A champion for the bourgeoisie: reinventing virtue and citizenship in Boris Akunin's novels

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Leon Aron

May we, years or decades from now, look back at the popularity of the Fandorin cycle as a signal that, in choosing between the "intelligentsia tradition"--of solemn dreams and sordid reality, of relentless etatism, all-or-nothing politics, shoddy work and sterile castigation of all but themselves for everything that is wrong with the country--and the Chekhov-Vekhi-Fandorin liberal vision of progress founded on self-improvement, personal responsibility, gradualism, patience and quotidian hard work, post-Soviet Russia has given the latter at least a sporting chance?

(1) S. F. Platonov, Uchebnick Russkoy istorii ("A Textbook on Russian History") (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1994), p.371. (This is the second edition of the textbook published in 1909.)

(2) See, for example, Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (London: Flamingo/Harper-Collins, 1997), p. 111.

(3) Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981), p.3.

(4) Bogdan Kistyakovsky, "Defense of Law" in Boris Shragin and Albert Todd, eds., Landmarks: A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Karz Howard, 1977), p. 137.

(5) Chekhov, "Letter to A.S. Suvorin, 7 January 1889", in Sobranie sochineniy v dvenadzati tomakh ("Collected Works in Twelve Volumes") (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literature, 1963), v. 11, pp. 317-8.

(6) "Small Entrepreneurs Tired of Russian Politicians", New York Times, December 16, 1999.

Leon Aron is Resident Scholar and Director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.