Boris Akunin avoids the big questions

An amusing and richly informative 2004 article/interview in The Telegraph examines the novelty of Boris Akunin's situation in Russia's cultural life:

"Until the fall of communism in 1991, educated Russian readers had retained a taste for classic literature ... There was no such thing as reading merely for pleasure. But that all changed with the lifting of the ban on decadent Western fiction. As suddenly as crime rose in Russia, so did crime fiction."

Unlike two of his fellow Russian practitioners of the new art of Russian crime fiction, the article continues, Akunin could write. Still, Akunin says, Russian readers can't avoid asking the big questions. "I never meet readers in Russia," he says, "because there would always be some guy who would stand up and say, 'What is the meaning of life? Does God exist?' "

Of course, Akunin did not reject the Russian classics completely. Here's how he created Erast Fandorin:

"When I was a kid there was never a Russian literary character who I could imitate. I was either Sherlock Holmes or d'Artagnan or some other bloody foreigner. You cannot pretend when you are 11 or 12 that you are a hero of Turgenev. ... I approached this problem in a scientific way. I grafted a bit from every protagonist in Russian literature whom I admire. I took 10 per cent of Andrei Bolkonsky [from War and Peace], 10 per cent of Prince Mishkin [The Idiot], 10 per cent of Lermontov's Pechorin. Then I added a recipe of my own design, mixed and stirred. At the beginning he looked like a Frankenstein, a homunculus. Then miraculously he came to life, for me at least, and started not doing what I wanted him to do. Now for me he is more alive than most of the people I know."

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Boris Akunin

Paradise tossed ("Murder on the Leviathan")

There's plenty of good, old-fashioned fun in Boris Akunin's tale of murder off and on the high seas: suspects gathered in one place, funny lines, rivalry between English and French (with a Russian coming out on top), nods to Wilkie Collins, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Maltese Falcon, and just maybe Maurice Leblanc, and the tale of a French police inspector who just knows that he'll get off the damned boat one of these days.

The Leviathan is a super steamship bound for Calcutta in 1878. Its passengers include a doctor or two, a doctor's wife, and a highly nervous nobleman. A middle-aged English lady suddenly grown rich under suspicious circumstances is part of the group, scandalized by the behavior of a Russian diplomat with a slight stutter. A flighty young woman in a delicate condition has her own reason to be nonplussed by the Russian, and a specialist in Indian archaeology arouses suspicion when he chucks a napkin under a table. One of the group has slaughtered ten people in a Paris townhouse -- maybe.

The characters take turn narrating chapters, and each misinterprets the state of affairs in his or her own way. Each, without knowing it, stumbles upon certain truths well before the detective in charge, Erast Fandorin. And, in a strange way, each is part of his or own Tempest, only these characters lose their illusions and delusions at sea, instead of on a wild island, before heading home, free of "the feverish stupor that had shrouded our minds and souls."

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Boris Akunin