Modern Language Review

This remarkable volume, edited by scholars of post-Soviet popular culture Elena V. Baraban and Stephen M. Norris, is a welcome reminder of the wit, wisdom, and astonishing versatility of Grigorii Shalvovich Chkartishvili, the author better known as Boris Akunin (or as Anatolii Brusnikov or Anna Borisova, among other noms de plume). The Akunin Project opens with a lucid Introduction co-written, in alternating sections, by Baraban and Norris, contextualizing the Akunin publishing ‘phenomenon’ and its popularity across multiple media, now sustained over a quarter-century (the first volume in Akunin’s most celebrated historical detective series, Adventures of Erast Fandorin, appeared in 1998). Twelve original essays (including two each by the co-editors) follow, ranging across Akunin’s many inspirations, series, and genres. There are also two transcribed interviews with the author, new translations of two key journalistic essays by Akunin, and translated extracts from two novels not yet available in English, Spy Novel (Shpionskii roman, 2005) and The Ninth Saviour (Deviatnyi spas, 2011). These are intended, in the co-editors’ words, to help readers ‘delve into the worlds [Akunin] has created beyond the Erast Fandorin and Pelagia series’ (p. 21).

With some inevitable overlap, but plenty of helpful cross-referencing, the twelve core chapters are organized into six thematic pairs. In their respective essays on the sixteen-novel Fandorin series (1998–2018), Baraban and Judith Kalb find unexpected Homeric echoes in both plot structure and characterization. Claire Whitehead and Zara M. Torlone analyse Akunin’s two significantly shorter historical detective series featuring Sister Pelagia (2000–03) and Fandorin’s grandson Nicholas (2000–09). Marshalling, with characteristic sophistication, critical theory specific to detective fiction, Whitehead suggests that Akunin’s unreliable plots and narrators convey an implicit warning that history itself packs surprises. Torlone addresses (and translates an extract from) the 2006 Nicholas Fandorin dilogy F.M. to demonstrate that, as a homage to Dostoevsky, whose initials provide its title, this work displays Akunin’s literary virtuosity. It also ably satirizes the Dostoevskian corruption and brutality of street culture in 1990s Russia. In the next section, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza examines Akunin’s intertextuality, specifically his ‘impersonation’ of the French novelist Eugène Sue, whose nineteenth-century Parisian demimonde is evoked in Akunin’s portrayals of Moscow and Petersburg; while Norris’s essay locates the improbable conspiracy narratives of Akunin’s spy novels as an attempt to make history read more rationally than real life. Norris returns in the following section, where both he and the historian Ilya Gerasimov evaluate Akunin’s ambitious plan, apparently inspired by the untypical pairing of Karamzin and Peter Ackroyd, to create a multi-volume History of the Russian State (2013–present) for average readers. Gerasimov finds the work cliché-ridden, calling Akunin ‘a lousy historian’ (p. 189). Norris’s essay, a tongue-in-cheek ‘instruction manual’, cautions that ‘[p]rofessional historians may experience headaches and [End Page 423] heart palpitations’ when reading the History, directing them back to the novels for their own well-being. Yekaterina Severts and Baraban examine Akunin’s literary projects under alternative pseudonyms (Severts’s analysis of stiob, or hyperbolic fidelity, in the historical novel The Ninth Saviour is excellent); and in the final section, Bradley A. Gorski and Natalia Erlenkamp explore the secrets of this former literary editor’s reinvention as a pseudo-pulp novelist, through skilled manipulation of social media and commercial advertising.

Something about Akunin, possibly his immersion in historical and literary detail, or the sheer profligacy of his success, makes scholars revel in figures and statistics: eight million copies of the Erast Fandorin series sold in Russia by 2004, a print run of 500,000 copies for a mere Fandorin short story collection published two years later, a suspiciously ingenuous advertising campaign (and a print run of 270,000 copies...