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

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Leon Aron

Fandorin attempts to put into practice a radical--for Russia--idea first articulated by Chatskiy, the hero of Alexander Griboedov's classic 1820s play Gore ot Uma (translated as "Woe from Intelligence"): "To serve the cause, not the individuals" (sluzhit delu, a ne litsam) and to "serve" (sluzhit') but not be "subservient" (prisluzhivat'). Often risking his life in carrying out his duties, Fandorin lets everyone know that he has assumed these tasks voluntarily. Occasionally, he threatens to resign and eventually does, walking away from a promotion to the head of the Moscow police. Disliked by a new Moscow governor-general appointed by the increasingly insular and incompetent court in St. Petersburg, Fandorin leaves Russia, works as a detective for hire in Europe and the United States, and returns to his country only to help solve crimes that pique his curiosity or to pursue criminals who had escaped him.

Seizing the opportunities offered by a new, freer Russia, Chkhartishvili's hero thus devises nothing short of an existential breakthrough--an alternative to the silent opposition to the regime and alienation from state-produced resignation, dour cynicism, sullen submission and shoddy work characteristic of the intelligentsia's way of life. By contrast, Fandorin acts as an honorable and free man: He offers the state his conscientious service until and unless his job contradicts his private moral code.

Chkhartishvili seems to have constructed his hero as a living antithesis to every negative stereotype of the Russian intelligenty. He is practical, pragmatic, attentive to detail, energetic, competent, physically fit and disciplined. (His hobby is constructing and testing a new means of transportation, the automobile, and he sets several distance records, including one from Moscow to Paris.)

Fandorin makes clear that he serves neither the chief of the Moscow police nor Moscow's mayor nor even, as the reader discovers in Koronatsiya ("Coronation"), the Czar himself. He serves his country. "I serve not you but Russia", Fandorin tells the head of the Russian police in Turetskiy Gambit ("The Turkish Gambit"). "And I will not participate in a war which is useless and even harmful to Russia."

Chkhartishvili sees his hero as an embodiment of something that "a national Russian character--for different political and historic reasons--has always lacked: honorable self-restraint, privacy and dignity." In Smert' Akhillesa ("The Death of Achilles"), a beloved general, a hero of the victorious campaign against the Ottoman Turks and a symbol of Russian military valor, is found murdered in highly compromising circumstances. The general's aide-de-camp implores Fandorin: "Promise that you will not use your detective talent to harm the motherland. Russia's honor is at stake!" Fandorin answers, "I promise that I will not do anything against my honor, and, I think, this should be enough." Not that Russia's honor did not matter to Fandorin, but to him the honor of the motherland equaled, and could not be more than, the sum total of its citizens' individual honors.