Russian reading
The Guardian reports from Moscow about how Russians are addicted to an author called Boris Akunin, who writes detective tales set in the Tsarist era.
Akunin began writing in the 1990s for Russia’s new middle class. At the time, post-communist Russians had two choices of reading: classical masters such as Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or pulp fiction.
Akunin spotted the gap. Realising, as he puts it, that every class needs a “literature it can read and enjoy”, he invented a new kind of detective genre set in imperial Russia. Its young hero, Fandorin, is self-assured, handsome and foppish - but also emotionally insecure. (At the end of his first novel, The Winter Queen, his new bride gets blown up.)
