Tuesday, July 27, 2004

The Winter Queen

There's still time to bring a copy Boris Akunin's The Winter Queento the beach this summer. I really couldn't put the book down. Don't be put off by the title, it is the name of a hotel in London which figures in the plot for about ten seconds. The Russian title, "Azazel," is much better, with the Biblical allusions that give this post-Soviet detective novel an extral level of significance. The orphanages at the center of this conspiracy reminded me of one of the key institutions of the Soviet Union, for good and ill. And the symbolism is potent. So the book is not only a ripping good yarn, it also provides keys to the post-Soviet psychology of Russia today.

Yeltsin biographer Leon Aron has written a marvellous essay about the Fandorin novels. While I might differ with Aron's characterization of Fandorin as a privatized hero--he is, rather, a government employee, a detective with a Gogol-like appreciation of the significance of rank not too dissimilar from Washingtonians concerned with their GS-levels--Aron's larger point about the meaning of post-Soviet literary sensibilities is certainly on target.

For, as Aron notes:

"The process that brought the Akunin books to the top of the Russian literary market may be described in terms of the Hegelian dialectic familiar to college-educated Russians (older than forty) from the compulsory courses in Marxism. First was the thesis: the increasingly stale classic canon on the one hand and propaganda trash on the other, both protected by censorship from competition or innovation. Then came the antithesis, a headlong plunge into a vat of forbidden fruit: the rediscovery of the banned serious writers and essayists (in Russia the list, dating from 1918, was very long) during Gorbachev's glasnost (1988-1990), followed by a quick descent into trash, typical of all fledgling postauthoritarian cultures. The synthesis occurred when the previously discarded national classic tradition had been retrieved, revived, and recast by an infusion of irreverence, experimentation, and occasional subversion..."

You can read the whole thing here.