Book Reviews

THE WINTER QUEEN, By Boris Akunin

Times Literary Supplement – May 16, 2003

Boris Akunin: The Winter Queen
Translated by Andrew Bromfield. Weidenfeld & Nicholson £9.99

“What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.” P.D. James’s dictum goes some way towards explaining the hunger for crime fiction of the Russian reading public in the chaos and uncertainty of the post-Soviet era. A nation whose thoughts had been molly-coddled for seven highly regulated decades with dull improving political tomes, relentlessly optimistic socialist fiction, or (when available) the lighter, more positive bits of the pre-1917 Russian literary canon, reacted to real life’s terrifying lurch into the unknown after 1991 by snapping up every grisly tale of chopping and mincing it could get its hands on. The relatively genteel crime writing of foreigners such as Agata Kristi was never going to satisfy this audience, overwhelmed as it was with nightmarish newspaper stories of flesh-and-blood serial killers, torturers, Mafiosi, assassins and even cannibals roaming the streets. Crime writers struggled to make up fiction lurid enough to compete with the facts reported in the press.

Street bookstalls filled up with pulp: blood-drenched covers featured men with guns and women with missing limbs – the fictional equivalent of the many urban myths about young men pushing old ladies out of their windows for their flats, or taxi drivers killing their fares to sell the body parts to hospitals, or packs of dogs in starving cities developing a taste for human flesh. With one notable exception (Nastya Kamenskaya, the lovably imperfect crime investigator of Alexandra Marinina’s books, a plain, married woman in her thirties with a sharp brain fuelled by her cigarette and coffee dependency), there wasn’t an attractive character to be found. Respectable citizens cautiously covered these violent offerings in paper before daring to open them in front of other people in the Metro.

Horrified by the kind of reading that a suddenly uncensored public seemed to prefer, hand-wringing literati spent much of the 1990s mourning the passing of their culture. The huge print runs of state-approved authors, the readership of 2 or 3 million for serious journals possibly containing a whiff of freethinking, or the excited passing from hand to hand of greasy samizdat typescripts had become history. The new mass hunger for cheap, nasty thrills made the television satirist Viktor Shenderovich categorise his fellow Russians as “fourteen-year-olds with mature bodies but without the mental capacity to work out what is allowable and what is not.”

Into this literary witches’ brew, in 1998, dropped a quiet little book that seemed to belong to a bygone era. It was set in the late nineteenth century and written in the elegant idiom of that pre-Soviet time. It was a detective story, but it had little in common with the pot-boilers beside it on the bookstalls. It featured a handsome young detective called Erast Fandorin who had powers of detection to rival those of Sherlock Holmes. Azazel featured the favourite villains of the 19th century: nihilists, card-sharpers and foreign spies. It gave readers a hero of grace and honesty; Fandorin is often called the “perfect Russian gentleman”. And it was written with a charm and lightness of heart that, by the late 1990s, Russians weary of brutal experimentation were longing to revisit. Everything about the book was in the familiar 19th-century prose tradition. Yet its title, Azazel¸and its author, “B. Akunin”, were known to no one, and its dedication – “in memory of the 19th century when literature was great, belief in progress was unlimited and crimes were committed and solved with elegance and taste” – was a clue that the book must be a sophisticated modern game.

The enigma of the author’s identity fascinated readers as much as the elaborate mysteries that his hero was solving between the covers. “Akunin” did not exist, admitted the publisher, Igor Zakharov. But he would not give away the real name of a writer with a “serious reputation” in literary circles that should not be compromised by dabbling in this despised genre. Intrigued, readers began to do their own detective work. Might “Akunin” be the Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who was also known as an intellectual and an expert in Eastern culture? Or might he simply be the chance inheritor of an attic containing a trunkful of genuinely pre-Revolutionary manuscripts, who was selling them off for profit? “While I was still hiding behind my pseudonym, I heard a lot of made-up stories: some really amused me,” the author told me. “Someone I knew who was trying to impress her gynaecologist told he she knew Akunin and could get his autograph. Pityingly, the doctor answered: ‘Nonsense, my dear: everyone knows Akunin lived in the nineteenth century’.”

Curiosity helped bring commercial success. Akunin sold 30,000 copies of his books in 1998 and 50,000 in 1999. It was only at the end of that year, when his fifth novel came out, that his identity was also revealed: Akunin was the Moscow academic Grigory Chkhartishvili, an expert in Japanese culture, who had translated Yukio Mishima and had just completed a monumental study, The Writer and Suicide. Confession sent his sales soaring: to 1 million in 2000 and 3.5 million in 2001. By now, well over 6 million Russians have bought his books – there are a dozen of them – and they have been translated all over the world.

Azazel (published in English as “The Winter Queen”) is a sparkling romp of a story. Squeezed into an excruciatingly tight “Lord Byron” corset, its well-born hero sets out to investigate a mysterious crop of suicides and would-be suicides in the Moscow of 1876. His search takes him across Europe to foggy London and back, in and out of a bewildering number of escapades and hair’s-breadth escapes from death. To give away anything about the witty and beautifully constructed plot would be unfair; but the delightful aside by one of the would-be suicides to another, before they start playing what they call “American roulette” (“because of you and me, Kolya, they’ll rename it Russian roulette, just you wait and see,”) gives the flavour of the writing.

The Winter Queen has echoes of the plots of the nineteenth-century classics all Russians know: duels, reckless gambling, superfluous men and mysterious beauties whose salons are full of despairing admirers. Some readers may spot subtler, more intellectual jokes; “sometimes a parody and a game of allusions, sometimes a polemic about the classics – you might call it a jazz improvisation on a classical melody,” as Chkhartishvili characterises it. His later books play daring games. Some have jokes that only speakers of Japanese will understand; one turns the story of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day upside down; another is designed to amuse lovers of Umberto Eco. Readers who don’t get the literary in-jokes that keep the intelligentsia happy do not lose out, however. The author says that he keeps these jokes separate from the crime mystery at the heart of each book: “Ninety per cent of my Russian readers don’t even guess that each novel has a literary detective story in it as well as a crime story.”

The fact that so many people have found they can enjoy these playful brain-teasers shows how Russians have relaxed in the five years since Chkhartishvili turned to crime. After the gangster-capitalism era of Boris Yeltsin, Russia is now ruled, more strictly but with more welcome predictability, by Vladimir Putin, whose popularity has been underpinned by a booming economy. A growing number of people with steady private-sector jobs now buy flats and foreign holidays and books; they are perhaps the first members of the quiet, steady middle class that this country of extremes never quite managed to acquire in the past. The rise of the Akunin books nowadays – people even talk of the “Akuninisation of Russia” – has coincided with a widespread recovery in the publishing business, with new work appearing by authors as diverse as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the darkly ironic young Viktor Pelevin.

Chkhartishvili does not claim his work is serious literature. All he ever wanted was to create well-crafted popular novels for the middle class: books that would fill the gap between Pushkin and pulp, books that would civilize the post-Soviet crime story, and books that respectable people could read without embarrassment on the Metro. He gives four characteristically whimsical proofs that he has succeeded: “First, it is no longer considered shameful to write detective stories. Second, reading this literature is no longer seen as a bad habit to be kept hidden. Third, my wife has started taking my literary interests, and me personally, a lot more seriously… And fourth, I no longer take the Metro.”

ENDS