The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

246 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

mirror opposite of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: an inspired pedagogue aims to infiltratethe incompetent, corruptgovernmentsof theworld with something like philosopher-kings, and to that end she raises thousands of young men and women “with a sense of their own dignity” and “possessing the freedom to choose” (p. 230).

Mystery novels are not all that Akunin produces. He has a postmodernist side as well. Like Petrushevskaya, he has tried his hand “rewriting” (or co-writing) a Chekhov play. She did a variation on Three Sisters; he, a playscript published in 2000 as A. Chekhov / B. Akunin, The Seagull. A Comedy and its Continuation.40 Chekhov’s original play, we recall, closes on the off-stage suicide of Treplev, failed writer and a failure in love. Akunin transforms this suicide into a murder and the “comedy” into a detective drama. Dr. Dorn locks all the suspects in one room and conducts the investigation – during which time no character can be shown not to have killed Treplev. Under such pressure, characters reveal their most selfish, bitter sides and Chekhov’s vulnerable, often whimsical dramatic dialogues turn grotesque.

The mystery novels, not the spoofs, are the global bestsellers. Akunin has been heralded as the creator of a “Slavic Sherlock Holmes” and a “Russian Ian Fleming.” Na¨ıvely but intriguingly, some politically conservative commentators in the West see in Erast Fandorin a new type of positive, proto-capitalist hero on post-Soviet soil. All Russia’s previous heroes (so this argument goes) were discredited by the fall of communism: the starry-eyed dissident-to-the-death extremist, the slovenly nihilist, the nay-saying anarchist, the Bolshevik activist negligent of family and faith. The new Akunin-style detective, we are told, is a person who, in the tradition of sober disciplined Chekhov and the Calvinists, draws up rules only for himself – and follows those rules.41

Akunin has a readership in the many millions. Whether his spic-and-span, code-cracking detective Fandorin is taken for a role model among post-communist entrepreneurs, or becomes simply a Russian contribution to the world’s repertory of private detectives, remains to be seen. Chkhartishvili himself – a professional linguist and translator from the Japanese in addition to being Boris Akunin – has confessed that with his bashful, brave detective he had consciously aimed to fill the space in Russian bookstores between serious literature and trash. In an interview from 2004 he left a revealing testimony about the genesis of his Fandorin:

When I was a kid there was never a Russian literary character whom 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. What would you do? Sob? Complain? I