Claire Whitehead

The Temptation of the Reader : The Search for Meaning in Boris Akunin's Pelagia Trilogy

For well over a decade, Boris Akunin (the pen name of Grigorii Chkhartishvili) has been the king of the Russian detektiv scene. He announced his arrival with the publication of Azazel (The Winter Queen) in 1998, the first in a series of, to date, fourteen novels featuring the detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin. Seemingly not content with one such series, two years later Akunin published the first in a trilogy of novels starring a Russian Orthodox nun, Sister Pelagia, as the sleuth. And in the same year came a third detective series in which the main protagonist is the Britishborn grandson of Erast Fandorin, Nicholas, who returns to contemporary Russia to trace his ancestors from the time of Catherine the Great.1 What all three of these series have in common, and what distinguishes Akunin’s detective novels from almost all of the manifold others which have flooded the Russian market in the post-Soviet era, is their combination of detective genre and historical novel.2