I call this model between post-modern, liberal, and Pope literatures. But we'll talk mostly about one author Boris Akunin, the only one contemporary Russian writer who has created so-called quality Pope literature, literature which is interesting to high-brow people looking for knowledge and ideas, and also to those who are looking just for fun. In order to understand the reasons for Akunin success and to find out the roots of his works, we should recollect one thing I was talking about in the previous lectures. In the USSR, there was almost no pope literature, no mass literature, and after failing down of the old restrictions in the beginning of '90s, literature has transformed into commerce. There was firstly a mighty flood of translations and secondly, a lot of imitations of the Western patterns previously unknown, the hard-boiled fiction or romances and song, and 29 percent of his production was trash. It turned out that the lacuna was filled in, the genre literature was established, but another lacuna has appeared. People wanted to get both pleasure and intellectual profit from literature and they had nothing to read. Of course, they could come back to classics, but contemporary genre fiction was a barren field for them and here enters Akunin. The writer himself, in one of his interviews, told a story how he decided to write his first book of fiction. He says that his wife was a mystery stories farm, but she was ashamed of it and all this wrapped welder colors of such bag books into a newspaper. He decided to write a book that modern educated woman would not be ashamed of, that she could not only read, but could discuss with her friends. When he had written such a book, according to Sarith, he can continue this business. Probably it's a legend, but I can assert that no one in Russia is ashamed to confess that he or she likes books by Boris Akunin and reads them on a regular basis, since the author publishes several new ones every year. These books are really interesting to discuss with friends. I hope you will like at least the only one text that I recommend to you, the first novel from the series of Erast Fandorin adventures, called, The Winter Queen, which in original was called Azazel after the name of a fallen angel. This is a model mystery story and at the same time, this book contains a lot of hidden sensors. Part of them I'll try to show you in these lectures. Let's talk about writer's biography as we [inaudible] all our heroes. Grigory Chkhartishvili, that's the real name of this man who uses the pen name, Boris Akunin, was born in 1956 in Georgia. I mean, of course the Caucasian country, not the American state. But despite his Georgian last name and birthplace, he never felt himself Georgian. Akunin said in one of his interviews, "My father was Georgian, although a Moscow one, but as for me, I can't feel myself anybody but Georgian." He spent almost all his life in Moscow, he loves this city and knows it very well. One can say that Moscow is one of Akunin's heroes. There are several books devoted to Akunin's Moscow. Each of his novel contains not only history, but also historical geography and topography of Russian capital. In Moscow, some agencies and amateurs offer guided tours to the places from Akunin's novels. His father was an artillery officer who has been fighting on World War II in the front and his mother was a teacher for Russian language and literature. Grigory, after school, entered Moscow State University, the department of Asia and Africa and his major was the history on Japan. As everybody who studies Eastern languages, he became a professional with many skills, he knows not only Japanese language, although it is a great achievement in itself, but also Japanese history, literature, and culture. Grigory Chkhartishvili, all his life was fond of literature, it was his passion. He speaks about it in all his interviews. Besides, he was a translator, not only from Japanese but also from English. Before beginning of his grades for writing career, he was well-known, first of all, as a translator who translated several books by Yukio Mishima, including the famous novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. He has translated several English books, including Professor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury, and besides, he worked as a Japanese to Russian, simultaneous interpreter too. For six years, Chkhartishvili was a deputy editor-in-chief of the foreign literature magazine, specialized in contemporary world literature, mostly in Western, European, and American. He was also an editor of 20 volume anthology of Japanese literature. As for his creative writing, it has begun in 1998 and immediately before it, Akunin attempted to create a very strange project, a very strange encyclopedia named, The Writer And Suicide. It was published in the year 1999. It was an encyclopedia for literary suicide. All the writers who have committed suicide were presented in this huge book. I didn't know the reason why Grigory Chkhartishvili decided to collect the biographies of all these writers who had ever committed suicide. But I believe such a work was not a big joy and probably needed some relaxation, and it was obviously one of the reasons he turned to recreational literature and decided to write a mystery story. Whatever the truth is, in the year 1998, he finished three books, first three volumes of his future, Erast Fandorin series. They were: The Winter Queen or Azazel in original, The Turkish Gambit, and Murder on the Leviathan. Now, after the publication of all Fandorin books, we understand that all their applets were invented in