich Khrapov's journey to Siberia, where he's been rusticated after ordering a teenage political activist flogged. So the code-named Green, one of the activist's allies in the Combat Group, comes up with the novel idea of masquerading as Fandorin in order to get close enough to Khrapov during one of his few scheduled stops to assassinate him. The real Fandorin first hears about the case when he's arrested for murder. Very quickly, however, he's out and about, partnering with the likes of Pyotr Ivanovich Burlyaev, head of Moscow's Department of Security, and Prince Gleb Georgievich Pozharsky, Deputy Director of the Police Department, to track down the assassin. Apart from czarist oppression, the Combat Group faces more acute problems of its own: a large sum of its operating funding has been filched, and Green and his mates need to stage a daring theft to replenish their coffers. After a pleasurable fling with Esfir Litvinova, a banker's revolutionary daughter, Fandorin inevitably ends up in the Combat Group's sights; just as inevitably, his supposed allies, double-crossing careerists and double-crossing traitors to a man, are a lot less reliable than he'd like. Through every twist and turn, both Akunin and his hero maintain an imperturbable decorum that makes this the most ceremonious tale of terrorism and counterterrorism you're ever likely to read.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Akunin, Boris: THE STATE COUNSELLOR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A491002733/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2cfb5c75. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "delightfully convoluted."
"Narrative sleights of hand and copious red herrings will keep readers guessing until the end."
The State Counsellor: A Fandorin Mystery
Boris Akunin, trans. from the Russian by
Andrew Bromfield. Mysterious, $25 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-8021-2654-2
Set in 1891, Akunin's delightfully convoluted sixth Fandorin mystery (after 2008's Special Assignments) brings to life the internecine squabbles among Moscow's multiple police forces as well as the nihilist revolutionaries whom they seek to foil. During a blizzard outside Moscow, Adjutant General Khrapov, governor general of Siberia, is murdered by a man claiming to be State Counsellor Erast Fandorin. The real Fandorin, who's quickly exonerated, is keen to find the impostor, a member of the Combat Group, a dangerous revolutionary organization. Only a few men, all police officials in some capacity, apparently had knowledge of the arrangements for Khrapov's transportation and protection. To further complicate matters, the czar's own deputy director of police arrives from St. Petersburg to take the reins of the investigation. Akunin's descriptions of characters' appearances and temperaments, as well as the time period, call to mind Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures. Narrative sleights of hand and copious red herrings will keep readers guessing until the end. Agent: Ann Rittmberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary Agency. (July)
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"The State Counsellor: A Fandorin Mystery." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 15, 10 Apr. 2017, pp. 51+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A490319242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e59c14cc. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Erast Fandorin’s response to and exit from a changed Russia is well-staged and satisfying."
REVIEW: NOT SAYING GOODBYE BY BORIS AKUNIN
BOOK REVIEWSNOVEMBER 25, 2020BY EDMUND RACHER
Last Updated on June 27, 2024
Not Saying Goodbye is the last of the Erast Fandorin books by Boris Akunin. It must operate thus both as a farewell and a fitting capstone for a long running series (the first book, was published in Russia as Azazel in 1998; it appeared in translation as The Winter Queen in 2003). Not Saying Goodbye was published in 2018 and translated into English by Andrew Bromfield for Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 2019.
Not Saying GoodbyeDespite a dangerous career as variously a police detective, counterintelligence agent and private investigator, Erast Fandorin has lived to the age of sixty-two. However, he has spent the last few years in a coma. It is now the year 1918 in Russia, and the Revolution has begun. Fandorin, apart from preserving his own life and safety – which is no mean feat when so many of his resources, physical or otherwise are depleted – must negotiate his way across a Russia that no longer has much use for a principled polymath detective.
The structure of Not Saying Goodbye tracks through the various factions of Revolutionary and Civil War-era Russia, each portion of the novel being named after one ‘truth’ or another: truths Red, White, Green and Black. There is a literal journey from Moscow to the Crimea through a splintered Russia, but though one might imagine that this could become didactic (every chapter, a new revolutionary faction!) it never seems so.
Part of Akunin’s success in this regard is that he does not discard Fandorin, but allows him to drift out of focus, allowing for other, younger characters to take up the role he might have taken on – or to reflect on him as a member of a previous generation. Fandorin’s milieu has always been as a creature of Tsarist, pre-Revolutionary Russia – whatever his travels or the events of Not Saying Goodbye, I am certain that this is how he will be recalled. Therefore, allowing for Alexei Parisovitch Romanov (who appears in some of Akunin’s other works) to take on a number of the more action-heavy portions of the book is beneficial. Romanov, the ironically named Bolshevik officer is an implicit successor to Fandorin, who is examining the possibilities of retirement in the face of old age and a Russia whose problems are beyond his capabilities. The more reflective, character-driven portions of Not Saying Goodbye are driven by an encounter with the passionate sculptor Elizaveta Anatolieva Turusova, known as Mona.
This is a historical novel, and one that throws out references to political factions and geography with the expectation that you have some faint familiarity with them. As with the other Erast Fandorin novels, a passing familiarity with Russian literature and customs will be useful to the reader, though one becomes used to the patronymics rapidly enough.
I was, at root, satisfied by Not Saying Goodbye. It is something of a departure from other novels, but that is exactly what one would expect from the subject matter. Erast Fandorin’s response to and exit from a changed Russia is well-staged and satisfying. As a long-time reader of these, I might give it Four Stars, though for the complete newcomer Three Stars might be more apt.