You don’t know his name, but Boris Akunin is one of the most popular and prolific Russian writers of the twenty-first century.

Acknowledgments
Notes on Transliteration

1. The Akunin Project: Introduction
Elena V. Baraban and Stephen M. Norris

2. Interview with Grigorii Chkhartishvili (Boris Akunin)

Part One: Postmodern Detektiv: The Erast Fandorin Series

3. In Search of a Hero: Boris Akunin’s Death of Achilles
Elena V. Baraban

4. Rewriting Homer: Boris Akunin’s Postmodern Approach
Judith Kalb

Part Two: Amateur Detectives: The Sister Pelagia Trilogy and Adventures of Nicholas Fandorin

5. Tempting the Reader into a Search for Meaning: Boris Akunin’s Pelagia Trilogy
Claire Whitehead

6. "A Little Theory": Boris Akunin’s "Crime and Punishment"
Zara M. Torlone

Part Three: Buried Secrets and Historical Spies in Akunin’s Works

7. The Mysteries of Moscow: In Which Boris Akunin Impersonates a French Writer and Reveals a Buried Secret
Elizabeth Richmond-Garza

8. Spying on the Past: Boris Akunin’s History of Espionage
Stephen M. Norris

Part Four: Rewriting the History of Russia

9. L’etat, c’est tout: Boris Akunin’s History of the Russian State and the National History Canon
Ilya Gerasimov

10. An Instructional Manual for the Nation: Boris Akunin’s History of the Russian State
Stephen M. Norris

Part Five: New Pseudonyms and Projects: Anatolii Brusnikin and Akunin-Chkhartishvili

11. "Under the Wide-Branching Cranberry": Stiob and Allusion in Anatoly Brusnikin’s The Ninth Saviour
Yekaterina Severts

12. The Family Album: Ordinary People in Extraordinary Circumstances
Elena V. Baraban

Part Six: Boris Akunin as a Literary and Commercial Project

13. Socialist Realism Inside-Out: Boris Akunin and Mass Literature for the Elite
Bradley A. Gorski

14. Boris Akunin and Cross-Media Marketing
Natalia Erlenkamp

15. Conclusion: A Dozen Questions for Boris Akunin

Appendices: Excerpts from Boris Akunin's Untranslated Works

1. Grigorii Chkhartishvili, "If I Were a Newspaper Magnate: Notes of a Restless Cow" (1999), translated by Bradley A. Gorski

2. "A New Karamzin Has Appeared" and "General Introduction" to The History of the Russian State, translated by Stephen M. Norris

3. Excerpt from Boris Akunin, Spy Novel (2005), translated by Stephen M. Norris

4. Excerpt from Anatolii Brusnikin, The Ninth Savior, translated by Yekaterina Severts

List of Works by Boris Akunin
List of Contributors
Index

Edited by Elena V. Baraban and Stephen M. Norris