that time, in the very beginning, before the publication of the first three books. For the first several months, these books were selling badly and critics were ignoring them too. But later, some critics among them, the best critic of the '90s Lev Danilkin and post-modernist adapt Richard [inaudible] have noticed the new author. Moreover, they were enchanted by these books and became their main promoters. By the way, several publishing houses, initially had rejected these books and Akunin's path to glory was not so smooth. But at the beginning of the year 2000, Akunin becomes a best selling writer. His books, serialized black-and-white front covers in Zakharov Publishing house have come in fashion and Akunin begins to diversify his assortment of goods. He continues his main project The Adventures of Erast Fandorin but simultaneously heads other projects. Firstly, the adventures of great detectives grandson, an English man, who holds master's degree in Russian history and comes back to Russia in 2000 to investigate some historical cases connected to his family members. This service is not translated into English, sorry, yet unfortunately. Secondly, is The Adventures of Sister Pelagia an nun who is solving crimes in the turn of the 20th century in provincial Russia. This series is translated. Thirdly, the series Bruderschaft with Death a cinematic novels written as a collection of telenovelas or films about the rivalry between Russian and German intelligence during World War 1. Fourth, History of the Russian State a series of non-fictional books documenting the history of Russia from the ninth century up to 1917 and complemented by a series of fictional works. Finally, it's the author's project, which we will discuss in detail a bit later. Akunin's, life after beginning of writing is a life of successful and hard-working man who produces a lot of books, gives a lot of interviews, presents his works at the book fairs and so on. Starting from early 2010, he lives mostly abroad in France, England, and Spain. In his political opinions, he is a liberal. He is a strong critic of Vladimir Putin's regime. He took active part in the 2011 protests against electoral falsifications, and even was the member of the coordination committee of opposition at the time. But soon he realized that politics is not his vacation and later only expressed his opinions in his blog and interviews. But now he does not participate in politics directly. He writes books and these books appear on regular basis, at least three books a year and even more fictional and nonfiction. Here I probably can tell about Akunin's literary or rather marketing experiment with masks carried out in the end of 2000, beginning of 2010. By the way, the very name Akunin is a literary mask. In Japanese it means a bad man, a villain, or rather a super villain, a serious criminal, and a self-governed man who creates his own rules. Chkhartishvili was concealing his name long enough, as he explained it later, I am a man of a serious profession and I was ashamed to confess that I am doing such business as writing pulp fiction. His first book of fiction, The Winter Queen, as I said appeared in 1998, but only after the critical acclaim of the first five books of the founder and series, the entity of Chkhartishvili was revealed. By the way, the first name Boris was not there in the first time. The pen name was B. Akunin, which sounds like Baconian, the sir name of the famous anarchist philosopher and revolutionary of the 19th century. It was strange enough taking into account that the main hero was not a revolutionary, but vice versa, a civil servant of the [inaudible] secret palace. But later, the mask has merged with the face, and now we cannot talk about post modern mask since there is no essential difference between the author and his literary double. But nevertheless, literary play is always a part of his strategy. He has confirmed it in late 2000 by carrying out two more experiments with authorial masks. One day in 2009, all the Moscow was full of posters advertising the book by some A Brusnikin or Anatoly Brusnikin, absolutely unknown author of an adventure historical novel from the times of Peter the Great. As Akunin has confessed later, it was pure marketing experiment. Answering the question, how many books of an obscure writer can be sold under the conditions of maximum publicity. The answer was 800,000. But the second book by the same now bestselling author, also without publicity at all. It was the novel The Hero of Other Times, written after Lermontov, The Hero of Our Times, and after other Caucasian texts of Russian literature and 200,000 copies were sold out advance. The project Anatoly Brusnikin was accompanied by the portrait of the author which presented a for the college of the merged images of [inaudible] his French editor. Another part of Akunin's project offers was a woman by the name of Anna Borisova, again, A and B as first letters. Three novels were published under this pen name. This time half mystical texts concerning the problems of death and aging, but also adventure ones as all Akunin's books. This project was successful, although less successful than Fandorin project. As we have seen Boris Akunin is not an innovative writer, but a kind of experimental in the area of popular literature. Each of his books and he has written now more than a 100 of them, is a part of some larger project and differs from the other paths. His plan with literary traditions all the time. In order to comprehend the rules of his games, let us address to the most famous of his series, The Adventures of Erast Fandorin. Thank you.
