The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

(collegiate registrar), he is scraping away with his quill pen, orphaned after his father died bankrupt in the railroad boom-and-bust of the 1870s. Butyoung Fandorin is no Akaky Akakievich. He has been raised to speak European languages and is in fact something of a dandy, like Eugene Onegin; one-third of his meager first-month salary is spent on a whalebone corset for men (the “Lord Byron”) of American make. More astonishingly, Fandorin has chosen to clerk not for some pompous, vacuous Petersburg “Your Excellency,” but for the Moscow Criminal Investigation Commission. His superiors are well-meaning men, but - true to their Moscow temperament - somewhat lazy and self-indulgent. Fandorin, in equal part disciplined and intuitive, combines the best of both capital cities. His bosses are perfectly willing to send this ambitious young fellow out to follow leads that interrupt their lunch hour.

Like a Dostoevskian protagonist (Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Alyosha Karama-zov) designed to prolong the reader’s curiosity, Fandorin is a pleasure to look at: “long girlish eyelashes,” “a most comely youth with black hair ... and blue eyes . . . rather tall, with a pale complexion and a confounded, ineradicable ruddy bloom on his cheeks.”38 This combination of na??ve energy and blooming health is the Alyosha side of Dostoevsky’s good-looking men, neither Raskol-nikov’s fevers nor the sinister, strikingly beautiful mask of Stavrogin. What is more, Fandorin is squarely on the sleuthing and justice-bearing end of the murder mystery, not on the crime-committing or gothic end. Following longstanding Russian convention, Fandorin is spared having to deal with criminal sex and its hideous exfoliations.39 In this new post-communist positive hero, Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and wholesome bashfulness come together.

Erast Fandorin is a harbinger of Russia’s smooth new cosmopolitanism. Reborn for the international market, it is retrofitted to Dostoevsky’s turbulent final decade (from the troubled aftermath of the Great Reforms to the assassination of the Liberator tsar). Akunin skillfully taps into multiple readerships. Detective-novel buffs smile at the steady flow of affectionate parodies of Sherlock Holmes; history buffs marvel at the accuracy of detail, whether in England, Persia, or the Suez Canal. Akunin’s stories integrate Russia’s first

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telephone, first terrorist bomb delivered by post to a civilian target, and the earliest imports of American gadgets – Remington typewriters and exercise trikes. But the Russian reader is probably most struck by the mass of familiar literaryreminiscences with moralvalencesreversed.Tsaristepaulettes, theTable of Ranks, imperial wars, and the Third Section (secret police) were all symbolic markers hostile to the great nineteenth-century writers from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Here they appear unambiguously as forces for good. From the perspective of a patriotic civil servant like Fandorin, these old myths take on new life. The Winter Queen, for example, is framed by Karamzin’s “Poor Liza.” Our new Erast meets his lovely seventeen-year-old Elizaveta while investigating the novel’s first mysterious suicide. When the two are being married in the final chapter (preparations for which reproduce Levin’s wedding-day bumblings and delays from Anna Karenina), the bride whispers to her bridegroom: “Poor Liza has decided not to drown herself and to get married instead” (p. 235). By the end of the day she has been blown up by a terrorist bomb. Inside these two bookended poles of the resolutely death-dealing “Poor Liza” plot, Erast confronts a multitude of other nineteenth-century literary “quotations.” He stumbles upon a portrait of a wondrous beauty (“A. B.”) lifted directly from the Nastasya Filippovna of Dostoevsky’s Idiot (p. 18), and later turns up at a soire?e run by the same enchantress, with the same cruel games and cash bids for her favors. One adorer, Count Ippolit Zurov, is a survivor from the Romantic era of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol: he presides over a gambling scandal involving a Jack (rather than a Queen) of Spades, then passes through a Pechorin moment en route to a Nozdryov phase (the compulsive swapper and gambler from Gogol’s Dead Souls). Zurov resurfaces in the London slums as pure Rogozhin, Nastasya Filippovna’s jealous suitor, and true to his Dostoevskian prototype eventually carries off his A. B. (or perhaps shoots her). The multipurpose Romantic hero Zurov saves the life of Fandorin, who has been tricked by a buffoonish double agent named Porfiry, subjected to graveyard apparitions out of Gogol’s Ukrainian horror tales, and almost drowned and blown up on the banks of the Thames. But this new, upright and unsentimentalist Erast is not beholden to any of the classic Russian literary heroes who surround him, threaten him, or pluck him from certain death. They are part of his adventure plot, but he is not obligated by theirs. He has one goal: to serve the Russian Empire with honor by following his own counsel and by sticking with a case until it is solved. His superiors – even those who turn out to be double agents, and whom he must then annihilate – immediately sense his integrity. “Speak up!” his chief insists during one of their early talks. “I recognize no difference in rank where work is concerned!” (p. 79). We might say that theplot of The Winter Queen turns on a utopian vision – or more accurately, a conspiracy – that is the

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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??vely 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

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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 Myshkin [The Idiot], 10 per cent of Lermontov’s Pechorin [from Hero of our Time]. Then I added a recipe of my own design, mixed and stirred. At the beginning he looked like Frankenstein, a homunculus. Then miraculously he came to life . . .42

What do Prince Bolkonsky, Prince Myshkin, and Grigory Pechorin have in common that Akunin might have admired? Those three nineteenth-century Russian heroes are all aristocratic and to varying degrees disdainful or eccentric; they are attractive to women but flout society’s expectations; and (for very different reasons) each is