9 L’état, c’est tout: Boris Akunin’s History of the Russian State and the National History Canon

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Note on Transliteration x
5. 1 The Akunin Project: Introduction 3
6. 2 Interview with Grigorii Chkhartishvili 30
7. PART ONE • Postmodern Detektiv: The Erast Fandorin Series
8. 3 In Search of a Hero: Boris Akunin’s Death of Achilles 45
9. 4 Rewriting Homer: Boris Akunin’s Postmodern Approach 62
10. PART TWO • Amateur Detectives: The Sister Pelagia Trilogy and Adventures of Nicholas Fandorin
11. 5 Tempting the Reader into a Search for Meaning: Boris Akunin’s Pelagia Trilogy 81
12. 6 “A Little Theory”: Boris Akunin’s “Crime and Punishment” 110
13. PART THREE • Buried Secrets and Historical Spies in Akunin’s Works
14. 7 The Mysteries of Moscow: In Which Boris Akunin Impersonates a French Writer and Reveals a Buried Secret 131
15. 8 Spying on the Past: Boris Akunin’s History of Espionage 156
16. PART FOUR • Rewriting the History of Russia
17. 9 L’état, c’est tout: Boris Akunin’s History of the Russian State and the National History Canon 179
18. 10 An Instruction Manual for the Russian Nation: Boris Akunin’s History of the Russian State 193
19. PART FIVE • New Pseudonyms and Projects: Anatolii Brusnikin and Akunin-Chkhartishvili
20. 11 “Under the Wide-Branching Cranberry”: Stiob and Allusion in Anatolii Brusnikin’s The Ninth Saviour 209
21. 12 The Family Album: Ordinary People in Extraordinary Circumstances 235
22. PART SIX • Boris Akunin as a Literary and Commercial Project 253
23. 13 Socialist Realism Inside-Out: Boris Akunin and Mass Literature for the Elite 255
24. 14 Boris Akunin and Cross-Media Marketing 282
25. 15 Conclusion: A Dozen Questions for Boris Akunin 301
26. Appendices: Excerpts from Boris Akunin’s Untranslated Works
27. Appendix 1 Grigorii Chkhartishvili, “If I Were a Newspaper Magnate: Notes of a Restless Cow”(1999) 308
28. Appendix 2 Boris Akunin, “A New Karamzin Has Appeared” (2013) and “General Introduction” to The History of the Russian State (Istoriia Rossiiskogo gosudarstva, 2013) 314
29. Appendix 3 Boris Akunin, Spy Novel (Shpionskii roman; Moscow: AST, 2005), 5–20 320
30. Appendix 4 Anatolii Brusnikin, The Ninth Saviour (Deviatnyi Spas; Moscow: Astrel’, 2011), 5–37 329
31. List of Works 345
32. List of Contributors 349
33. Index 353