Nostalgia re-written. Boris Akunin's Fandorin project and the detective (re-)discovery of Empire
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Date
15/07/2020Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
15/07/2021Author
Liebig, Anne
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Abstract
Since his rise to fame in 1998, Boris Akunin has become a household name on
the post-Soviet book market. Temporarily, he also became one of the leading
voices in Russia’s liberal opposition movement to the Putin regime. Occupying
a place on the border between fiction and non-fiction, Akunin’s oeuvre
challenges genre classifications along with established perceptions of cultural
authority in Russia.
Akunin’s first and most successful project is the best-selling Fandorin series,
a series of historical detective novels that are set in the late Imperial era. The
choice of historical detective fiction - a genre that is both popular and interactive
at the same time – allowed Akunin to involve a broad, middle-brow readership in
a critical problematisation of Empire whilst updating crime fiction for a specific
post-Soviet usability. In my thesis, I approach the Fandorin project as a double
detective journey that consists of two narrative strands: one righting the historical
narrative about Empire, the other using this reassessment to counteract the
widespread trends of nostalgia and cynicism in contemporary post-Soviet culture.
In my reading, these two strands simultaneously embody the novelty of Akunin’s
self-proclaimed ‘new detective novel’: a revivification of the socio-political
function of traditional crime fiction, aimed at Russia’s post-Soviet nostalgia
discourse, and a rediscovery of original intelligentsia values, accompanied by a
critical investigation of the intelligentsia’s ill-fated nostalgia for their own,
insufficiently reassessed past. Consequently, I present the Fandorin project as a
multi-tome counternarrative to the regnant nostalgic remembering for Empire
within the wider post-Soviet nostalgia debate.