The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Chapayev and Emptiness is a seriocomic pastiche of Russian fantasies about space: upper, lower, outer, across, the unmappable Eurasian frontier and physical volume that does not have to obey the laws of Western materialism. It is, in its way, a postmodernist sunken city of Kitezh. Inevitably, Pelevin’s project has been associated with Marshall McLuhan’s media extravaganzas and with the French theorist of simulacra and simulations, Jean Baudrillard. But as one astute student of the current literary scene has observed, “Pelevin is interested not in the transformation of reality into simulacra but rather in the reverse process: the birth of reality out of simulacra. This strategy is the polar opposite of the major postulates of postmodernist philosophy.”37

Pelevin’s quasi-parodic mysticism and skill at bringing low philosophically highbrow plots have made him a bestseller, with a growing reputation outside Russia. However, both Pelevin’s Buddhism for the masses and Sorokin’s alleged pornography were eclipsed in the first years of the twenty-first century by the runaway impact of the most prolific practitioner of Russia’s fastest-growing genre, the detektiv or detective novel: the Moscow-based, Georgian-Jewish B.[oris] Akunin, pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili (b. 1958). (The “Bakunin” connection in this pen name is clear; less evident, perhaps, is that

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Akunin means “villain” in Japanese). Akunin is creator of a cycle of historical mystery novels around the detective Erast Fandorin, all set in the “terrorist” portion of the nineteenth century (1870s-1905). This Fandorin is as clean-living, energetic, disciplined, and self-reliant as the Sorokin hero is befouled and the Pelevin hero is multi-temporal. Fandorin is also a commentary and corrective update to our roster of Russian nineteenth-century heroes, beginning with the poor government clerk.

We first meet Fandorin in the opening novel of the series, AzazeV (1998, translated as The Winter Queen). An eighteen-year-old civil servant of the fourteenth class (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¨ıve 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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